A Stroke of Insight
Early in her life, Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, was drawn to the internal workings of the human brain when her brother presented with schizophrenia. That curiosity took her into the world of scientific enquiry where she excelled as a neuroanatomist. Then one morning, when she was only 37 years of age, everything changed.
I was in my mid-thirties and thriving both professionally and personally. But in one fell swoop, the rosiness of my life and promising future evaporated. I woke up on December 10, 1996, to discover I had a brain disorder of my own. I was having a stroke. Within four brief hours, I watched my mind completely deteriorate in its ability to process all stimulation coming in through my senses. This rare form of hemorrhage rendered me completely disabled whereby I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any aspects of my life.
Unknown to her she had an arteriovenous malformation in her brain which had just blown, pouring blood into the left hemisphere. Miraculously she was able to observe the disintegration and in My Stroke of Insight she has recorded the whole experience and her recovery through the eyes of a neuroscientist, and she shares the unique insight it has given her into the beauty and resilience of the human brain with its intuitive right side and the logical left. She includes a limited amount of simple science to help understanding, but essentially this is a personal account of a shattering experience.
The dawning realisation of what was happening on the fateful morning came with the systematic loss of each function, each analytical reaction. Astonishingly, after an initial confusion, as more and more blood flowed into her brain, she fairly soon felt a growing sense of peace, enfolded in a blanket of tranquil euphoria … an expanding sense of grace. Without the traditional awareness of her physical boundaries, she felt fluid rather than solid, at one with the vastness of the universe.
In the absence of the left hemisphere’s analytical judgment, I was completely entranced by the feelings of tranquillity, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience.
Despite the fact that her brain was by now no longer capable of creating connections between things, she knew she needed to get help. Alone in her flat, it took her over 45 minutes of intense concentration to finally recall her work number and phone a colleague who knew her well enough to recognise the garbled noise spelled trouble. By the time Jill arrived in the hospital her ability to differentiate anything had faded and she no longer felt grounded in the external world.
In the absence of sight, sound, touch, smell, taste and fear, I felt my spirit surrender its attachment to this body and I was released from pain.
Realising that her keen scientific brain was no longer available to record, relate, detail and categorize information about the surrounding external three dimensional space she wanted to howl like a baby. She felt tremendous despair that she had survived. After a lifetime of being super-charged, that day she learned the meaning of simply being.
But somehow she managed to retain the memory of that first bitter-sweet day and has recorded brilliant insights into the complete inability to put information together and answer the most simple of questions, to make sense of sound or sight, space and form, boundaries between objects, smells, temperature, pain, the position of her own body … never mind what was inside her damaged mind.
She survived but recovery was painstaking. At first she had to concentrate on breaking every task down into manageable steps, every tiny effort taking so much time and energy. Her brain was on sensory overload and simply couldn’t process the barrage of information coming at her. It was exhausting. The left hemisphere had to be taught everything all over again, but here she had the inestimable support of her patient and intuitive mother who came to live with her and played a pivotal role in helping her begin to rehabiltate.
Sixteen days after the stroke happened, she was strong enough to have her cranium opened (craniotomy with a 9” scar) and the blood clot and tangle of blood vessels surgically removed. The effort needed to recover was agony; so much so that she had to make a conscious effort a million times a day to endure it and persist, to deliberately choose the chaos of recovery over the peaceful tranquillity of the divine bliss that she’d experienced. Huge amounts of healing sleep without sensory input were required, during which her brain painstakingly filed information.
It took eight challenging years to recover; eight years during which she watched her mind analysing and recording everything that was going on in her brain. And astonishingly she discovered that she could now choose which emotional programmes she was interested in retaining; choose who and how she wanted to be in this post-stroke world; consciously develop characteristics in her personality and reactions that she liked and wanted to promote – a loving and peaceful mind, and a kinder way of living. For her, even amidst the normal chaos of a busy life, deep inner peace is just a thought/feeling away.
Learning to value and utilize all our cognitive gifts opens our lives up to the masterpiece of life we truly are. Imagine the compasssionate world we could create if we set our minds to it.
For me this conclusion is a leap too far. Just because Jill, with her unique abilities and experiences, has come to this conclusion and belief for herself doesn’t mean it’s a conscious possibility for us all. But I’d love to be proved wrong!