'How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I've gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career.'

By Geraldine Royds

 

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old Harvard-trained and published brain scientist when a blood vessel exploded in her brain shutting down her left hemisphere’s neural circuitry.  

In this enthralling video made for the TED conference in February 2008, she describes how she watched as her brain functions - movement, speech, self awareness - slipped away, one by one. 

'And I lost my balance and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy. Energy. And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me, what is going on?"'

On the morning of 10 December 1996, neuroanatomist Dr Jill Taylor had a stroke and over the next four hours she watched her brain deteriorate until she could no longer move, speak, read, write or recall anything of her life.  

As a scientist working in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry she had been studying the micro circuitry of the brain but at weekends and in the evening she was an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a role she took on because she has a brother who has the brain disorder, schizophrenia.  Now, she found she had a brain disorder herself.  

After undergoing major surgery to remove a golf ball size haemorrhage and amazed to find herself still alive, Dr Taylor began to rebuild her brain. Aided by her understanding of how the brain works and supported by her mother (who she calls a true angel in her life) she spent the next ten years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk including having to learn to read all over again, beginning with the pre-school book The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy.

Using her academic training and personal insight into the unique functions of the two halves of her brain, Jill now helps others to rebuild their brains from trauma.  In her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey she shares her recommendations for recovery, offering hope to everyone who is brain-injured, not just stroke patients but accident victims and Iraq war veterans. 

Moreover, she encourages those of us with normal brains to better understand how we can ‘tend the garden of our minds’ to maximize our quality of life. By exercising our own right hemispheric circuitry, we can consciously influence what we think, how we feel, and how we react to life’s circumstances. 

In a healthy person and a healthy society we should live more or less equally out of both halves of the brain but in an interview with the journalist, Robert Koehler, Dr Taylor describes the current balance of left brain/right brain as about 85-15: 'We don’t just not engage the skills of the right hemisphere, we mock them!' she said. 'I realized that the blessing I had received from this experience was the knowledge that deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time...My stroke of insight would be: peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.'

Dr. Jill Taylor teaches at the Indiana University School of Medicine and is the Consulting Neuroanatomist for the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute. She travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank and she is still an active member of NAMI.  Find out more on:

http://www.drjilltaylor.com/

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229