O'Neill, Desmond (2008). "My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey". New England Journal of Medicine. 359 (25): 2736. doi: 10.1056/NEJMbkrev0805088. Most of us enjoy the luxury of a well-integrated brain. But, like Taylor, we must realize that our brains are actually complex entities, trying to fulfill a variety of hugely disparate goals. Evolution made the human brain this way, cobbling together lower and higher functions over time, and it shows. Lesson 3: You can opt out of many negative emotions and choose to feel mostly the positive ones instead. Taylor had a full and active life as a Harvard Medical School researcher. But she suffered from a stroke that left her with severe brain damage, which disrupted many of her memories and other important capacities. However, Taylor was able to overcome all the deficits by working hard with the help of her mother over 10 years later.

Oh yeah. I mean, after the stroke, I didn’t look normal. I had weakness on one side of my body, and it was clear I had no understanding going on in my face. And I was slow — I was emotionally slow, I was cognitively slow, and I was physically slow. And people are impatient. If you’re trying to do some grocery shopping and you’re slow, that can really irritate a lot of people. It made me even more compassionate than I had been pre-stroke.

Health care providers should be more patient-centered in their care. In convalescing, as in everyday life, it’s important to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Negative self-talk can be damaging for everyone, especially people recovering from a brain injury. Sleep is crucial to recovery from a stroke because it has incredible healing properties. I was also so grateful that I was still alive. I made a conscious effort to stay out of my way emotionally or say, Well, I’m less than what I was. Another thing that was very helpful was that I was given years to recover. When I left the hospital after the stroke, my neurologist said to me, “We won’t know anything for a couple of years.” Because she gave me years, I felt free to sleep and take my time and not make negative judgments about myself. Your TED Talk is one of the most watched of all time. Why do you think your story has resonated with so many people? Taylor first noticed a headache upon waking, but soon found herself descending into an increasingly bizarre psychological state. She became a spectator of her own body which, unsurprisingly, led to trouble in moving around and performing ordinary activities.

Among the lessons Bolte Taylor has for medical professionals and caregivers: Don't accept timetables for recovery, have hope in the brain's plasticity and ability to be repaired, and appreciate the value of sleep in the healing process. By the eighth year, I felt I had completely recovered, so I wrote the book. It was an enormous task for me to undertake, and at the same time it was incredible for my brain to challenge itself in that way. It wasn’t easy, but it was important and necessary. I self-published the book, and then about a year later I did the TED Talk, and then I sold the book to Penguin. That was life exploding.

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Describing the immediate aftermath of your stroke, you’ve called yourself “an infant in a woman’s body.” At that point, what did you think the rest of your life would look like?

Yet Bolte Taylor not only recovered completely—a process that took eight years—but regards her stroke as a positive event that left her with a sense of peace, a less-driven personality, and new insight into the meaning of life.You know, I ask myself that all the time. I had this curiosity. When I reach an obstacle, or something I don’t know, there’s something in my spirit that turns toward it because I’m curious and I want to understand. As long as I’m not tired or irritable, I tend to challenge myself. I wanted to know about the world again. I think part of that was because I had already been a competent human being — and so I knew the rewards of being a competent human being. I had known what it means to have connections with people and healthy relationships. I knew the end goal. I knew where I was going, and that helped me put one step in front of the other. After suffering a massive stroke, Jill Bolte Taylor turned the negative event into a positive stroke recovery story. Now she shares her wisdom. Taylor believes that her spiritual experience was biologically determined. She likens it to the Buddhist concept of nirvana, which means a state free from suffering. Her left brain was damaged and quieted her inner voice, which is a stream of constant commentary. This freed up her right brain to experience bliss. One of Bolte Taylor's goals with the book, she says, was to reach doctors-to-be while they were still in school, to "influence the way they perceive the ability of the brain to recover." Some neurologists tell stroke patients most recovery occurs within the first six months post-stroke, leaving little hope for further improvement—advice with which Bolte Taylor strongly disagrees. Rather than debilitating her, the left-sided stroke and resulting brain damage revealed to Taylor the power of the unharmed right side of her brain. As it turns out, it can be an immense source of psychological poise and serenity.