Jill had a brother who was only 18 months older than her, her constant companion as a child. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic. She grew up to study the brain because her introduction to the world was through the eyes of her brother, as well as her own. She recognised as a little girl that her brother was very different in the way that he perceived experiences around him and then chose to behave. The overall way that he put the world together was different from Jill’s. She became highly tuned into body language, tone of voice, how people interact with one another, what persons valued, and how they made the decisions that they made.
Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard trained neuroanatomist who teaches at the Indiana School of Medicine and is a national spokesperson for the mentally ill for the Harvard Brain Tissue Research Centre. She wrote a book called ‘My Stroke of Insight’ because she had a massive stroke and remained conscious the entire time and live to tell the tale.
At the time of her stroke, Dr Taylor was at Harvard Medical School, teaching and performing research. Her area of specialty was the post mortem investigation of the brain as it relates to schizophrenia. She was serving on the board of Director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. There was a lot of meaning in her life because she was doing something that could make a difference in the lives of people like her brother.
Jill did have a rather strange wish to be awake when she died because she believed that it would be cool to watch the whole thing and have that experience. Be careful what you ask for.
She was thirty-seven when the stroke occurred. When her alarm went off in the morning, she snoozed it to give herself a few more minutes in bed and noticed a pounding, pulsating pain behind her left eye. She noticed the light coming in from the window also pulsed at her head and burnt her brain. It was very unusual for her to any kind of pain.
She had zero warning signs she may have a stroke. Her blood pressure was fine. Her weight was fine. She exercised regularly. Everything was fine.
Except that she was unaware that she had a congenital weakening of the walls of her blood vessels that left her susceptible to a haemoagic stroke. This is where there is a bleed in the brain, not a blood clot like in an ischaemic stroke.
Despite the pounding in her head, she started her normal exercise routine. A lot of persons may have called into work sick and stayed in bed. Dr Taylor thought, “Let’s do some exercise. Maybe that will help it go away. It’s going to get the blood flowing and hopefully normalise everything”. That’s a healthy person’s attitude. That morning she was not very healthy, but at least she had the right attitude.
Soon, she had a shift in perception, a shift in consciousness, where she became a witness to herself being on the exercise machine, having this experience. Her entire perception was altered. She knew something was going on, but she did not know what because she had never had stroke.
She decided to observe herself for a while. She got off the machine and noticed that everything in her body had slowed down. Her thoughts had slowed. Her body had slowed, had become deliberate and rigid. She had a constriction in her area of perception.
Despite living in a noisy area of Boston, she had no perception of noise. She became focussed in on the working of her body. Being a neuroanatomist, she found this very interesting; fascinating.
She then decided to take a shower. When the water started to run, the volume of the sound as it hit the tub was dramatically amplified. The loudness knocked her back and made her fall over.
At this point, she realised that she had a major problem involving her auditory system. As a neuroanatomist, she knew exactly where the fibres in the brain that perceive sound. She knew that her problem could possibly be life threatening, though she still had no idea that she was having a stroke.
She shifted into an awareness that she is this miraculous conglomeration of trillions of little organisms working together to propagate her existence. She could wiggle her fingers, reach out into the world and move it.
When she had got out of the shower, had dressed for work, walking around her apartment, visualising the road to McClain Hospital and asking herself, ‘Can I drive?’, her right arm went totally paralysed. It thuds against her body. She found this amazing because she had never had anything like that happen before. This is the point where she said to herself
“Oh my God, I am having a stroke!’
The next thing her brain said to her was, “Wow! This is so cool!”
The place in Dr Taylors brain where she had the stroke is in the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is responsible for language, to think sequentially, to think methodically, to think linearly, to be able to know A plus B equals C, both literally with number but also with sequencing in life. It controls our ability to communicate with the external world.
The right hemisphere is responsible for ‘big picture’ thinking. It gives us the context of everything. It also gives us more subtle concepts of understanding, intuition. It is our witness, our observer. It is our ability to experience deep inner peace. The two hemispheres are totally different in their function.
As the blood spread throughout her brain, Jill’s entire left hemisphere went quiet. She lost her ego; her sense of self.
After the stroke, she was essentially an infant in a woman’s body and did not have any recollection of her life. This begs the question, was she the same person. She lost the sense of ‘I am’. She lost the concept of I am Jill. I am a PhD. I am at Harvard. She was not any of that any more.
