Stroke of insight - Jill Bolte Taylor

[Music] I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. As a sister, and later as a scientist, I wanted to understand why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true. What is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusions? So, I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses, and I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Venice in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry.

In the lab, we were asking the question: What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or bipolar disorder? So, we were essentially mapping the micro circuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals. There was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day, but then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain, and in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body.

If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. Thank you, sir. So, this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of the brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. When you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another.

For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus callosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate because they process information differently. Each of our hemispheres thinks about different things, they care about different things, and dare I say they have very different personalities.

Excuse me, thank you. It's been a joy. Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about right here, right now. Our right hemisphere thinks in pictures, and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems, and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like, and what it sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere.

We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family, and right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. In this moment, we are perfect, we are whole, and we are beautiful.

My left hemisphere, our left hemisphere, is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. Our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me in my internal world to my external world.

It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning." It's that calculating intelligence that knows and reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most importantly, it's a little voice that says to me, "I am." I am. And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me, "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. This is a portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye, and it was the kind of pain, caustic pain, that you get when you bite into ice cream. It just gripped me and then released me, and then it just gripped me and then released me. It was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, "Okay, I'll just start my normal routine." So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full body, full exercise machine, and I'm jamming away on this thing.

I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar, and I thought that's very peculiar. I looked down at my body and I thought, "Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." It was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience. That was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse.

So I get off the machine and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realized that everything inside of my body has slowed way down, and every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perception. I'm just focused on internal systems, and I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, "Okay, you muscles, you gotta contract, and you muscles, you relaxed."

Now, I lost my balance, propped up against the wall, and I looked down at my arm and I realized 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. I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me? What is going on?"

In that moment, my brain shattered. My left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent, just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button: total silence. At first, I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind, but then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. Because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Then, all of a sudden, my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, "Hey, we had a problem, we got a problem, we gotta get some help." But I'm going, "Oh, I got a problem, I got a problem." So it’s like, "Okay, okay, I got a problem." But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness, and I fictionally refer to this space as "Lala land," but it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world.

So here I am in this space, and my job and any stress related to my job, it was gone, and I felt lighter in my body. Imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those; they were gone, and I felt this sense of peacefulness. Imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage. Oh, I felt euphoria! Euphoria! It was beautiful there.

Then again, my left hemisphere comes online, and it says, "Hey, you've got to pay attention, we've got to get help!" I'm thinking, "I've got to get help, I gotta focus." So I get out of the shower, and I mechanically dress, and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, "I gotta get to work, I gotta get to work. Can I drive? Can I drive?" In that moment, my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side.

Did I realize? Oh my gosh, am I having a stroke? I'm having a stroke! And then the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow, this is so cool! This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" Then it crosses my mind, but I'm a very busy woman. Time for a stroke? It's like, "Okay, I can't stop the stroke from happening, so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine."

Okay, so I got to call help, I got to call work. I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered in my office I had a business card with my number on it. I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards, and I'm looking at the card on top, and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not because all I could see were pixels. The pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell.

Then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity, and in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell, "That's not the card, that's not the card, that's not the card." It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers; I do not understand a telephone, but it's the only plan I have.

So I take the foam pad and I put it right here, I take the business card and I put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the foam pad. But then I would drift back out into Lala land and not remember if I'd already dialed those numbers. So, I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them so that as I would come back to normal reality, I'd be able to tell, "Yes, I've already dialed that number."

Eventually, the whole number gets dialed, and I'm listening to the song, and my colleague picks up the phone, and he says to me, "Whoa!" I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a golden retriever." So, I say to him clear in my mind, "This is Jill, I need help!" But what comes out of my voice is, "I think, oh my gosh, I sound like a golden retriever." So I couldn't know! I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried.

He recognizes that I need help, and he gets me help. A little while later, I'm riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to Mass General Hospital, and I curl up into a little fetal ball. Just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just right out of the balloon, I felt my energy lift, and just—I felt my spirit surrender. In that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. Either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition.

When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life, and my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise. I just wanted to escape because I could not identify the position of my body in space.

I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle, and my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana! I found nirvana! I remember thinking there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body. But then I realized, but I'm still alive. I'm still alive! And I have found nirvana!

If I have found nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find nirvana. I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time and that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. Then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be. What a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives!

It motivated me to recover. Two-and-a-half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my momma, who's a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds, and we have the power to choose moment by moment who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are—I am the life-force power of the universe! I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, and one with all that is, or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere where I become a single individual, a solid separate from the flow, separate from you.

I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. I thought that was an idea worth spreading. [Applause]