With the left hemisphere of her brain ravaged by a hemorrhage, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor made a surprising discovery. The brain bleed had not only deprived her of language, it had also wiped away memory of past trauma.
What Dr. Taylor learned about brain cells after a stroke has implications for identity, spirituality, and insight. Find out why you’re a better lie detector without your left hemisphere, and why shouting at a stroke survivor is not the best strategy.
Plus – the “Singing Brain Banker”.
Phil Stieg: Hello, I’d like to welcome Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroscientist and author of The New York Times best-selling book, “My Stroke of Insight”, a memoir of her stroke in 1996 and her eight-year path to recovery.
Jill received her PhD from Indiana University and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School when a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain caused her to lose the ability to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life.
Now fully recovered, she has focused her career on how we can activate the power of our neuroplasticity to not only recover from neurological trauma, but also choose to live a more flexible, resilient, and satisfying life. Her newest book, “Whole Brain Living – the Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters that Drive our Life” focuses on self-actualization.
Jill, welcome, and thanks for being here today.
Jill Bolte Taylor: Thank you. It’s so wonderful to be with you.
Phil Stieg: Before we get into talking about your stroke, perhaps Jill, you could talk about what originally drew you to the field of neuroscience?
Jill Bolte Taylor: I have a brother who’s diagnosed with the brain disorder schizophrenia, and he was only 18 months older than I was, so he was my constant companion as a child, and he’s older than I was, so he was actually my introduction to the world and how to process the world. And by five or six years old, I’m really aware that he and I are interpreting the experience of even our mother’s emotional expression as very different.
So that’s why I became interested in the brain, was I just wanted to know, what’s normal? Why is my brother so different from me? And I wanted to help people like my brother. So I wanted to study at a neuroanatomical cellular level. What is schizophrenia? What is schizoaffective? Bipolar disorder, panic, anxiety? What’s going on? What is different about these brains at a cellular level than a normal brain would be?
Phil Stieg: One of the things that struck me in the beginning of your book was how you were observing the effects of your stroke in your brain in real-time and had the capacity to appreciate that. Can you explain it?
Jill Bolte Taylor: I’m not a neurologist, so I’m not exposed to a lot of living people who have strokes. So I didn’t know automatically, and it wasn’t until my right arm went paralyzed by my side, that that was a warning sign of a stroke. And then my brain said, oh, my gosh, I’m having a stroke. And then from that moment on, it was fascination and how am I going to save myself?
So as I was on the morning of the stroke, having these experiences of shutdown, I was actually anatomically mapping in my own mind, oh, my gosh, this is this circuit. This is this circuit. This is this circuit. I was fascinated by what was going on. I think anybody who studies the brain would have had the same automatic response.
Phil Stieg: But tell me, there must have been an emotional component to that as well. Given where your bleed was, you must have lost verbal speech – had to be frightening.
Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, I didn’t know. That’s one of the interesting things about language, is it’s so complex that I was still having conversations inside. I had my own internal dialogue going on, and I did not know that I could not speak out loud until I tried. And by then, I had already progressed in the deterioration process. And also, when you look at where my hemorrhage happened, it actually blocked part of the limbic system in that left hemisphere, so I was actually really filled with curiosity instead of fear.
Phil Stieg: Did this then affect your understanding of the brain? Has it changed since the stroke?
Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh, yeah. (Laugh) I think in terms of cells and circuits, and every ability we have is because we have cells that perform that function. And if those cells go offline, then those abilities go offline. So, it has completely shifted the way I look at the brain.
Phil Stieg: What’s your message to people who have a minor injury, or more severe, about the concept of neuroplasticity and what they can do to facilitate the recovery of your brain cells?
Jill Bolte Taylor: So for me, the most important thing is to realize that the brain is a collection of cells. And those cells are little living creatures that eat, they consume food, what they need, and they create waste.
If I have a disability, it’s because I have cells that have become disabled. And so what do those cells need in order to recover? And for me, the absolute number one thing we need to pay attention to is sleep. Because sleep is two things. First, it’s when the microglial cells wake up and they clean out the waste of all these cells. We’re talking billions of cells.
