'There were 20 of them in a minute and then there were hundreds of them a day,' Leeb says.ĭoctors ordered an MRI of Mora's brain. In early 2008, Mora began having epileptic seizures that became more and more frequent. 'And then in the holiday season of 2007, all of these milestones sort of stopped,' Leeb recalls. She smiled and rolled over, right on schedule. And for the first few months, she seemed like a typical baby. Sometime in the third trimester of Ann Leeb's pregnancy, the child she was carrying had a massive stroke on the left side of her brain. They also hope to gain a better understanding of why very young brains are so plastic. Scientists hope that by understanding the brains of people like Mora, they can find ways to help others recover from a stroke or traumatic brain injury.

It's also how the brain revises its circuitry to help recover from a brain injury - or, in Mora's case, the loss of an entire hemisphere. It's an extreme version of brain plasticity, the process that allows a brain to modify its connections to adapt to new circumstances.īrain plasticity is thought to underlie learning, memory, and early childhood development. Yet to a remarkable degree, Mora's right hemisphere has taken on jobs usually done on the left side. Her slow, cadence-free speech is one sign of a brain that has had to reorganize its language circuits. 'I can be described as a glass-half-full girl,' she says, pronouncing each word carefully and without inflection. Yet at 15, Mora plays soccer, tells jokes, gets her nails done, and, in many ways, lives the life of a typical teenager.

When she was 9 months old, surgeons removed the left side of her brain. In most people, speech and language live in the brain's left hemisphere. The 15-year-old has grown up without the left side of her brain after it was removed when she was very young. Mora Leeb places some pieces into a puzzle during a local puzzle tournament.

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