For decades, science imagined the growing axon as a kind of wanderer, reading its environment tip-first, feeling its way through the body's terrain like a root seeking water. Researchers at Brown University's Carney Institute have now discovered that the true navigator sits far from the frontier: back in the neuron's cell body, a genetic switch orchestrates the entire journey, activating and silencing whole clusters of genes at precise moments along the path. The finding, published in PNAS and built from the analysis of more than 12,000 neurons, reframes not only how the nervous system wires i