My Stroke of Insight

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After the stroke, I was spending literally six to eight hours a day on the phone speaking to people who had neurological trauma or their caregivers. My mother said to me, “Jill, you have to write this down and give it to the world, because you don’t have any time for your life. You’re on the phone all the time.”

In My Stroke of Insight, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes the stroke she had in 1996 when she was 37. She combines her perspectives as a scientist and patient to describe the symptoms of her stroke and how they affected her life. This is how Bolte Taylor became interested in, and began working with, the human brain. In the following blink, you’ll find out some scientific facts behind the harrowing, life-changing experience she endured when she had her stroke. By the eighth year, I felt I had completely recovered, so I wrote the book. It was an enormous task for me to undertake, and at the same time it was incredible for my brain to challenge itself in that way. It wasn’t easy, but it was important and necessary. I self-published the book, and then about a year later I did the TED Talk, and then I sold the book to Penguin. That was life exploding.Describing the immediate aftermath of your stroke, you’ve called yourself “an infant in a woman’s body.” At that point, what did you think the rest of your life would look like?

In My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (Penguin Group, 2008), Bolte Taylor, 49, shares lessons learned from a stroke patient's perspective, including tips for doctors, nurses, caregivers, and other stroke survivors. Perhaps most surprisingly, she recalls feeling an intense sensation of inner harmony and deep connection during the stroke that has remained with her. She believes this state of awareness is available to all people if they know how to look for it. Even when she was still recovering from her stroke, Taylor felt a strong desire to share her experience. Anyone can achieve the right-brain tranquility that she experienced after her recovery. Her recovery wasn’t easy, but it was worth it in the end. She’s eager to tell others how they can recover as well. Key Takeaways Taylor believes that her spiritual experience was biologically determined. She likens it to the Buddhist concept of nirvana, which means a state free from suffering. Her left brain was damaged and quieted her inner voice, which is a stream of constant commentary. This freed up her right brain to experience bliss. Dr. Jill is a dynamic teacher and public speaker who loves educating all age groups, academic levels, as well as corporations and not-for-profit organizations about the beauty of our human brain. She focuses on how we can activate the power of our neuroplasticity to not only recover from neurological trauma, but how we can purposely choose to live a more flexible, resilient, and satisfying life.Before the stroke, I was climbing the ladder at Harvard. I wanted to teach and do research. I was interested in understanding, at a cellular level, the differences between the brains of people who would be diagnosed as neurotypical and the brains of people who would be diagnosed with a severe mental illness. After the stroke, I had to mourn the death of who I had been before — but it was never my ambition to grow up to be that person again or to do the things that she had done. You know from the beginning of this book that Taylor must have recovered reasonably well from her stroke. After all, she wrote a book! Yet it still feels surprising that anyone could survive, let alone thrive, with such a brain injury. Well, Taylor’s stroke experience suggests a different way of looking at mindfulness. If a sense of peace, wholeness, and calm simply comes from the right side of the brain, then mindfulness is actually within you all along. This stays true whether you’ve ever meditated or not, whether you’ve ever deliberately undertaken mindfulness exercises or not. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientistʼs Personal Journey (2008) is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning book written by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist. In it, she tells of her experience in 1996 of having a stroke in her left hemisphere and how the human brain creates our perception of reality and includes tips about how Dr. Taylor rebuilt her own brain from the inside out. It is available in 29 languages. [1] Critical reception [ edit ]

At the time, I had been serving on the board of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. That’s a brain-related network, so after my stroke, word spread that I was recovering and I started getting invitations to keynote about the brain and the ability of the brain to recover. At that point, doctors were still telling stroke patients that if they didn’t recover in three to six months, then forget it. It made me angry. If you’re told by your doctor, “Don’t even bother to try,” then nobody’s going to recover. My brain was still recovering six, seven, eight years after the stroke. Before the stroke, I had been an advocate for the mentally ill, and then after the stroke, I became an advocate for the ability of the brain to recover. You know, I ask myself that all the time. I had this curiosity. When I reach an obstacle, or something I don’t know, there’s something in my spirit that turns toward it because I’m curious and I want to understand. As long as I’m not tired or irritable, I tend to challenge myself. I wanted to know about the world again. I think part of that was because I had already been a competent human being — and so I knew the rewards of being a competent human being. I had known what it means to have connections with people and healthy relationships. I knew the end goal. I knew where I was going, and that helped me put one step in front of the other. Among the lessons Bolte Taylor has for medical professionals and caregivers: Don't accept timetables for recovery, have hope in the brain's plasticity and ability to be repaired, and appreciate the value of sleep in the healing process. In the beginning, I had no concept of that. I didn’t have that capacity, just like an infant child. My mother’s only hope for me was that I would be able to one day live independently again. I had no skills. I had no language in my mind telling me I was Jill. Without knowing who you are, you have no data about your life beyond the present moment experience of being hungry or being tired or being in awe. So it was a process of regaining a worldview that existed beyond what I could see and smell and taste.

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Bolte Taylor was accepted as an undergraduate at Indiana University where she studied human biology. At the same time, she got a job at the Terre Haute Center for Medical Education. It was here that she worked as a lab technician in both the Human Anatomy Lab and the Neuroanatomy Research Lab.

On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven- year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist experienced a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she observed her mind deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life-all within four hours-Taylor alternated between the euphoria of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical, sequential left brain, which recognized she was having a stroke and enabled her to seek help before she was completely lost. It would take her eight years to fully recover. If people with literal brain damage can so often regain the abilities they’ve lost and even continue to develop new ones, imagine what you can do with a fully functioning, healthy brain. Lesson 2: You feel like just one person, but your brain really has two totally different parts. Most of us enjoy the luxury of a well-integrated brain. But, like Taylor, we must realize that our brains are actually complex entities, trying to fulfill a variety of hugely disparate goals. Evolution made the human brain this way, cobbling together lower and higher functions over time, and it shows. Lesson 3: You can opt out of many negative emotions and choose to feel mostly the positive ones instead.

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Desmond O'Neill, M.D. writes in the New England Journal of Medicine, that although the account is gripping and insightful, that it is "burdened by an interpretation of stroke through the narrow lens of hemispheric function." He also argues that the advice Taylor gives to stroke patients might not be valuable for all stroke patients. [2]