摘要：The brain may undergo functional reorganizations. Selective loss of sensory input or training
within a restricted part of a modality cause “shifts” within for instance somatotopic or tonotopic
maps. Cross-modal plasticity occurs when input within a modality is absent – e.g., in the
congenitally blind. Reorganizations are also found in functional recovery after brain injury.
Focusing on such reorganizations, it may be studied whether a cognitive or conscious process
can exclusively be mediated by one neural substrate – or may be associated with multiple
neural representations. This is typically known as the problem of multiple realization – an
essentially empirical issue with wide theoretical implications. This issue may appear to have
a simple solution. When, for instance, the symptoms associated with brain injury disappear
and the recovery is associated with increased activities within spared regions of the brain, it is
tempting to conclude that the processes originally associated with the injured part of the brain
are now mediated by an alternative neural substrate. Such a conclusion is, however, not a simple
matter. Without a more thorough analysis, it cannot be concluded that a functional recovery of
for instance language or attention is necessarily associated with a novel representation of the
processes lost to injury. Alternatively, for instance, the recovery may reflect that apparently
similar surface phenomena are obtained via dissimilar cognitive mechanisms. In this paper we
propose a theoretical framework, which we believe can guide the design and interpretations
of studies of post-traumatic recovery. It is essential to distinguish between a number of levels
of analysis – including a differentiation between the surface phenomena and the underlying
information processing – when addressing, for instance, whether a pre-traumatic and posttraumatically recovered cognitive or conscious process are actually the same. We propose a
(somewhat preliminary) system of levels of analysis, which can be applied to such studies.
