My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

On the morning of December 10, 1996, Jill Taylor woke up with a piercing pain in her head which accelerated rapidly, diminishing her physical and cognitive abilities. It was some time before Jill realized what was happening to her - she was in the process of experiencing a stroke. Her reaction:

“Wow, this is so cool!”

An atypical reaction, but then Dr. Jill Taylor happened to be a neuroanatomist who was on the staff of the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry. She had spent most of her adult life trying to understand the intricate functioning of the miracle that is the human brain. She also served as a member of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), and advocated the value of brain donation to assist in research that would benefit the psychiatrically distressed.

What happened to Jill following her stroke was as awe-inspiring as it was awful. ‘My Stroke of Insight’ chronicles that experience.

The book is well-written, and Dr. Taylor writes with the awareness that most of her readers have neither her academic background, nor a very accurate idea of the workings of the human brain. She explains with simplicity and clarity, in language that both moves and inspires.

Jill’s stroke occurred in the left hemisphere of the brain – the area that predicates logic, language, memory, ingrained responses, likes and dislikes, awareness of time as divisible chunks – in short, the area that is “the home of your ego center.”

This left her at the mercy of her right hemisphere that is the seat of intuition, imagination, and awareness that the time is always now.

“The present moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one. As a result, our right mind perceives each of us as equal members of the human family. It identifies our similarities and recognizes our relationship with this marvelous planet, which sustains our life. It perceives the big picture, how everything is related, and how we all join together to make up the whole. Our ability to be empathic, to walk in the shoes of another and feel their feelings is a product of our right frontal cortex.”

Dr. Taylor lost the ability to walk, talk, read, write or recall any aspect of her life. It took eight years for her to completely recover all her physical and mental abilities. But what she gained in the process is immeasurable.

This book highlights both the fragility of the human body that is dependent upon a mind which can disintegrate with devastating suddenness, and, the invincible power that sustains us from within and without – orchestrating life, or its termination.