Monday, March 2, 2009

Hemmorhaging Nirvana



Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the Singin' Scientist
Robert C. Koehler

"I am trillions of cells sharing a common mind--I am life!"

“Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke! And in the next instant, the thought flashed through my mind, this is so cool!”

You want a guided tour of the human brain? My guess is that you probably can’t do better than “My Stroke of Insight,” Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Taylor’s extraordinary account of the cranial hemorrhage that shut down her left brain when she was 37 years old.

But the book’s value — its preciousness — lies less in the plain-language, enthusiastic science it offers us, than in the door it courageously opens to the mystery of the brain’s right hemisphere and beyond...to the pulsing miracle of life and the vast universe that is our home.



One morning in late 1996, Taylor, a research scientist who worked at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (a.k.a., the Brain Bank), awoke with a sharp pain behind her left eye, and soon enough — as her speech and motor functions failed her, as she melted into what she called a euphoric stupor and lost all sense of where “Dr. Jill” ended and the rest of the universe began — she realized this was no ordinary headache.

It was, she later learned, a blown AVM: the rupture of a congenitally deformed vein-artery connection deep inside her brain. She was in the first stage of a potentially killer stroke — and she was alone in her apartment and had lost the capacity to think or act rationally or even communicate with the outside world.

Part of the joy of this book is that nothing unfolds the way you’d expect. Taylor’s story at its darkest courses with gratitude and humor and, most of all, amazement, as she recounts what happened to her with Ph.D.-level clarity and awareness of detail combined with childlike exuberance.

The sudden loss of her left-brain organizational and self-defining capabilities was not, for instance, terrifying. Life-threatening though her predicament was, Taylor saw her stroke as a gift of unparalleled awareness: the shattering of the self-created box we live in that we call “life.” More>>

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