A new brain-imaging test may, however, change that.Nick Ward, of University College, London, and his colleagues, have found a marked difference between the pattern of brain activity displayed by a person pretending to be unable to move a leg, and that displayed by the same person when he is genuinely unable to move his leg.
Oakley is currently using brain imaging to discover what is happening when a subject tries in vain to move a leg, having been told by a hypnotist that it is paralysed.
The lowest layer consists of control modules performing elementary actions, like moving a leg up, down, left or right to achieve the elementary swing and stance motions for individual legs.
"About a million people in the U.S. suffer from a stroke every year, and about half of them suffer from some sort of motor symptoms — they can't move a leg or an arm or something like that.
I think they move a leg, or a claw, maybe a millionth of an inch, and then film some more.
These are reprised right down to their original Top of the Pops dance moves – a leg-cross here, an insouciant spin there.
Where the web is sparse, a Portia will use "rotary probing", in which it moves a free leg around until it meets a thread.
Sometimes an arm or a leg moves a little, but that's not because Atlas is alive, it's because the worms have moved an arm or leg.
The virus moves from a leg bitten by a rabid dog up the long axons leading to the spinal cord, then jumps to dendrites of other nerves and travels up to the brain, where it causes horrific damage.
But once s/he is getting drowned in a lagoon, s/he should not move a hand or shake a leg, just because the situation is exacerbated and s/he may lose her/his life.
