Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor on her own stroke
April 3rd, 2008 by some dudeFrom TED Talks…
And I lost my balance and I’m propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can’t define where I begin and where I end.
Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, “Hey! we got a problem, we got a problem, we gotta get some help.” So it’s like, OK, OK, I got a problem, but then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness, and I affectionately referred to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world.
via ScienceRoll
May 29th, 2008 at 3:34 am
The New York Times Sunday Newspaper on May 25 had a great two page article on Jill Bolte Taylor and her book, “MY STROKE OF INSIGHT”. Her book is a must read and this NY Times article - called “A Superhighway to bliss” is worth checking out too.
May 30th, 2008 at 4:58 am
I read “My Stroke of Insight” in one sitting - I couldn’t put it down. I laughed. I cried. It was a fantastic book (I heard it’s a NYTimes Bestseller and I can see why!), but I also think it will be the start of a new, transformative Movement! No one wants to have a stroke as Jill Bolte Taylor did, but her experience can teach us all how to live better lives. Her TED.com speech was one of the most incredibly moving, stimulating, wonderful videos I’ve ever seen. Her Oprah Soul Series interviews were fascinating. They should make a movie of her life so everyone sees it. This is the Real Deal and gives me hope for humanity.
June 1st, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Thank you for that. Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight is one of the most incredible stories I’ve heard in a long time. Her TEDTalk video blew my mind wide open to new possibilities. On the one hand, there’s what she went through and how she emerged from it. On the other hand, there’s what she can teach all of us.
I saw the 4 part Oprah interview on Oprah dot com Soul Series and I did learn a lot from that, but I’d like to find our more of how to do what Dr. Taylor did, without having a stroke of course!
Thin how many of us are living too much in the head, and not the heart. And of course, you can’t get more left brain than a Harvard Brain Scientist. Isn’t it ironic that she should be the one to have the stroke and transform from the quintessential left brainer into this “”seen the light”" disciple of finding inner peace?
I hope this movement keeps going. Maybe there will be My Stroke of Insight classes where we can practice what Jill Bolte Taylor is preaching.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
As one of few others who, like Ms. Bolte Taylor, not only survived a hemorrhagic stroke but remembers every detail of it, I can tell you this lady’s experience is abnormal at best. I suspect it is also exaggerated (slightly related note, the pictures I’ve seen of her bleed indicate it was very small). My bleed was also in my left hemisphere, and I very much remember what it was like to lose my ability to sign my name on all the hospital forms, or communicate to the doctors what I was feeling. No short term memory, no concept of the situation, high on the natural opiates your body procudes in response to such severe pain, followed by high on morphine. And let me tell you, there is nothing cool about it. It is scary to simultaneously assume you are going to die and yet wonder why you don’t care. It is scary to feel connected to all your limbs, yet not be able to operate them as normal. It is indescribable to see the doctors and nurses take something so seriously, to see the looks of concern on their faces, the looks of fear on the faces of loved ones, and wonder why the hell they don’t just chill out. I meet regularly with a group of hemorrhagic stroke survivors, some who were aware at the time, some who lost consciousness and remember nothing. What Ms. Bolte Taylor had, an AVM, carries a much higher survival rate than my personal affliction, cerebral aneurysm, but the group I attend consists of people who survived both, and lost loved ones to both. None of us in that room can relate to her quote of “Oh, cool, I’m having a stroke.” We’ve all passed around real human brains, looked at the arteries and vessels that have caused us such struggle, learned about the different lobes and hemispheres, gone to different sorts of physical and cognitive therapies, talked to and about people who are now missing parts of their brains — permanently (some are in my group) — I can’t be anything more than skeptical of this lady. Most of what she says, I can relate to, but I’ve drawn much different conclusions. I remember saying goodbye to my life, I remember needing complete darkness, I remember not being able to separate stimuli. I didn’t recognize the words coming out of my mouth, and didn’t know why I was saying them. I had my nirvana, and you what caused it? Shock and hormones. It is your body’s natural reaction to that kind of pain and brain swelling. Our bodies make stuff remarkably similar to opiates. I suspect that is why my friends that had brain bleeds on the right side of their brain were also able to have similar experiences, even when forced to rely on their left hemispheres. For anybody who wants their own Stroke of Insight, I’d recommend studying less about the relationship between cerebral hemispheres, and more about the relationship between cognitive thoughts and emotions. You can find your nirvana too, not by shutting off half your brain, but by learning how to make your brain work for you.