What she was left with was a sense of oneness, a sense of peace, a sense of connection to humanity in a way that she had never had before, because all her ego had been quieted.
Now, when Dr Taylor looks at anyone who has had any kind of trauma she asks herself, ‘What have they gain?’. What she gained was an incredible knowingness, a deep inner peace, an excitement of realising that everything is interconnected.
She lost the boundary of her body, so she thought that she was enormous, as big as the universe, because she no longer defined that this was where she began, and this was where she ended.
You do not have to have a stroke to feel this way, though it appears to be a short cut. This is one goal of meditation, quieting the chatter of your left brain, recognising that there is no self and being one with the world.
This is how Jill described what silent mind was like.
It was beautiful. It was tranquilised; peaceful. I was high. I felt so whole and so enormous and I would sit on my couch with this goofy grin on my face because I was alive.
There was no left-brain functioning, no attachment to the ego, so Jill didn’t care what other people thought. It made no difference to her. She did not let her thought cause negative emotions, because she did not have the ability to do so.
Reading Stroke of Insight could help so many people dealing with children or family members with disabilities. Because of our own assumptions, we may look at them and pity them. “Poor thing”. You are projecting all your fears of what you think it would be like to be in their shoes, but you are not in their shoes.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Dr Taylor said,
…even though I’m drooling, even though I have no hygiene care, I have no ability to take care of myself, somebody is feeding me, it didn’t matter. What mattered was I still had life and I was still capable of honouring my own life… I was perfect and whole and beautiful just the way that I was. That was my perception
In surgery, Jill had three holes drilled into her skull, a piece of bone taken out, a blood clot the size of a golf ball sucked out, and the bone returned. She was then sent home to heal. She was given a prognosis of two years before she would know anything about the ramifications of the stroke.
She woke up from the operation and there was a brightness. She felt bright again. She had been just totally flat. Once the blood clot was removed, she felt enthusiastic about life again! She felt a sense that whatever happens now does not matter because she was herself again. She did not feel like Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, that was a long way away. She still did not have an identification with an ego. It was two and a half weeks before the brain chatter started to come back.
She had a clean slate. She did not remember her life. She had to learn to read and write from scratch. All her science knowledge had gone. She still had the pictures. The right hemisphere thinks in pictures. So as the left hemisphere of the brain became more normalized again from the swelling, the pictures were there. Jill had to learn language again. She had to learn her name.
Even once you’ve learnt that this is your name, that still doesn’t mean that you know that is who you are. The person that you were is essentially dead.
Jill was determined that she was going to be somebody new and could not be held to whom she had been because she would have been a Harvard brain scientist. She couldn’t hold herself to that with a hole in her head, so she was gone.
Jill and her family grieved the loss of her. She talked about it with her friends and family. They recognised that they had to let the person whom she had been go because Jill was not her anymore. She didn’t have any of her memories of her life. She had none of her knowledge. She had none of her education.
It was seven to nine years before she remembered stuff from her past, things no one had taught her after the stroke. She had to really learn a self. She got reborn essentially.
What would you do if you were given a second life? What an opportunity. If you’ve lost all your emotional baggage. You’ve lost all your pain. You’ve lost any suffering you’d ever had. You’ve lost all those memories.
Jill lost it all and got to start fresh at the age of thirty-seven. She had the choice to either pick up the baggage or not. She had the choice if she created new bags. She chose not to create new baggage.
When Oprah asked Jill why she chose to not pick up her old baggage, she said:
I didn’t like the way it felt in my body, so I chose not to run that circuitry. It’s circuitry. It’s all about circuitry. For example, you can think something that makes you feel sadness and sadness has a physiological feeling in your body and your throat tightens and things happen inside of you physiologically… I just decided that wasn’t circuitry that I was going to run anymore so I said no to the circuitry. So, no… you must remember that your brain is just a bunch of cells right and I look at the cells as a bunch of little children and some little children I want to play with and there are other little children who I don’t really like what they do and I’m going to say what I say I don’t want to go there and play… anybody can do that… you control your thought. We all do… right now you can stop and think about taxes. How did that feel in your body? Exactly, but you had the ability to consciously think taxes and have that experience you have the ability to focus your mind on what you want to focus it on
We are all just a stream of consciousness. If you don’t think about it anymore, it doesn’t exist.
