The brain is one of the most distinguishing features of the human species, and understanding it is one of the greatest challenges of twenty first century science. Mice and rats are strikingly similar to humans in their anatomy, physiology and genetics – over 95% of the mouse genome is similar to human genome. Rodents are the dominant species used in neuroscience research; the majority of articles published in neuroscience are on the rat and mouse. In the general neuroscience journal group, these two species account for 45% of the published pages. There are important advantages to working with rodents; rodents typically live less than 1 year, and are easy to manipulate due to their small size. Also, they serve as excellent models to some human diseases. At this age, when the tools now available for studying the rodent brain are improving at a remarkable pace, understanding the details of the rat brain has become very important, as there are a multitude of challenges for methods used in human brain research.