Review of My Stroke of Insight
Jill Bolte Taylor's Journey into the Right Brain
On December 10, 1996, brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor woke up with a sharp pain behind her left eye. She had a stroke that caused severe hemorrhaging in her brain. Her left brain, which processed language, thought and memory centers, was becoming dysfunctional while her consciousness shifted to the right brain.
She began to lose her sense of identity; the boundaries between self and the world dissolved. However, a sense of being at one with the universe grew. Taylor's personal and compelling account of her journey reveals the existence of a mystical center in the right brain which, on its own, is euphoric but static. Her decision to reclaim the power of thought in the left brain not only restored her life, but allowed her to understand that both the left brain and right brain need to be balanced for coherent functionality and wholeness. Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (Viking, 2006) is a worthy read.
Right Brain
Taylor's experience of right brain dominance was similar to the mystics' experience of God. She described it as an "engulfing bliss"(p.61) she had to fight off desperately in order to maintain sufficient consciousness to dial for help. This sense of bliss was addictive; she felt like a "great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria"(p.67).
She stopped thinking in language and processed what was going on in pictures. Past and future had no meaning to her; all she could perceive was "right here, right now"(p.69). She lost her sense of three dimensionality. She saw herself as fluid; there were no boundaries, no shape to things; everything she looked at was resolved into pixels. She could not speak, communicate or act. Without the judgment of her left brain, she saw herself as perfect and whole. The desire to stay within this static euphoria was very strong.
Left Brain
Taylor was also cognizant of the reality of her situation: without restoring her left brain, she would "live out the rest of [her] days completely disabled "(p.72). Euphoric, but disabled. After surgeons removed her brain clot, Taylor, with her mother's help, embarked on a program to restore the left brain.
Using children's puzzles, games and books, she eventually learned to recognize alphabets, sounds and words. Within 4 years, she re-learned addition and subtraction. Within 5 years, she re-learned division. By the eighth year, she had recovered most of the intellectual and cognitive functions of her left brain. The journey was difficult because her left brain had the tendency to judge and negate her success. She had to override these judgments consciously in order to pursue the slow but steady restoration of the brain.
Power of Thought and the Balanced Brain
Taylor's journey had made her wise. Her book is filled with marvelous insights into the power of thought and its role in creating a balanced brain. Taylor compares the brain to a garden that needs constant tending. Aware that the old judgmental self can return, she is diligent in pruning negative, angry, jealous circuits and nurturing the circuits of empathy, compassion and love. By doing so, she engages the left brain to access the right, taking a more "balanced-brain" approach to how we lead our lives"(p.133).
Jill Bolte Taylor's book is indeed a stroke of insight for all readers who wish to understand the brain anatomy and circuitry behind compassion and joy. Realizing that experience is the product of the brain's cells and circuitry, readers can make the choice to free themselves from the negative critic in the left brain; they can also choose to nurture the circuitry that helps them tap into the sense of euphoria and oneness of the right brain.
Jill Taylor Bolte
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