Doctors removed one side of her skull and her eye socket to release pressure on her brain from bleeding.
But medically speaking, they don't have a picture of her brain from before and after, so they can't say.
Giffords has relied on her resilience, Simon said, to recover from wounds that have left her with a brain injury, partial blindness and a paralyzed right arm.
Helena's group also interviewed a teacher about a baby who was born two days after her mother died from a brain haemorrhage.
Noor has a shunt in her brain to relieve pressure from fluid buildup, and she often experiences urinary tract infections that could possibly lead to renal failure.
For on top of the normal pressures, she was recovering from treatment for a brain tumour that left her without most of her hair and exhausted.
If a subject is presented with a sentence like, "When she came in from the cold her cheeks were like roses, " many sections of the brain become involved, including those responsible for visual processing.
Post-mortem tests revealed very high levels of aluminium in her brain - levels described at the inquest by expert Professor Chris Exley from Keele University as "beyond belief".
He describes how her responsiveness to commands from doctors is an optimistic sign, though the caveat is that with brain injuries it takes time to assess the recovery.
Her husband Ronald, who was the American leader between 1981 and 1989, also suffers from the degenerative brain disease.
The mother of three from Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, was told the cancer had spread too far and she had secondary tumours in her brain.
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