My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey » (Reprint)

Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D., is a neuron-anatomist affiliated with the Indiana University School of Medicine. She is the national spokesperson at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (Brain Bank), and one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World, 2008.

A brain scientist's journey from a debilitating stroke to full recovery becomes an inspiring exploration of human consciousness and its possibilities On the morning of December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist, experienced a massive stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left side of her brain. A neuroanatomist by profession, she observed her own mind completely deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, all within the space of four brief hours. As the damaged left side of her brain the rational, grounded, detail- and time-oriented side swung in and out of function, Taylor alternated between two distinct and opposite realties: the euphoric nirvana of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace; and the logical, sequential left brain, which recognized Jill was having a stroke, and enabled her to seek h...

Publishers Weekly

In 1996, 37-year-old neuroanatomist Taylor experienced a massive stroke that erased her abilities to walk, talk, do mathematics, read, or remember details. Her remarkable story details her slow recovery of those abilities (and the cultivation of new ones) and recounts exactly what happened with her brain. Read proficiently by the author, this is a fascinating memoir of the brain's remarkable resiliency and of one woman's determination to regain her faculties and recount her experience for the benefit of others. Taylor repeatedly describes her "stroke of insight"-a tremendous gratitude for, and connection with, the cells of her body and of every living thing-and says that although she is fully recovered, she is not the same driven, type-A scientist that she was before the stroke. Her holistic approach to healing will be valuable to stroke survivors and their caregivers, who can pick up suggestions from Taylor's moving accounts of how her mother faithfully loved her back to life. A Viking hardcover.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1 Jill's Pre-Stroke Life 5

2 Simple Science 12

3 Hemispheric Asymmetries 27

4 Morning of the Stroke 37

5 Orchestrating My Rescue 47

6 My Return to the Still 56

7 Bare to the Bone 64

8 Neurological Intensive Care 74

9 Day Two: The Morning After 81

10 Day Three: G.G. Comes to Town 86

11 Healing and Preparing for Surgery 93

12 Stereotactic Craniotomy 108

13 What I Needed the Most 110

14 Milestones for Recovery 122

15 My Stroke of Insight 131

16 My Right and Left Minds 137

17 Own Your Power 146

18 Cells and Multidimensional Circuitry 149

19 Finding Your Deep Inner Peace 159

20 Tending the Garden 175

Recommendations for Recovery

Appendix A Ten Assessment Questions 179

Appendix B Forty Things I Needed Most 181

The Harvard Brain Bank 184