Jill Bolte Taylor had a massive stroke several years ago. Since she's a brain scientist by profession, she had the unique opportunity to observe the progress and the effects of the stroke as it was happening, and to learn a lot about what was happening to her. The talk that she gave about her experience at the TED conference in February (which received a standing ovation) is much more than a detached theoretical scientific dissertation. It's a moving and powerful presentation of the personal insights she gained from her attack. That she can refer to her experience as a "gift" is amazing, considering the fact that she became paralyzed and lost her ability to speak, which took eight years to recover from. She also lost her "sense of self", her "I am", and her description of what it was like to have her self repeatedly disconnecting from and re-connecting to her body seems to have many similarities to what mystics describe when they attain an "enlightened" state of mind.
A video of her talk is available at Jill Bolte Taylor: My Stroke of Insight, and a transcript is available there also.
© 2007 by Bernard Schneider. All rights reserved.
