Jill Bolte Taylor remembers the morning 10 years ago vividly. Blood vessels in her brain exploded unexpectedly, and hours later, she curled up into a fetal position and said goodbye to life.
"I was shocked when I awoke later," says Taylor today. She now teaches neuroanatomy on the Indiana University Bloomington campus. "I couldn't talk. I couldn't understand language. I lost all recollection of my life and lost all perception of my physical presence. By anyone's standard, I was completely disabled.”
Taylor's new self-published book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey describes in lay terms the anatomy underlying her experience of stroke and her commitment to rebuild the left side of her brain, all from the perspective of an insatiably curious scientist who considers her stroke a blessing.
"How many brain scientists are able to study the brain from the inside out?" Taylor says. "It was in many ways a delightful experience. It shifted me out of my left hemisphere, which thinks in language and focuses on the past and future, to the consciousness of my right hemisphere, which thinks in pictures and exists in the present moment."
Many neurologists say the brain has only a short window -- just six months -- during which it can recover following a stroke. Taylor disagrees. She believes the brain is an amazing, resilient organ, much of which still remains a mystery to science.
"I watched my brain grow, change, and recover for eight years before I thought I was fully recovered," she says.
When her left hemisphere went off-line, the right hemisphere became dominant, and Taylor says she became a different person. Shifting away from a “Type-A” personality focused on academics and achievement, she has become more compassionate and humane, reaching out towards those in our society who need help, particularly the mentally ill, the homeless, and those in jail.
Dubbed the "Singin' Scientist," Taylor travels the country "singing for brains" as the national spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, which collects human brain tissue for brain research. She says her stroke also has made her a better singer. Before the stroke she couldn't sing in tune, she says, but now the voice she hears when she sings matches the voice everyone else hears. Taylor's creativity has blossomed into new artistic talents as well; recently, she created “Neurological Processing,” a yin-yang artwork, for IU Bloomington's annual ArtsWeek.
During her process of recovery, Taylor paid close attention to the pieces of her mind that began to come alive again, and when negative experiences wanted to resurface, she was able to convince her brain that she was not interested in reengaging with that neurocircuitry.
"I think we have a lot more say about what's going on inside our brains than we were ever taught," she says. "You can teach yourself to consciously choose to activate new thought patterns by coming back to the present moment."
Taylor has resumed her pre-stroke activities. She is active in the National Alliance on Mental Illness, teaches medical science classes at IU, and is a consulting scientist at the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute in Bloomington.
For more about Jill Taylor and her new book, visit www.drjilltaylor.com.
