Unit 1, Listening 1, My Stroke of Insight

 


My Stroke of Insight

David Inge, Host: Good morning. Welcome to the second hour of Focus 580. This is our morning talk program; my name’s David Inge. . . . In this hour of Focus 580, we’ll be talking with Jill Bolte Taylor; she is a neuroanatomist. She’s affiliated with[1] the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. And back in 1996, she was teaching and doing research at the Harvard Medical School when she had a stroke, a very serious and severe stroke. On that day, as she writes in her book My Stroke of Insight, on that day, she woke up with a sharp pain behind one eye. She tried to get on with her usual morning activities, but clearly she knew something was very wrong. She wasn’t sure what. Uh, instead of finding answers or information, she writes she “met with a growing sense of peace.” She writes that she felt “enfolded by a blanket of tranquil euphoria[2].”

We should talk a little bit more about the, the structure of the brain, and, and I think that probably people have an idea in, in their head of what the brain looks like. And that I think the thing that people think about as being the brain is in fact the cortex, the cerebral—

Jill Bolte Taylor: Right.

Inge:      —cortex, which is that part of the brain that sets us apart from a lot of other living things and in fact maybe sets us apart in degree from other mammals[3] as well. Uh, and maybe also people are used to the idea that it has two halves, right and left, and that the two halves are different. So, talk a little bit about that, the structure of the brain at that level, and the two halves, the right and the left, and what makes them different.

Taylor:  Well, they process[4] information in, in different kinds of ways, um, but of course they’re always both working all at the same time. So as you look out into the world right now, whatever your perception is, you, you have choices. You can look first at the big picture of the room and not really focus in on any of the details. And the right hemisphere looks at things for the big picture. It blends the, softens the boundaries between things so that you take in the bigger picture of the room. Is this a really lovely room? Is this a great room? Um, and you just have the overall perception. If you’re at the beach, um, you look out over the, the, um, horizon and you look out over the water, and, and you, you allow yourself to feel expansive[5], and that’s the bigger picture of everything. The left hemisphere, then, is going to—and it’s all in the present moment. The right hemisphere is all about right here, right now.

And then the left hemisphere is going to take that big picture and it’s going to start picking out the details. So if you’re at the beach, now it’s going to start looking at the kinds of clouds, and it’s going to label them, and it’s going to look at the whitecaps and label them, and it’s going to look at the kinds of grains in the sand and label them. And everything now starts working into language and the details that we can then communicate with, so it’s looking—and, and, and in order to do that, it’s going to compare things to things that we’ve learned in the past, and it’s going to project images[6] into the future.

The right hemisphere thinks the big picture in pictures. The left hemisphere thinks the details using language, so the two hemispheres work together constantly for us to have a normal perspective.

And, and on the morning of my hemorrhage[7], I lost the left hemisphere, which lost my language, it lost my ability to associate or relate anything to the external world or to communicate either creating language or understanding other people’s language. But what I gained was this experience of the present moment and the expansiveness, so, so they’re, they’re very different ways of perceiving the world. And most of us, you know, I think we can identify that there are these two very different parts of ourselves and that we use them together. I just had the opportunity to lose the detail of the left hemisphere so that I could really just experience the right hemisphere untethered[8] to the left hemisphere.

Inge:      Our guest in this hour of Focus 580, Jill Bolte Taylor; she’s a neuroanatomist. And of course, questions are welcome. Line 1. Hello.

Caller:   Hello.

Inge:      Yes.

Caller:   I find this fascinating. I’m, I’m an experimental psychologist, retired. And, um, there’s an old, uh, out of the behavioristic tradition, you know, they believed that consciousness was intrinsically[9] tied to language. And it sounds like that that’s out the window now because you evidently didn’t lose consciousness and, uh, because you—but you did lose your language. But what I’m interested in, did you lose the concept of future and past? It sounds like you were living entirely in the present. Is that true or not?

Inge:      All right.

Taylor:  Thank you. Yeah. No, that’s a great question. I did lose my perception of past and future when I had that hemorrhage in the left hemisphere, and I lost all of the consciousness of the language center. I lost the portion of my brain that said, “I am an individual. I am Jill Bolte Taylor. These are all the data connected to me.” These are all the memories associated with who I had been and when that person went offline, which is the best way for me to explain it, I lost all of her likes and dislikes, and I didn’t—but I was still completely conscious. And in the process of recovery, I essentially had to say that woman died that day, and I was now an infant in a woman’s body. And this new consciousness was going to regain the function of the left hemisphere, but I was not going to regain being whom I had been before.

So, um, uh, I love your perspective on it. At the, at the same time I, I see it as, as, just as far as language is concerned, picture yourself as a, a purely English-speaking person and then you wake up one day and you’re in the heart of China where nobody speaks any English whatsoever, so you’re no longer dependent on the language. You’re dependent on having a heightening[10] of your other experiences, the inflection of voice and facial expression, and, and you’re, you’re really in the present moment, then, in order to gain information about what, where, where you’re at and what you have to do. So we do function; there’s a whole part of us that is non-language, and once that language goes off, I was still a whole human being, even though I didn’t have my language center and the rest of my left hemisphere was, was swimming in a pool of blood. I still had the experience that I was perfect and whole and beautiful just the way that I was even though I only had part of my, my mind functioning.


[1] be affiliated with: phrase to be closely connected to

[2] euphoria: noun a strong feeling of happiness

[3] mammal: noun any animal that gives birth to live babies, not eggs, and feeds its young on milk

[4] process: verb to understand and respond to sensory information

[5] expansiveness: noun a great size or amount of space

[6] project images: phrase to send images

[7] hemorrhage: noun a severe loss of blood

[8] untethered: adjective not tied or connected to

[9] intrinsically: adverb being part of the basic or true nature of something

[10] heightening: noun an increase

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