After suffering a massive stroke, Jill Bolte Taylor turned the negative event into a positive stroke recovery story. Now she shares her wisdom.

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. 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. 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. Well, Taylor’s stroke experience suggests a different way of looking at mindfulness. If a sense of peace, wholeness, and calm simply comes from the right side of the brain, then mindfulness is actually within you all along. This stays true whether you’ve ever meditated or not, whether you’ve ever deliberately undertaken mindfulness exercises or not.In the beginning, I had no concept of that. I didn’t have that capacity, just like an infant child. My mother’s only hope for me was that I would be able to one day live independently again. I had no skills. I had no language in my mind telling me I was Jill. Without knowing who you are, you have no data about your life beyond the present moment experience of being hungry or being tired or being in awe. So it was a process of regaining a worldview that existed beyond what I could see and smell and taste.

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. 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. I think losing our mind is one of the most terrifying concepts for anybody. And the irony of a brain scientist at Harvard who loses her mind and lives to tell the tale — I think it’s just a great story of the human spirit. Your TED Talk is one of the most watched of all time. Why do you think your story has resonated with so many people?But in the abstract, this whole two-sides stuff is hard to take seriously. And why does it even matter that our brains have two different sides?

I don’t think anybody had any clue about how much I would be able to recover or not. My stroke was severe. Cells died in my brain that were instrumental for language and mathematics. So I don’t think anybody knew. Some people in that condition would not have recovered at all. Taylor writes about how she felt uncomfortable during her first hospital stay. She had to deal with policies and practices that were not conducive to healing, which made the experience unpleasant for her. Taylor argues that there should be a more patient-centered approach in hospitals. 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.

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Desmond O'Neill, M.D. writes in the New England Journal of Medicine, that although the account is gripping and insightful, that it is "burdened by an interpretation of stroke through the narrow lens of hemispheric function." He also argues that the advice Taylor gives to stroke patients might not be valuable for all stroke patients. [2] Later, the author joined a six-year Ph.D. program in the Department of Life Science at Indiana State University. In 1991, she received her Ph.D. and a couple of years later spent time at Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Neuroscience. Oh my God, no. I’m so grateful it happened. It took away all my stress circuitry. Who doesn’t want that? My left-brain emotional system went offline, and with that went all my negative judgment. It took away all my emotional baggage from the first 30 years of my life. And it set me on a new path of possibilities. The job I had before was fantastic, and I was prospering and winning awards and having a great time. But when that was all gone, I felt this incredible sense of relief because I was no longer juggling a billion details. Probably the biggest difference between who I am today and who I used to be is that I trust the details are going to fall in place as they’re supposed to fall in place with just a little direction from me. I don’t have to go out and try to control the world, which I can’t do anyway. 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. Jill Bolte Taylor was a healthy 37-year-old neuroanatomist at Harvard when, one morning in 1996, she suffered a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. In four hours she lost her ability to walk, talk, read, write, and remember parts of her past.