Recently TED.com featured an 18 minute clip about a brain researcher who had suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. One morning Jill Bolte Taylor, PH.D, a brain scientist at Harvard, found herself in the midst of having a stroke. Being the curious neuroanatomist that she is, she proceeded to keep track of what was going on during the 4 hour deterioration of her left brain, which rendered her unable to walk, talk, read, write, or recall her old life.
In her book , "My Stoke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey," Dr. Jill takes us through the process of her left brain injury, the discovery of what it was like to live almost entirely through her right brain, and the 8 years after the stroke that it took her to completely recover. With a golf ball sized clot rendering the full function of her left hemisphere non-existent, Dr. Jill recreates for us what it was like to exist and function from the perspective of her right hemisphere where time doesn't exist. This is the center for bliss and joy, the ability to think outside the box, intuition, empathy. Another fascinating aspect, this is where we live without the ego: no individuality or feelings of separateness.
Interview
BH: Since you were able to experience first hand, living in your right brain, is it a lot easier for you to get back there now?
Dr. Jill: Oh yes, you know, it's not that I'm separate from it. It's kind of like the story of how the blue sky is always there and so I see the blue sky as the right hemisphere. It's always there, it's always doing what it does, it's a constant entity. The left hemisphere is the clouds and the clouds represent brain chatter. The clouds come in, and the thoughts come in, and they block the view of being able to see the blue sky even though the blue sky is always there.
The brain chatter comes on line and then it's organizing and categorizing and dramatizing all of our lives in the external world. But you can quiet that when you get rid of the clouds, when you allow the mind to focus away from those thoughts, then you unveil what's always been there – which is the existence of the right hemisphere and that peacefulness and that awareness that everything is one and everything is connected. That experience of euphoria, if you're willing to let go of the left hemisphere clouds.
BH: And the more you practice at that, the better you get.
Dr. Jill: Well you know, I'm coming from the other direction. So for me, when I had the hemorrhage and I lost the left hemisphere, I lost all the clouds. I was open to this incredible experience, and then for me to actually be functional in the external world, I had to consciously choose to bring the clouds back so that I could function like a normal human being.
My primary place is the state of being in the blue skies, and the clouds I can then just blow away. It's a tool; I'm so clear that my brain chatter is a tiny group of cells that perform a magnificent function and I have a say in whether or not that circuitry runs. So all I have to do is make the decision that in this moment, I'm not going to think those thoughts. I'm not going to run that particular circuitry, and I'm going to focus my mind on the bigger picture and think about other things and block those clouds from being there.
BH: It seems a lot of people don't have the understanding that they are in control of their emotions, or the brain chatter, or what goes on in their brain. Do you think if people had a little bit more knowledge about the workings of their brain that it would be easier to understand we are in control?
Dr. Jill: You know, no society that I'm aware of, at least certainly not in our society, have we been brought up having any real relationship with our brain. We get disciplined on our behavior, which is our output and we create relationships with other people, which is our socialization, but we are not trained as children that we have some say over what's going on inside of ourselves.
We haven't had the biological knowledge, the scientific support for it as well, which leaves us very vulnerable to what's going on outside of ourselves because we are not trained to develop ourselves internally.
I think that education will be key, which is one reason I am so excited about having had that TED.com video go out into the world and do what it's doing, because people are talking about the brain. And they're talking about their brains and they're talking about their possibilities and they're acknowledging, "Oh, I'm not just a right hemisphere or a left hemisphere," as we have kind of packaged ourselves through various types of temperament typing. No, we have two brains, we have two personalities, we have two ways of being in the world. We have two options which leave us always capable of choosing something, which empowers us. Personally I think it's a fabulous thing.
I'm not saying anything that hasn't been supported by science up until this point. The whole right hemisphere, left hemisphere possibilities, this has been an argument for over 200 years. All I'm doing is feeding fuel to a fire that has been going on for hundreds of years and it's very exciting because now people are ready to hear it. People are ready to hear, "I'm not just this, I'm not just that." We're tired of the incredible bipolarity of science saying the spiritualists are nuts, and the spiritualists are tired of the closed-mindedness of the scientists. We've got this incredible chasm going on. How about a little corpus collosum love! Let's get both hemispheres functioning and communicating in all of us so that we are open-minded and we are open-hearted because we're actually utilizing both hemispheres.
