Functional neurosurgery was born in the 40's years of 19th century. In the last decades this branch of neurosurgery had been largely improved for: development of neuroanatomical and neurophysiological knowledge; computer-assisted stereotactic devices; improvement of intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring. Nowadays, functional neurosurgery is used for the treatment of many neurological and psychiatric disorders, movement disorders, pain and epilepsy through lesional or stimulation techniques, and drugs infusion in the central nervous system. The future applications regard finding of new functional targets, and development of genic and stem cells therapies.