My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

“Stroke is the number one disabler in our society and four times more strokes occur in the left hemisphere, impairing language.”

This neuroscientist had a massive stroke in her left hemisphere, wiping out much of her ability to speak and understand language and math, or think in our normal linear fashion. Reading this profound and insightful book, it’s apparent she managed to make an impressive recovery. Because of her brain scientist background, she is able to colorfully take us through the experience of that stroke (including post-stroke surgery to remove a large blood clot) and her patient, difficult recovery that took eight years. It’s like having a trail guide with knowledge of the local terrain and flora and fauna so show more extensive that she can comfortably and entertainingly give you highlights you can understand.

Her stroke shutting down her left hemisphere had a huge silver lining. Our left hemisphere is the one that chatters all the time, making observations and judgments and telling us stories - not all of them true. It’s the one that in meditation we try to calm, quiet and eventually silence. In her case, it left her right hemisphere for the first time (in adulthood) unfettered and free.

“My consciousness no longer retained the discriminatory functions of my dominant analytical left brain. Without those inhibiting thoughts, I had stepped beyond my perception of myself as an individual. Wihout my left brain . . . My consciousness ventured unfettered into the peaceful bliss of my divine right mind.”

The right brain gives us gestalt, “big picture” thinking, and normally the two halves work together to create and understand our experience. The stroke left her with an oceanic feeling of tranquil connection with everything in the universe - a tempting place to stay and live. She felt “fluid” rather than solid and separate in the normal way.

“AlthoughI rejoiced in my perception of connection to all that is, I shuddered at the awareness that I was no longer a normal human being. How on earth would I exist as a member of the human race with this heightened perception that we are each a part of it all, and that the life force energy within each of us contains the power of the universe? How could I fit into our society when I walk the earth with no fear? I was, by anyone’s standard, no longer normal. In my own unique way, I had become severely mentally ill.”

This desire to connect with others in a normal, human way motivated her to take on the arduous, humbling work of recovery. At the beginning, she could barely speak, barely (and not often) understand others, and could engage in linear thinking only briefly, after which she’d need a lot of sleep. Speaking loudly to her didn’t help - she wasn’t deaf! She humorously identifies some of her pet peeves with doctors, nurses and visitors. She credits her mother with incredible, patient care (the author had actually been somewhat neglected as a young child with older siblings). Her mother realized she needed slow, step by step learning, akin to a toddler. The ultimate result was this book (she’s also a frequent speaker, urging people to donate their post-death brains to Harvard for study).

How she learns to balance the two sides of her brain, and change the negative left side loops that had impeded her enjoyment of life is a fascinating story.

“My stroke of insight would be: Peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is to silence the voice of our dominating left mind.”

Her ordeal left her with the enviable ability to experience “Nirvana” (which she describes as filled with “compassion and joy”) whenever she likes, and adeptly bring balance and joy to her experience of life. The abrupt smashing of her life and her arduous journey back to “normal” make for an exhilarating journey for the reader, full of life lessons to think about. All this in a slim, 180+ page volume. We just started February, but this may well end up my favorite book of the year.

P.S. My stroke happened in my right hemisphere, so none of this cool stuff for me, just re-educating the left side of my body in particular to move in a normal way. show less

Let me just start this one by noting that I hate TED Talks. The supposedly beneficent "non-profit" that puts them on is extremely wealthy and charges literally thousands of dollars for their annual event, after which they use the generous proceeds to do ... nothing else of consequence all year. Still, once in a while an "original" TED Talk is actually inspirational, and hers is my favorite.

With that digression complete, I did enjoy this one. The writing is approachable and not at all academic, mirroring the effectiveness of her lecture style as mentioned above. Much of the story recounts how she recognized her own stroke and the subsequent years-long recovery, from a deeply humble perspective. I will also say this is a very useful show more book: she includes easy-to-understand symptoms that you or someone around you may be in the early stages of a stroke, and when that merits medical attention. In addition, she has been part of the NAMI board and advocates for supporting them, plus details you how can donate your brain to science after you die! show less

Jill Bolte Tayor was a 37-year old neuroanatomist when she experienced a massive stroke that severely damaged the left hemisphere of her brain. My Stroke of Insight is her account of what happened that day, her subsequent, 8-year recovery, and how these events changed her life for the better.

