Books |
My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey
Jill Bolte Taylor
By
Published: Apr 12, 2021
Category:
Memoir
I knew of Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk in 2008, but as someone who often confuses his brain with his life, I wasn’t quick to watch it. I didn’t watch it when Time Magazine put her on its 100 most influential people. I didn’t watch it after she was on Oprah.
I avoided all things Taylor for one reason. She had the thing a writer like me fears even more than a heart attack, cancer or a visit from a Proud Boy — she had a stroke. In fact, there was no one better to have a stroke, for when she woke up on December 10, 1996 to discover ”I had a brain disorder,” she was a 37-year-old neuroanatomist at Harvard’s brain research center. And she quickly figured out what was happening to her.
She had two reactions.
One came from her left hemisphere: "I’m a busy woman. I don’t have time for a stroke.”
The other came, immediately after, from her right hemisphere: "This is so cool!”
With that, Jill Bolte Taylor embarked on a wondrous trip: “My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air… I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle.”
I got over my resistance. I surrendered to my curiosity. I read an excerpt from her book. And was about the 17th million person to watch her TED talk. And, finally, got the book. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. For the audiobook, read by the author, click here.]
Jill Bolte Taylor’s story is compelling. One of her brothers is a schizophrenic who believes he’s personally tight with Jesus — he’s a big reason she gravitated to brain research. She was, by her account, very much the scientist in her work. Right-brain insights didn’t interest her — until, that is, they were all she had, all she was.
Her account of her stroke and her recovery is so wonderfully and meticulously detailed that it’s hard not to be suspicious of these chapters. She had a stroke and she remembered just about every thought and sensation — how is that possible? Because she’s a scientist who writes like a scientist; she can hold a lot of information in her head. But you don’t need to have had a stroke or know someone who has to value this book. She says something that we desperately want to hear: Heaven is just one thought away. One decision, really.
Here, on one side of the brain, you can access “the life force power of the universe.” On the other, “the single individual”. These, she says, are “the we inside of me.” And she presents you with a challenge: “Which would you choose?”
You know what she chose: “I believe the more time we spend running our deep inner peace circuitry, then the more peace we will project into the world, and ultimately the more peace we will have on the planet.”
This is not to minimize the commitment and work her rehabilitation required — that took years. But she confidently believes that inner peace is a choice. You choose it, you have it. There may be backsliding, there may be a bump here and there, but if I understand her correctly, we all have the capacity to experience bliss just by an act of will. In the words of the old Apple slogan: “Think different.”
How did a serious scientist reach such a simplistic conclusion? She had a powerful experience. And she found herself in a universe she had never played in. And, boy, is she happy she found it: “Nowadays, I spend a whole lot of time thinking about thinking just because I find my brain so fascinating.”
Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience gave her a shortcut. For most of us, her book is most valuable for telling us what we have heard from many others: slow down, take a breath, make time for kindness, eye-contact, patience, empathy. You wanted a Big New Idea? We can never be reminded too often to be human. After all the excitement fades, consider Jill Bolte Taylor’s book a 175-page Post-it note.
