I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been
diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia.
And 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 delusion? 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 Benes in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry.
And 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 microcircuitry of
the brain, which cells are communicating with which cells, with
which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those
chemicals. So 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. Yes.
Oh. Thank you. Sure.
Oh.
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.
And 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 hemisphere think
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. It has been.
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.
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,
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 got to
remember to pick up bananas on your way home.
I need them in the morning.” It’s that calculating intelligence that
knows, 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.
And this is the 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. And it just gripped me, and then it
released me,
and then it just gripped me, and then it released me.
And 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 cardioglider, which is a full body full exercise
machine.
And I’m jamming away on this thing, and I’m realizing that my
hands look like primitive claws grasping
onto the bar.
And I thought, “That’s very peculiar.” And I looked down at my body and I thought,
“Whoa, I’m a weird looking thing.”
And 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.
And it 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
realize 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 into my area of perception, so 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 got to
contract, and you muscles, you relax.” And then I lost my balance, and I’m
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.
Energy. And I’m asking myself, “What is wrong with me?
What is going on?” And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left
hemisphere brain chatter, went totally silent.
Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button.
Total silence. And 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. And 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.
And then all of a sudden, my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me,
“Hey, we got a problem. We got a problem.
We got to get some help.” And I’m going- … “Ah, 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 affectionately refer to this space
as La La 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. And 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.
And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years
of emotional baggage. Oh.
I felt euphoria.
Euphoria. It was beautiful there.
And then again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, “Hey, you’ve got to
pay attention. We’ve got to get help.” And I’m thinking, “I’ve got to get help.
I’ve got to focus.” So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress, and I’m
walking around my apartment and I’m thinking, “I got to get to work.
I got to get to work. Can I drive? Can I drive?” And in
that moment, my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side.
Then I realized, “Oh my gosh, I’m 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?”
And then it crosses my mind, “But I’m a very busy woman.”
“I don’t have 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.
So I go into my business room and 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. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of
the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn’t
tell. And 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-I do not understand numbers.
I do not understand a telephone, but it’s the only plan I have.
So I take the phone pad and I put it right here.
I take the business card, 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 phone pad. But then I would drift back out into la la land
and not remember when I come back 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
phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me,
“Woof woof woof woof.”
And I think to myself, “Oh, my gosh, he sounds like a golden
retriever.”
And so I say to him, clear in my mind, I say to him, “This is Jill.
I need help.” And what comes out of my voice is, “Woof woof woof
woof.” And I think, “Oh, my gosh, I sound like a golden retriever.”
So I
didn’t know that I couldn’t speak or understand language until I tried.
So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help.
And 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.
And just like a balloon with the last
bit of air, just
right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and
I felt my spirit surrender.
And
in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my
life,
and 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, and 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.
And 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.
And if I have found nirvana and I’m still alive, then
everyone who is alive can find nirvana.”
And 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. And 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.
And 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 mama, 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, at 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.
And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