The most interesting part of the book for me was Bolte Taylor’s discussion of what happened to her on that morning in 1996. With her scientific background, Bolte Taylor was in a unique position to observe the progressive breakdown of her own functioning as the blood from her burst AVM spread throughout her brain. As new areas were affected, different functions were lost, and reading about her experience is a strange kind of real-world brain show more anatomy lesson.

A significant portion of this book is devoted to the process of Bolte Taylor’s recovery. She realized early on that the attitude and pacing of her caregivers made a big difference in how willing and able she was to respond, and she speaks in detail about what she, personally, found was most effective in helping her heal. There is some useful information in this section for those involved in stroke victim care.

What has catapulted this book onto the bestseller list, however, is the spiritual message underlying Bolte Taylor’s experience. When the language processing areas of her brain shut down, Bolte Taylor found herself bathed in a kind of peace and bliss that was previously unknown to her. With the section of her brain that controls physical boundaries offline, she felt fluid, open, and one with everything around her.

Bolte Taylor considers these experiences to be the result of her right brain suddenly being given the chance to run the show while her left brain was incapacitated. She speaks quite a bit about how she made a conscious decision during her recovery to retain access to these states and to keep these pathways open as she brought her left brain back online. In the latter section of the book, she offers a list of techniques she feels anyone can use to help open up pathways to the expanded capacities of their own right brains.

I learned a number of interesting things while reading this book, and there is no question that Bolte Taylor’s story is a very inspiring one. Ultimately, however, I was disappointed by a number of things about this book. To start, it would have benefited from better editing. Some sections are highly repetitive, I was confused about certain aspects of her level of functioning and recovery, and the flow of the narrative was very uneven. Hers is a great story, and good editing would have made that even more obvious.

My main criticism of this book, however there is a very sloppy blending of hard, scientific information about the brain with Bolte Taylor’s anecdotal experience and personal theories about what happened to her. It was not always obvious which was which, and I suspect many readers will be confused and assume her personal theories are more scientifically grounded than they actually are.

Though Bolte Taylor does not specifically mention religion in the book, her numerous allusions to prayer, visualization, energy, and oneness make it clear that she subscribes to a certain kind of belief system that her experiences are filtered through. While this is to be expected, her inability to see the contradictions in her beliefs was frustrating to me. For example, she speaks about how, after the stroke, she floated in a place of bliss, at one with everything. Yet just a few paragraphs earlier, she refers to a harried, inexperienced medical student as an “energy vampire.” She does not address why her feelings of being at one with and connected to everything did not extend to this person. In addition, she is critical of how the judgmental function of the left brain keeps us shut down from the more expanded perspective of the right brain, yet doesn’t seem to notice her own preference for right-brain dominated experiences seems, well, kind of judgmental.

I’ve had personal experiences of peace and bliss that are similar to what Bolte Taylor describes, so I can certainly understand her preference for them. I also think she gives some good advice to help people find those states themselves without having to have a stroke to get there. But I think this book would have been much more valuable had Bolte Taylor used her scientifically trained left-brain to more clearly separate her anecdotal experience and beliefs what science actually tells us about our fascinating brains. show less

This book blew me away. For the first time, a stroke victim was able to describe in detail what it was like to rapidly lose function in the left brain hemisphere AS THE STROKE WAS HAPPENING, and then she was able to describe what it was like during the short- and long-term recovery process. And when the stroke victim is a brain scientist, the insight revealed is truly staggering. That Dr. Taylor was able to retain her memories of the stroke - before, during, and after - and regain the use of her left brain hemisphere to be able to WRITE about it in great detail years later, well, this was nothing short of a miracle.

