My Stroke of Insight

Jill Bolte Taylor

4 ideas

1. Neuroanatomist Watches Her Own Stroke Unfold

   On the morning of December 10, 1996, Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, then 37, had a bleed from a congenital arteriovenous malformation in her left hemisphere and observed her own functions shutting down as it happened. She lost the sense of where her body ended, could not follow her inner verbal chatter, and could not read the numbers on a business card, so she spent about 45 minutes matching the shapes of the digits to the squiggles on a phone keypad to call a colleague, then found she could produce only garbled sounds. After surgery to remove a golf-ball-sized clot, she needed about eight years, with her mother as primary caregiver, to regain walking, reading, math, and full cognitive function.

2. The Ninety-Second Lifespan of an Emotion

   Taylor claims that the chemical surge behind an automatic emotional reaction such as anger flushes through the body and dissipates within about 90 seconds. On this account, feeling the emotion beyond that window means your thinking is re-triggering the circuit, which makes continuing the reaction a choice rather than something that happens to you.

3. Left-Brain Narrator Versus Right-Brain Presence

   Taylor describes the left hemisphere as the source of linear, verbal, past-and-future thinking, the running 'brain chatter' that builds a separate self, and the right hemisphere as present-moment, sensory, and boundaryless. When her left-hemisphere language centers went silent, she experienced euphoric peace and oneness, and she treats this as evidence that anyone can choose to 'step to the right' to find calm.

4. Rebuilding a Brain From the Inside

   From the patient's side, Taylor sets out what made her recovery possible. She needed a great deal of sleep to let her brain heal, and each skill was broken into the steps just before it so she could build on small successes. Caregivers were asked to treat her as wounded rather than stupid and to be responsible for the energy they brought into the room, because she was highly sensitive to other people's emotional tone even when she could not follow their words.

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