As you read this page, your brain is engaged in several tasks. It observes the words and decodes their meaning, it senses the weight and texture of the magazine and controls the muscles in your hands to hold the page at the proper angle with the appropriate pressure, and it coordinates your head and your eyes so that the whole process of reading doesn't make you queasy.
Figure 1. Actress Patricia Neal (center) is well known for her remarkable recovery from a series of massive strokes in 1965, which left her partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. In 1968 she returned to the screen in The Subject Was Roses (inset)—a dramatic performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. More than 30 years after the strokes, Neal is still traveling, lecturing and acting, most recently in Cookie's Fortune (1999). The mechanisms underlying such sustained recoveries from a stroke are now being explored through functional imaging techniques that help scientists examine the brain's ability to reorganize its structure. Here Neal is pictured during her convalescence with her former husband, writer Roald Dahl, and three of their children.
Bettmann/Corbis and Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
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