My father suffered a hemorrhagic stroke - similar to, but not the same as, Dr. Taylor's - three years ago. I picked up this show more book, hoping it would give me some insight into what might have been going through his head at the time. I read the book, hoping it would give me reassurance that my mother - his full-time caregiver - was doing the right thing. I devoured the book, looking for pointers on how best to help him continue his healing process. This book did all of this and more: it gave me hope. I cannot wait to share with my father what I learned from this book and to hear from him whether he experienced some of the same thoughts and sensations that Dr. Taylor did. I cannot wait to share with my mother that she has been doing the right thing, to reassure her.

Dr. Taylor wrote this book in hopes that it would help caregivers and the medical community to better understand how to help stroke victims. I am forever grateful. show less

In 1996 at the age of 37, brain doctor Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke, a massive bleed in her left hemisphere that affected her ability both to speak and interpret language. Miraculously, she was able to get help and recovered; here she shares her experience and the insight she believes she gained from the time she spent processing the world primarily through the right hemisphere of her brain.

The structure of the book lends itself to a threefold purpose:
1. Warn others of potential stroke symptoms so they can recognize warning signs in themselves or family/friends
2. Give a stroke victim's experience of care and recovery so family and caregivers can better provide help
3. Share her "insights" gained from the time she spent with only a show more functional right hemisphere

Our brains are complicated, intricate, amazing things and I am not alone in being captured by hemisphere lateralization, recovery from brain trauma, and the brain's plasticity. Dr. Taylor's detailed description of the morning of her stroke and the difficulties she had stringing thoughts together to get help were utterly fascinating. Unfortunately, she lost me after that. Her descriptions of recovery were impressionistic, with only a few concrete examples, especially post-surgery where she compressed about eight years in the same amount of space she'd spent detailing the one morning of the stroke. Certainly this may have been because of her left hemisphere damage, but after the detail of the first part, this reader found it disappointing. She also begins to get repetitive - I don't know how many variations of "I was wounded, not deaf" I read, and she begins to introduce some italicized phrases that carry over into part 3, such as "one with the universe" and "step to the right." Finally, I didn't find her insights all that insightful. Is it really that groundbreaking to discover you can break a chain of negative self-talk by choosing to think of something else? I am, admittedly, extremely sensory and analytical, so she really lost me when she started talking about angel cards and the like. Your mileage may vary. show less

Ever since I read "Breakdown" by Stuart Sutherland, I've been intrigued by a particular kind of book. A professional used to viewing something in the abstract finds themselves having a strong, personal and often painful experience which relates to their area of expertise and study.

With Stuart Sutherland it was an experimental psychologist experiencing mental illness, here it is neural scientist Jill Bolte Taylor's experience of a haemorrhagic stroke (bleed rather than clot). Strokes, like episodes of mental illness, come in many and varied forms, so it's unwise to generalise too much from one person's experience - but there's food for thought for medical and care professionals, as well as for the loved ones of a recovering stroke show more patient. Many who suffer a stroke are unable to recover in the way that the author has been able to and share their experience.

Jill Bolte Taylor interprets a lot of her experiences through the prism of her views on left brain/right brain function, which not all readers may agree with. As a scientist and communicator, she seems to have been profoundly affected by the loss of her analytical and language functions, most of which were regained over time or relearnt - but only with very considerable effort.

Like many highly personal accounts, it's best to take from it what you find inspiring, useful, and instructive, while not treating it as a guide. Some of the most striking parts of the book are those which relate to early treatment and assessment, what made for good care, and observations on attitudes of medical staff, friends and family. These were things the author couldn't find ways to communicate at the time, but had very strong feelings about.

Some key phrases:

"See that I am a wounded animal, not a stupid animal. I am vulnerable and confused."

“Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think”

“Over the course of several years, if I didn’t respect my brain’s need for sleep, my sensory systems experienced agonizing pain and I became psychologically and physically depleted.” show less

Jill Bolte Taylor's tribute to the right brain is a fascinating auto-exploration of her experience of a left side hemorrhagic stroke, and her eight year long recovery process. The stroke performed a temporary lesion of the language and related functions of her left brain, leaving her awash in feelings of mystical unity and connection to the universe. In short, it sounds like she was tripping. It put her in touch with her right brain, enabled her to find her soul, and enabled her to write a book that integrates neuroanotomy and medicine with spiritual and emotional wisdom. Looking back she is genuinely grateful for the experience of stroke. Not a bad day's work for a bleeding arteriovenous malformation (AVM) at age 37.

That said, I've got show more some problems with this book. The first involves the epistemological status of the stroke narrative itself, particularly that of the first few hours. It is beautifully written, but it is of course written, and written long after the fact. Because it is writing about the very experience of losing language itself, it is at least a problematic text. Clearly there must be a significant measure of reconstruction. Memories that by her own account cannot have been verbal or left brain based must have been translated and re-presented as words. As long as we keep this literary/physiological fudge in mind, the account itself is interesting, even fascinating. Taylor enables us to experience in words the experience of someone who has awakened to the fact that she has lost her words. We have the impression that she could picture, as a neuroanatomist, what was actually happening to her brain, or does she mean only to imply that she has reconstructed this afterwards? It's not clear. And so we have to keep in mind that this is a creative fiction in some significant measure and not merely mimetic or directly representational. She is painting pictures of awarenesses that it is difficult to imagine that she could have had during the experience because they are such left brain thoughts. Neither her own impressive credentials as a scientist at the time, or her subsequent research, all of which create the literary experience that "you are there" should disguise the fact that in a certain left brain sense "she was not there" and had to apply words to her experiences much later. In some ways, this makes her literary achievement all the greater, but this perhaps should be differentiated from a scientific text. Any introspective narrative faces this problem, but an introspective narrative about the loss of language is even more problematic.

The deeper problem that I have, however, with this text, and it may not be your problem but it is certainly mine, is that I don't believe in the right brain, as a matter of religion. If I am to choose a side in the brain wars, I must believe in the left brain. My God is not the god of oceanic feelings of oneness, or of wordless emotional connection, or even of feelings at all. My God is the god of symbols, time and linearity. I believe in words and symbols and I believe through words and symbols. I consider the human capacity for logic and reason to be the purest distillation of divinity (or if you prefer the greatest achievement of evolution... all the same to me.)

My heart and my soul are in my left brain, not my right brain. I like my right brain well enough, but I'm just not that into it. And when I read the later chapters of this book, with all of Dr. Taylor's odes to emotional awareness and right brain connectivity, it just makes me feel all cynical and angry. That's not going to feed my children! That's not going to feed the world. It's all very well for you, Dr. Taylor, to preach about emotional wholeness (who could be against that? not me!) but I'm running out of money and I've got a family to feed. I really don't have time to hang out and get more in touch with myself. I need to reason my way out of this box of life that I'm trapped in, and no one is paying me to observe my circuitry and heal my soul. I don't think I've expressed the full extent of my cynicism yet, but I'm trying.

Sure I've had a few artificially induced right brain experiences, and sure I've done enough therapy to believe that our right brains are real and have a certain importance. But that's not where God is. No way. God is doing multiplication tables, and calculating functions. God is reasoning through logical possibilities. God is law and justice. God is language. God is in the left brain. God is what a microprocessor does. And while I readily grant that God needs a friendly working relationship with the Shekina, the indwelling presence, if you will, or the right brain if you must, I just don't think I could live in that kind of holiness for very long. I have too much I want to get done before I die, and time is short.

I'm happy that Dr. Taylor is happy. I suspect it has way more to do with the fact that she has a nice position with the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute and the Indiana University School of Medicine and has written a book that has garnered lots of attention, than it has to do with the strokes of insight she gained when half her brain winked out. It's the writing and sense she made of that event, not the time of oceanic oneness itself, that she herself acknowledges was necessary to feel whole again. She still values the time when her left brain disappeared for awhile. I've had experiences like that of a lesser degree, but I'm not so convinced that they amount to a hill of beans. We'd both probably agree that you wouldn't want to live only on the right side of the brain. show less