Phil Stieg: They’re the garbage trucks of the brain.
Jill Bolte Taylor: They’re the garbage cleanup, right! And they come out and they really are active during sleep. So sleep is number one, really protecting someone’s sleep is important. Second of all, what are you feeding your cells? What are you giving them? And what kind of stimulation — over-stimulation are we giving ourselves?
If I’m experiencing brain trauma and I’m having information processing problems like audio information processing, then there’s a break in the circuit. And if there’s a break in the circuit, then no matter how much auditory stimulation I bombard with, it’s not going to make sense. I need to be able to calm my system of external excessive stimulation so I can focus very clearly on what can I do and what is the ultimate goal of what I’m trying to achieve.
Whether that’s to understand when someone else speaks to me and if their voice is blending into the background and I can’t hear them then let’s calm down the background excess noise so that I do have that ability to focus very specifically on how is that person enunciating, what is the shape of their face. Try to allow me to really focus on stimulation.
Phil Stieg: I thought that was the important part, when you’re talking about your recovery, when people would come into the room and just start talking louder because they thought if they did that, you might hear them.
Jill Bolte Taylor: Exactly.
Phil Stieg: It’s both about the ambiance and also your ability to process the words.
Jill Bolte Taylor: Exactly! And what is the message that my doctor is communicating to me or my nurses or my environment, if I can’t understand anything that you say? And now you’re yelling at me. You’re telling me, first of all, you don’t get me. I’m already feeling really isolated, alone, and I can now become fearful of you because I really am isolated and alone. And now you’re yelling at me, and I still don’t get it.
Phil Stieg: I was also struck by your focus on the support structures. I thought it completely unusual about your mother, whom you referred to as Gigi, was able to commit her entire life to being with you and provide not only the verbal, auditory, visual stimuli, but also to create the warm environment for your recovery. Describe that for us.
Jill Bolte Taylor: You know, I was very blessed. My mother was 72 at the time, so she had a long career of being a college mathematics professor. She had a PhD in history and philosophy of science, and she was fascinated with language. When I experienced the stroke and I had no language, I think not only did it break my mother’s heart, she really recognized that I was now an infant again. And it was her job to help me get out of my own way emotionally, be supplied with an environment that supported my brain’s ability to recover itself, because she believed that the brain had the ability to self-heal. She wanted to set me up for success. And then at the same time, she was really fascinated with my brain and language,
I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I had no recollection even of my mother, what a mother was, much less who my mother was. And we had to rebuild the circuitry, circuit by circuit. It was in her mind, her goal, to really set my brain up for success.
She came in as a very loving, supportive, warm human being who was now going to protect me. She fed me. She let me sleep until I was done sleeping. She would provide me with stimulation while I was awake. We had no TV, no radio, no external noise. She was very focused on what I could do, what I could not do. And what were the steps that her infant child now needed to go through again in order to regain those functions. And because of the environment that she provided, I recovered 100%.
Phil Stieg: You describe the importance of social connections during your recovery. People that weren’t negative, they were supportive. Describe how important that is.
Jill Bolte Taylor: It was absolutely everything. Please take responsibility for the energy you bring to me. I’m the one who has experienced the trauma. This is not about you. And I think one of the biggest mistakes we make as a society is we bombard these people who have had brain trauma with all this negative input, negative energy. Imagine what you’re dumping on to me. I’m over here trying to figure out how do I communicate with a world of people who don’t know how to find me?
I’m in here, okay, so you can come in with all your fear and all your negative emotion and you can just really build that wall between us, or you can come in and you can very quietly explore me. This is about me. Find me of interest. Find me with your fascination and your curiosity. Figure out how to communicate with me and connect with me. It’s not about fixing me when I’m in trauma – it’s about connecting with me.
Phil Stieg: Now that you are, as you say, 100 percent recovered, how would you describe the person you are now? How are you different than you were before the stroke?
