Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor was 37 when a blood vessel exploded in her brain. Through the eyes of a curious Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, she watched her mind completely deteriorate whereby she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life.
Having lost the categorizing, organizing, describing, judging and critically analyzing skills of her left brain, along with its language centers and thus ego center, Jill’s consciousness shifted away from normal reality. In the absence of her left brain’s neural circuitry, her consciousness shifted into present moment thinking whereby she experienced herself “at one with the universe”.
“I realized that the blessing I had received from this experience was the knowledge that deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time...My stroke of insight would be: Peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind”.The video of her lecture at the TED conference is challenging and thought-provoking, and well worth watching right through to gain wonderful insight to human existence as we experience it via our brain. From the New York Times article:
As a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor has always known more about brains than most people. But when a brain hemorrhage triggered her own stroke, she suddenly had a front-row seat on the deterioration of the brain.
