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Imagine you're living in Maine and want to drive to a relative's house in Florida, but your only map is the map of the United States that used to fit in your binder in Junior High. You can see where Florida is in relation to Maine, and may see where a few major cities and highways are, but once you get to Florida, you can only guess where your relation's house will be.

That sums up the current state of knowledge of the inner workings of the human brain. What we know about brain function comes from various imaging techniques that give us maps of major activity in the brain when a subject busy recalling memories or listening to music. In color-enhanced images, different parts of the brain "light up," when a subject is reading than when the subject is sniffing certain scents or listening to Beethoven's Sixth. Even more interesting is that different parts "light up" when an ordinary person listens to Beethoven's Sixth than when a professional musician listens to the same piece, since the professional musician listens with a different understanding of the music.

What imaging techniques can't do is pinpoint with absolute precision just how groups of neurons "talk" to one another in recalling memories, processing sensory information, sending signals to the muscles, or spinning out complex thoughts about thought itself. What's astonishing is how much knowledge neuroscientists have pieced together from such subtle data, though the scientists themselves will be the first to tell you that we are still far, far from understanding exactly how the human brain works. From what they've learned so far, though, the rest of us can draw useful lessons on the care and feeding of the human brain.

THE BRAIN IS FLEXIBLE

A preserved sheep's brain, sitting in the bottom of a dissecting pan, doesn't convey much about the dynamism of the living brain. To the student, poking at the brain with a dissecting probe, there are few landmarks. The cerebellum sits in the back, where it controls many motor functions and stores motor memory. The cerebrum, the most prominent part of the brain in mammals, sits in the front, processing sensory and motor information, storing memories, and allowing its owner - when it was still alive - to think. A corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain and coordinates information flow between the two halves. A careful student can pick out the thalamus, hypothalamus, and pituitary structures involved in maintaining homeostasis in the body, and perhaps the

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