Jill Bolte Taylor—neuroscientist—My Stroke of Insight author

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroscientist (specifically, a neuroanatomist). In 1996 she experienced a severe haemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain, causing her to lose the ability to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life.

Her stroke was a blessing and a revelation, and she is now a compelling voice for how we can choose to replace our stress, fear and anxiety with feelings of joy and deep inner peace.

Watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk: My stroke of insight

View speaker profile | Running time 20:11

What she says in her talk regarding the brain’s right hemisphere

Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment.

It’s all about “right here, right now.”

Our right hemisphere, it 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.

And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.

What she says about the brain’s left hemisphere

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, 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.

And our left hemisphere thinks in language.

It’s that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world.

It’s that little voice that says to me, “Hey, you’ve got to remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning.”

It’s that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry.

But perhaps most important, it’s that 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.