India, Nov. 29 -- Shubha Tole's fascination with the brain began, she says, with the question of how colour makes its way into dreams. "How is the circuitry that makes us dream created inside our heads?" she wondered.

Michelangelo played a small but critical role too.

Tole was a Class 12 student at Mumbai's St Xavier's college, sitting riveted in a developmental biology class taught by the brilliant Sam Waugh, when he quoted the Renaissance sculptor's famous words: "The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work... I just have to chisel away the superfluous material."

"That's when I realised that development is essentially creating form and structure out of basic raw materials," she says.

This realis...