Jill Bolte Taylor - My Stroke of Insight

Heart to Heart, Brain to Brain

Every brain has a story and this is mine. Ten years ago, I was at Harvard Medical School performing research and teaching young professionals about the human brain. But on December 10, 1996, I was given a lesson of my own. That morning, I experienced a rare form of stroke in the left hemisphere of my brain. A major hemorrhage, due to an undiagnosed congenital malformation of the blood vessels in my head, erupted unexpectedly. Within four brief hours, through the eyes of a curious brain anatomist (neuroanatomist), I watched my mind completely deteriorate in its ability to process information. By the end of that morning, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. Curled up into a little fetal ball, I felt my spirit surrender to my death, and it certainly never dawned on me that I would ever be capable of sharing my story with anyone.

My Stroke Of Insight: A Brain Scientists Personal Journey is a chronological documentation of the journey I took into the formless abyss of a silent mind, where the essence of my being became enfolded in a deep inner peace. This book is a weaving of my academic training with personal experience and insight. As far as I am aware, this is the first documented account of a neuroanatomist who has completely recovered from a severe brain hemorrhage. I am thrilled that these words will finally go out into the world where they might do the most good.

More than anything, I am grateful to be alive and celebrative of the time I have here. Initially, I was motivated to endure the agony of recovery thanks to the many beautiful people who reached out with unconditional love. Over the years, I have remained obedient to this project because of the young woman who contacted me out of desperation to understand why her mother, who died from stroke, had not dialed 9-1-1. And because of the elderly gentleman, who was laden with worry that his wife had suffered enormously while in a coma before her death. I have remained tethered to my computer (with my faithful dog Nia on my lap) for the many caregivers who have called in search of direction and hope. I have persisted with this work for the 700,000 people in our society (and their families) who will experience stroke this year. If just one person reads The Morning of the Stroke, recognizes the symptoms of stroke and calls for help-sooner rather than later, then my efforts over the last decade will be more than rewarded.

My Stroke of Insight falls into four natural divisions. The first portion, Jills Pre-Stroke Life, introduces you to who I was before my brain went offline. I describe why I grew up to be a brain scientist, a little of my academic journey, my advocacy interests, and my personal quest. I was living large. I was a brain scientist at Harvard, serving on the national board of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) and traveling the country as the Singin Scientist . I follow this very brief personal synopsis with a little simple science, which is designed to help you understand what was going on in my brain biologically on the morning of the stroke.

If you ever wondered what it might feel like to have a stroke, then The Morning of the Stroke chapters are for you. Here, I take you on a very unusual journey into the step-by-step deterioration of my cognitive abilities, as viewed through the eyes of a scientist. As the hemorrhage in my brain grew larger and larger, I relate the cognitive deficits I was experiencing to the underlying biology. As a neuroanatomist, I must say that I learned as much about my brain and how it functions during that stroke, as I had in all my years of academia. By the end of that morning, my consciousness shifted into a perception that I was at one with the universe. Since that time, I have come to understand how it is that we are capable of having a mystical or metaphysical experience-relative to our brain anatomy.