book review: my stroke of insight

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, is a remarkable book. One day Jill Bolte Taylor, a Ph.D. research scientist in brain anatomy at Harvard, woke up with a terrible headache. Over the next 4 hours, she watched her mind lose its many of its abilities. She had an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) in the left hemisphere of her brain, and when a blood vessel blew out, the spreading leak of blood gradually shut down her abilities to create and understand speech, to move and sense the world, and to perceive physical boundaries, time, and space.

What was left was her right brain.

Somehow she managed to orchestrate her own rescue.

Taylor takes the reader through her experience with the skill of an anatomist teaching college freshmen and the zest of a natural storyteller. Taylor was profoundly changed by her experience, and her description of what it is like to perceive "in one's right mind" is worth the price of the book alone.

I learned that mental chatter (aka "monkey mind") is completely a left brain function. A sense of boundaries, of being solid and separate, also comes from the left brain, as do our perceptions of time and space. What remained, in Taylor's experience, without this left brain operating was deep inner peace, a feeling of bliss, silence, open-ended moments following one another, a sense of being enormous and expansive, and at the same time, of being composed of liquid cells.

I'll have what she's having.

Taylor no longer experienced herself as the personality she knew, and not surprisingly, in eight years of recovery, she repeatedly made conscious choices to leave behind emotional patterns from her pre-stroke personality that she didn't like, such as hostility and unhappiness. She learned that emotions are physical, that joy and peace are feelings in the body, that the chemicals of emotions surge through us and are flushed out of our systems in 90 second or less, and that she could choose to prolong a feeling's presence in her body or let it go after that.

In her "right mind," she processed information as images of the present moment, rather than in words. Later she learned to use her left brain's language abilities to talk to her brain as a whole and tell it what she wanted and didn't want.

It's like a scientist is telling us what the mystics and meditators have been saying all along. She's telling us that these experiences are accessible to all, if only we can allow our right brains to experience existence without so many left brain intrusions. (And in fact, she cites research on nuns and monks that says that's what happens in deep prayer and meditation.)

Taylor believes our brain hemispheres have two different characters, and that our inner conflicts are usually splits between our left and right brains. With very little guidance, she says, people can distinguish these characters in those they are close to and even in themselves.

She does not slam the left brain, however. It allows each of us to communicate in the external world, organizes information, multitasks, thinks sequentially, identifies patterns, processes information quickly, sees sharp boundaries between objects, and tunes into higher frequencies. It is a master storyteller, filling in the blanks where there are gaps. It can imagine alternative scenarios.

Taylor firmly believes that the more time we spend running our inner peace and compassion circuits, the more of those we will project into the world and the more peace and compassion we will have on the planet.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in the brain and anyone interested in experiencing more joy and peace in their lives and in the world, and who doesn't want that?

(click title to purchase on lulu.com)