Jill Bolte Taylor: I was very right-brained dominant before the stroke. I was very creative, very artistic, very musical. I play the guitar. I write songs. I mean, I was very in the present experience. So when I lost my left hemisphere, I still had a whole lot of healthy right hemisphere to fall back on. And I didn’t judge myself negatively because “now I’m flawed. Now I’m damaged. Now I’m less than what I was. It’s like, no, I’m still a viable creature, even if I have no language. So it did really shift my perception of how I view people who have disabilities, because it’s not about what they have lost, but it’s about what they have gained because of the trauma that they have experienced.
Phil Stieg: Isn’t that the difference between a brain injury and somebody has a heart attack, or they break a bone? Their perception of the disease process or the injury process is completely different than it is in the brain. Like you use the word, I’m not damaged. Well, you’re not, because you do have other components of your brain that still function.
Jill Bolte Taylor: Right! And I think it’s really important for anybody who’s had any brain trauma in the absence of the cells that are now traumatized, what have you gained? And one of the interesting things that I have learned about from having this experience is when the left hemisphere that is listening to language focused on language goes offline, the right hemisphere opens up in its ability to well, what is the body language saying?
What is the intonation and inflection of voice saying? What is the big picture versus what are the actual words that are being said? And I always encourage people who have extreme left-brain trauma to fine-tune their ability to be a lie detector. I mean, it becomes pretty easy to tell when people are not telling the truth, when the whole picture isn’t working.
(Interstitial Theme Music)
Narrator: Early in her career as a neuroanatomist, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor had the task of encouraging families to donate the brains of their soon to be deceased mentally ill loved ones to the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center – otherwise known as the Harvard Brain Bank.
The ability to study the brain tissues of recently deceased mental patients is crucial to understanding the biological basis for such psychiatric disorders as schizophrenia, major depression, substance abuse, or bipolar disorder. Harvard has been collecting brain donations since 1978, documenting 45 different brain disorders.
Having grown up with a schizophrenic older brother, Jill was uniquely empathetic to the emotional plight of the families she would contact for donations. She soon developed a unique and somewhat lighthearted approach…
Jill Bolte Taylor: People need to know that I’m not the monster coming in to take their brain. And so, I wrote what I call the brain bank jingle. And I would travel around as the singing scientist and I would educate people about the brain, about mental illnesses as a physical disorder and that only families with mental illness can donate the tissue for research into mental illness. So yeah, that was my stick back pre-stroke.
(Singing)
Oh, I am a brain banker
Yes, banking brains is what I do
Oh, I am a brain banker
Asking for a deposit from you
Don’t worry, I’m in no hurry
Have you considered
The contribution you can make
When you are heaven bound
Your brain can hang around
To help humanity
Find the key to unlock this thing we call insanity
Just dial 1-800-brain bank
For information, please
Educate then donate – It’s free!
Phil Stieg: So, my sense in reading the book is that you much prefer the person you are now. Like you said earlier, your limbic system, which wasn’t damaged, hasn’t changed, but it has become more expressive.
Jill Bolte Taylor: Actually, it has changed. And I think that this is one of the most important points that people in general don’t understand. You do, of course, because you’re a neuro guy. But we have two limbic systems. We have a right hemisphere limbic system and a left hemisphere limbic system. And those two systems, even though they have the same anatomical structures, they’re different in the way they process information. So, if the right limbic system is right here, right now, it’s about how do I experience the present moment? Am I excited? Am I engaged? Am I curious? Am I alone? Am I with others?
What does it feel like, actually to feel the air or when I dive into water, the pressure of the water against my body? The experience of the present moment, the left hemisphere limbic system is about me, the individual. It’s all the pain from the past. If you wipe out that left hemisphere limbic system people essentially lose their trauma from the past. So, these two limbic systems are separate from one another even though they are interconnected.
So yes, what I did gain was an untethered experience of the present moment in my right hemisphere. But the left hemisphere was all the emotional trauma from the linearity of my life. So, all of my emotional trauma was swimming in a pool of blood. It was offline. And trust me, it was delightful because I had experienced, as we all have, a lifetime of trauma.
