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This thesis is a brain-based study of neuroscience. While human beings have studied the brain and considered its role in what makes a human being since at least the ancient Greeks, neuroscience is a very specific contemporary formation. Within the project laid out by the field to understand the human mind in terms of the brain, what is considered to be within the scope of research on the brain includes a growing range of complex human phenomena. This ethnographic study explores the growth of neuroscience and considers the factors that sustain its entry into the investigation of an ever-broadening research scope. The thesis is an ‘object ethnography’ that explores neuroscience as a particular cultural world through a focus on the brain as neuroscience’s object. The research involved participant observation in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience laboratories and interviews with neuroscientist key informants in a major metropolitan Australian city, as well as an analysis of popular neuroscience books written by key neuroscientist writers. My central argument is that ‘neuroscience’s brain’ provides an evolving multidisciplinary field with coherence and with the ability to expand into the study of increasingly complex human issues. Through my ethnographic data I show: first, how neuroscience’s brain addresses organisational needs by bringing together a diverse group of scientists and providing them with space within the field where they are able to develop their particular areas of interest; second, how the brain, conceived of as both mind and body, embodies tensions between the material and immaterial that are used productively to drive neuroscientific work forward; third, how the brain facilitates the mixing of neuroscientific knowledge with other domains of knowledge through its status as a particularly human kind of scientific object. Neuroscience’s brain provides concrete explanations of human behaviour, allows materiality to be extended into areas where the mate