In laboratories at the University of California, Irvine, researchers have found a way to ask a small cluster of cells a profound question — where are you? — and receive a coherent answer. By exposing developing brain organoids to specific signaling molecules, scientists prompted the tissue to establish its own regional identity, mimicking the front-to-back organization of the human cortex as it unfolds in the womb. The discovery matters not only as a technical achievement but as a window into how the brain first learns to know itself, and how that self-knowledge may go quietly wrong in conditi