Phil Stieg: Before the stroke, were you a spiritual, religious person? Because then you said post stroke, you became more spiritual, and there was a connection between your brain and, quote, spirituality.
Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, I look at spirituality as the collective whole. When we pray, we often will set up a prayer in the language centers of the left hemisphere. It calms different parts of our being, and we open up a different part of our brain that allows us then the ability to have the experience that we would describe as spiritual. And when we create a mantra and we again occupy the language centers of the left hemisphere, then when that’s calm or that’s contained, what other parts of our brain in the right hemisphere allow us to shift out of the me, my I’m an individual into the consciousness of the bigger picture, collective whole.
Call that God, call that Allah, call that whatever you’re comfortable with. So in answer to the question, was I religious before? I was not particularly religious before. My father was an Episcopalian minister, so of course I rebelled against that. But I was a scientist. I was a curious type. I look at the bigger picture, but I didn’t have a religious dogma.
Phil Stieg: You spent a little bit of time talking about being freed from some of the negative things that occurred in your life, pre-stroke and being able to offload that post stroke. Tell us what that felt like, and was it a process, or did it just happen because of the stroke?
Jill Bolte Taylor: My identity as Jill Bolte Taylor was in my left hemisphere. And on the morning of the stroke, when the positioning of where the hemorrhage was happening, it actually bled into the limbic emotional tissue of me, the individual. And when it did that, it just set those cells offline, and that was all my pain from the past. So, what it really did was it shifted me out of the ability for me to have a past or for me to have a future.
And it shifted me then into just the experience of the present moment. And in the present moment, having the experience of perceiving myself to be connected to all the energy around me, that is a completely different perception and perspective of me in relationship to life.
So I had this major shifting away from me, the individual, a past and a future into I am not an individual, I am a part of the collective whole. There are no boundaries for where I begin and end, and the only thing I’m capable of processing is the present moment.
Phil Stieg: It’s a little bit related to your discussions about the difference between right and left, the left logical, linear, the right more universal and creative. Do you think it was because the damage on your left just for a period of time over accentuated your right side and over time now you’ve recreated that new balance?
Jill Bolte Taylor: We live in a society that really values the value structure of the left hemisphere. We are skewed to “me, the individual.” But as a society, because we are skewed to the values of the left. When I lost that left hemisphere, I shifted into just untethered right hemisphere experience. And it was an explosive experience for the eyes of a scientist to say, wow, everything that I had known, all of that at a cellular structural circuitry level, was now offline, giving me an untethered experience of the present moment and what is actually going on in that right hemisphere. I don’t bring any new science to the conversation of the right hemisphere, left hemisphere. I just had this wild experience of, through the eyes of a neuroscientist and neuroanatomist wiping out that left hemisphere and being able to have the experience of an untethered right brain.
Phil Stieg: I think one of the things you focus on that’s extremely important is understanding and accepting the present moment.
Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, first of all, the present moment has a completely different value structure. What I value in the present is the present. I care about the experiential. I care about what’s going on in the bigger picture of here and now. As I’m not perceiving myself as that individual, now, I care about the bigger picture collective whole. So how do I, the bigger picture part of me, use me, the individual, to contribute, make a positive contribution to the bigger picture of humanity?
Well, that sounds very lofty, but we all are wired this way. The reason why we can have an experience where we care about community, and humanity and our relationship to the planet is because we’re wired for that. It’s in there in the right hemisphere for all of us.
But then the left hemisphere, me, the individual, comes in and says, yeah, but it’s about me and mine and I want to climb the ladder and I want more and I want more for me. I want a bigger house; I want more money in my bank account. I want this, that or the other. For me, pre-stroke to post-stroke, it really has balanced me. But I come into the world now through the value structure of how do I use me, the individual. Of that beautiful left hemisphere and that skill set, how can I use that to help the collective whole?
Phil Stieg: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, thank you so much for spending this time with us. I think that your candor about the events that occurred and the mission that you have carried on since your stroke are admirable, and I am certain that this will be helpful to all of our listeners.
Jill Bolte Taylor: Perfect. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Additional Resources
Dr. Taylor Bio