"Once the brain is understood," says Associate Editor Peter Stoler, who wrote this week's cover story, "that knowledge will have almost unlimited usefulness." The brain's secrets may not be discovered for a decade or more, Stoler points out, "but even if doors don't open immediately, at least we have found some keys."

Stoler spent four weeks interviewing neurosurgeons and neuroscientists in Washington, Baltimore, Boston and New York. He also observed a brain operation in Manhattan. "Looking into a heart is wonderful and unusual," says Stoler, who has seen plenty of surgery in his three years as TIME'S medicine writer. "But looking into the brain was eerie. I could not avoid the feeling that by looking into someone else's head and seeing his cerebrum, I was violating the very thing that made that person an individual."

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This week TIME opens a new bureau in the Middle East. The bureau will be located in Cairo, and its chief will be Wilton Wynn, a Rome correspondent for TIME since 1962. The author of Nasser of Egypt: The Search for Dignity, Wynn has had long and varied experience in the Middle East.

Wynn, a native of Louisiana, first arrived in Cairo in September 1945 to teach for two years at the American University there. He later spent four years with the Associated Press in Beirut and six as the A.P.'s bureau chief in Cairo. Since joining TIME, Wynn has made numerous trips back to the area, most recently during the Arab-Israeli war.

"Much has changed in Cairo in 29 years," notes Wynn, "but there is still a sense of permanence about the Egypt of awe-inspiring antiquities, of graceful feluccas with their arched sails on the Nile, and the finest kabob and sharpest sense of humor in the world."

Some of Wynn's early acquaintances are now Arab leaders: Wynn met Habib Bourguiba, President of Tunisia, in 1946 when, as a 43-year-old exile in Cairo, Bourguiba brought a piece of anti-French propaganda to be published in a magazine Wynn was helping edit. He first met Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1953, when Sadat was editor-in-chief of the government-owned newspaper Al Gumhurriya.

"Many times since 1945," Wynn says, "I have seen the tension between the Egypt of heroism and great exploits-- which existed under Nasser-- and the Egypt that struggles for its daily existence. Under Sadat, one gets the impression that the emphasis is on the very practical demands of survival and more bread for the people. This evolution is due in part to the difference in style of the two men, but it results primarily from the obvious needs of Egypt today."

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