My Stroke of Insight

Product Information

Later, the author joined a six-year Ph.D. program in the Department of Life Science at Indiana State University. In 1991, she received her Ph.D. and a couple of years later spent time at Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Neuroscience. At the most elementary level of information processing, stimulation is energy, and my brain needed to be protected, and isolated from obnoxious sensory stimulation, which it perceived as noise.” I think losing our mind is one of the most terrifying concepts for anybody. And the irony of a brain scientist at Harvard who loses her mind and lives to tell the tale — I think it’s just a great story of the human spirit. Desmond O'Neill, M.D. writes in the New England Journal of Medicine, that although the account is gripping and insightful, that it is "burdened by an interpretation of stroke through the narrow lens of hemispheric function." He also argues that the advice Taylor gives to stroke patients might not be valuable for all stroke patients. [2] In My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (Penguin Group, 2008), Bolte Taylor, 49, shares lessons learned from a stroke patient's perspective, including tips for doctors, nurses, caregivers, and other stroke survivors. Perhaps most surprisingly, she recalls feeling an intense sensation of inner harmony and deep connection during the stroke that has remained with her. She believes this state of awareness is available to all people if they know how to look for it.

Want to learn the ideas in My Stroke Of Insight better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of My Stroke Of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor here. Oh my God, no. I’m so grateful it happened. It took away all my stress circuitry. Who doesn’t want that? My left-brain emotional system went offline, and with that went all my negative judgment. It took away all my emotional baggage from the first 30 years of my life. And it set me on a new path of possibilities. The job I had before was fantastic, and I was prospering and winning awards and having a great time. But when that was all gone, I felt this incredible sense of relief because I was no longer juggling a billion details. Probably the biggest difference between who I am today and who I used to be is that I trust the details are going to fall in place as they’re supposed to fall in place with just a little direction from me. I don’t have to go out and try to control the world, which I can’t do anyway.Taylor’s experience with a one-sided brain injury drives the point home. With her left brain mostly out of function by the stroke, Taylor discovered that she felt calm and totally in touch with the world. Because her right side was in charge, she was now neither scared about the present, nor fearful for the future.

I need to remember, however, that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know. I learned that I need to be very wary of my storyteller's potential for stirring up drama and trauma.”I was teaching anatomy, physiology, and neuroscience, and I had to sit down and relearn the material. I would spend the two days before a lecture mastering that terminology again. It was an enormous workout, but it was a fantastic exercise in pushing my brain to its highest capacity. It was what my brain needed to push it to that level of function, with a ton of sleep in between. Jill Bolte Taylor was a healthy 37-year-old neuroanatomist at Harvard when, one morning in 1996, she suffered a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. In four hours she lost her ability to walk, talk, read, write, and remember parts of her past. Taylor first noticed a headache upon waking, but soon found herself descending into an increasingly bizarre psychological state. She became a spectator of her own body which, unsurprisingly, led to trouble in moving around and performing ordinary activities.