Jill re-established all her relationships as well. Think about the power between the mother-daughter relationship. If anybody is going to have any power in a girl’s life it is going to be her mother. But Jill didn’t even know what a mother was, let alone who her mother was.
I really like this new entity, but she had none of her own power or her old power which meant she couldn’t coax me into doing anything the way that she used to be able to because I really wanted it right because the game was different now. I changed the rules.
When you pay attention to what’s going on in your own brain, and you take responsibility for the circuitry you are running, you play by rules you make, the rules of a new game. As soon as you change the way you interact with other people, the game and the rules have changed. It’s freedom!
How do we get some of this state without having to have a stroke?
Pay attention to what you’re thinking. Be mindful. You are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are created by a little group of cells about the size of a peanut, sitting in your brain’s left hemisphere.
Many of us let that little peanut rule our lives. You must recognise that it is just a group of cells that is designed to tell stories so that we feel safe in the external world.
You are not your thoughts so pay attention to what you’re thinking and then decide if those are thoughts that are creating the kind of life that you want to create. If not, then change your thoughts.
This does not take much work. Just take responsibility for the thoughts that you are thinking and allow yourself to move yourself into the circuitry that brings you peace.
We all have the capacity to tap into that without having a stroke. Anybody can have an attitude of gratitude. You know what it feels like inside your body when you’re feeling grateful. You’re just feeling this celebration of life and ‘oh my gosh how fortunate it is for me to be on the earth’.
Who knows what the future is going to bring and who knows what the past has brought? It does not matter. All you have is right now. The rest is just thoughts in your head. Celebrate the gratitude. That is the Power of Now.
It is also so important to pay attention to self-talk. Pay attention to what you’re saying to yourself. Take some responsibility for that voice.
Did you ever wonder, when you’re mad, really mad, you’re yelling at yourself, did you ever wonder who is doing the yelling and who you’re yelling at? It’s the left hemisphere brain chatter yelling at their right hemisphere which is not always doing things absolutely to the story that left hemisphere would like.
What brain science teach us about ourselves, to help us cope when there’s all this brain chatter going on, where do you focus your attention? Pay attention to how things feel in your body because you know what you feel like in your body when you get angry. You have a choice when you get angry of either being angry or of paying attention to what it feels like in your body when you are angry and when you have that kind of physiological response. When you get angry, it only takes ninety seconds from the moment that you feel that trigger happened, and you feel yourself starting to get angry, for the chemicals to flush through your body and then flush completely out you. Ninety seconds is all… you start feeling yourself again.
Next time you feel angry, look at your watch and start timing. Within ninety seconds it will be gone, and you will be OK. You will have dodged that one. Ninety second.
Why do people harbour the same feelings, where for years they keep rethinking the same thought that restate that emotional circuitry? They rerun the looped tape and are right back into the hostility. Then run it again. People can stay angry for days and weeks and even years. Either consciously or unconsciously, they are choosing to rerun the loops of the circuitry.
I did not go through a stroke, but I did go through a rather major relationship break up, which kind of hit reset on my life. I really worked on myself. I like to think I’m a lot more fun to be around. I have more time for people. I’m more compassionate. I’m more generous. I am glad that I did not need a stroke to find this out.
I know if I could go back that day, and not do it again, I would say no. If I had to have it, I would choose to have I have learned so much. I have grown so much as a human being and I just really feel like I have identified my purpose and the purpose is to help other people recognise that they too have deep inner peace right there on the right hemisphere.
– Dr Jill Bolte Taylor
Go out there and have your own strokes of insight.
Scott
PS. Please share this with your friends so that they too can have strokes of insight.
A neuroanatomist by profession, she observed her own mind completely deteriorate to the point that she lost the ability to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, all within the space of four hours. As the damaged left side of her brain – the rational, logical, detail and time-oriented side – swung in an out of function, Taylor alternated between two distinct and opposite realities: the euphoric Nirvana of the intuitive and emotional right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace; and the logical left brain, that realized Jill was having a stroke and enabled her to seek help before she was lost completely.
In My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, Taylor brings to light a new perspective on the brain and its capacity for recovery that she gained through the intimate experience of awakening her own injured mind. The journey to recovery took eight years for Jill to feel completely healed. Using her knowledge of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human form, and an amazing mother, Taylor completely repaired her mind and recalibrated her understanding of the world according to the insight gained from her right brain that December morning.