You’ve heard me refer to brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor and her book My Stroke of Insight. She had a stroke many years ago and wrote about her insights during and after the experience and I find myself referring to her perspective about what role the brain plays in defining ourselves.
I recently stumbled upon her 2008 Ted talk and I’m still impressed by her continuing efforts to teach us about the brain through her experience as well as her emotional plea to “step to the right of the left hemisphere.” She explains the difference between the two hemispheres of the brain and describes what the damage to her left hemisphere did to her thoughts and what the right hemisphere made her feel.
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I love the reminder that we can choose peace and happiness in our lives. And I hope we can all find that balance between our brain’s linear chatter of the left hemisphere and the kinetic connection of the right.
[…] Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist who had a stroke and wrote about it in her book My Stroke of Insight. The hemorrhage was on the left side of her brain, which she identifies as the side that is filled with all the chatter; the very linear thinking side of the brain. She recounts that during her recovery, she was conflicted because she didn’t know that she wanted that back. She was living in her right brain, which was so ethereal, touchy feely, floaty and intuition-based. How could she retrain her left brain to co-exist with the good-feeling side? She talks about how we have the ability to choose how we respond to any situation. She says there’s a 90 second physiological affect that follows an emotion, such as anger. That’s the physical component of anger, where your pupils get big and adrenaline flows through your veins. But that reaction is gone in 90 seconds. If you’re still angry after that, it’s because you’ve chosen let that circuit continue to run. You’ve chosen to keep that in your head and circulate it every few seconds so that you can react to it. You can indeed choose to let the reaction go away, just as the physiological reaction did. […]
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