Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

Nirvana and the Right Side of the Brain
Kelly Howell: Welcome, once again, to Theater of the Mind. Your host is Kelly Howell. My guest today is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the author of "My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey". Dr. Taylor is a neuroanatomist affiliated with the Indiana University School of Medicine. She has recently appeared on Oprah's 'Soul Series', and her story has also been featured on the PBS program 'Understanding the Amazing Brain'. In February 2008, she was a featured speaker at the TED Conference. And she was recently named one of Time Magazine's '100 Most Influential People in the World'. Welcome, Dr. Taylor.
Jill Taylor: Thanks, Kelly. It's great to be here.
Kelly Howell: Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's such an honor.
Jill Taylor: Well I appreciate it.
Kelly Howell: You're busy. Everywhere I turn, there you are.
Jill Taylor: I know, that's how I feel too. Everywhere I turn, I'm somewhere else. It's very exciting.
Kelly Howell: Well where should we start? Should we start with before the stroke, and what got you into becoming a scientist?
Jill Taylor: Sure. I initially became fascinated with the brain when I was a little girl, because I had a brother who was very different from me, in the way he interacted with the world and in the way he chose to behave. So because he was only 18 months older than I was, everywhere I went, we were constant companions. And just because he was so different from me in the way he behaved, chose and obviously, experienced the world, I just became fascinated with the brain, and how is it that the two of us can have the exact same experience, but walk away with very different interpretations of what just happened.
So that was the origin of my interest in the brain. So I grew up to get a PhD in neuroanatomy, the anatomy of the brain.
Kelly Howell: You've been practicing for how many years?
Jill Taylor: Well I received my PhD in '92 or '93. And it was actually while I was in my PhD program that my brother was officially diagnosed with the brain disorder of schizophrenia. So a couple of years after I graduated, I taught and performed research at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry, where I was focusing on the postmortem investigation of the brain
Which cells communicate with which cells and with which chemicals, and then what quantities of those chemicals to result in either a brain that experiences a normal reality, or delusions and hallucinations as with schizophrenia.
Kelly Howell: Well it's extraordinary. It was three years later that you had the stroke?
Jill Taylor: Yeah. It was quite a profound experience for me as a brain scientist to one day be a Harvard brain scientist teaching and performing research, and then the next morning, wake up and realize that I was having a major neurological problem of my own. And I had a rare form of stroke: It's called an arterialvenous malformation. And it was a congenital disorder that I was born with, but it was really a bomb waiting to blow inside of my brain. And I was 37 years old at the time, and these things usually blow between the ages of 25 and 45.
Kelly Howell: Wow. Tell us what happened.
Jill Taylor: Well on the morning of the stroke, I woke up, and I had a pulsating pain behind my left eye. And it was that caustic pain like when you bite into ice cream. It just gripped me, and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to experience any kind of pain, so I thought I'll just start my normal routine, which was to exercise. And so, I jumped onto my fullbody exercise machine, and I'm riding this machine and looking at my hands, and my hands are looking like primitive claws. And I realized that my conscious perception had shifted away from being the person on the machine, having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.
And, you know, through the eyes of a brain scientist, I wondering what is going on. Is this like anything that I've ever experienced before? But it wasn't until a few minutes later, when my right arm went totally paralyzed that I realized I'm having a stroke. And my first reaction was, oh my gosh, I'm having a stroke. Then my next reaction was, wow, this is so cool.
This was through the eyes of a scientist. This was a phenomenal opportunity to watch my own brain deteriorate, to be able to know what that feels like, and to pay attention to that. So I was very fortunate that on the morning of the hemorrhage, I did not experience fear, but I experienced curiosity.
Kelly Howell: A scientist at heart, huh? [laughs]
Jill Taylor: A true scientist at heart with my own brain as my own experiment.
Kelly Howell: Tell us what did you experience? You realized that you were having a stroke, and then what happened?
Jill Taylor: Well I realized I was having a stroke, and then it was like, I know that the prognosis for stroke was you had to get help as soon as you could. And so, I fed a plan in my brain, and my plan was to call work. And the difficult thing of this was I had been a relatively normal human being, if you will. And my language centers would talk to me and tell me what my name is, what my credentials are, where I live, and how I would stay abreast of my life in the external world.
And then, that normal brain chatter had gone completely silent in my left hemisphere because that was where the hemorrhage happened. And as that happened, it shut down all of my relationship to the external world, and I did not know who I was.
I did not have any of my relationships in the external world, which made it very difficult to have any attachment to what was going on in the real world.
But as my mind shifted away from those details and that understanding, I felt this experience of incredible peace, this experience of euphoria and bliss. And for me, the absence of being attached to the details of my life was a tremendous relief.
And I wasn't busy anymore; I was free to just experience the present moment in all of its glory. So I refer to this experience of my right hemisphere as 'La La Land'. It was a beautiful experience of deep inner peace.
Kelly Howell: And were you conscious?
Jill Taylor: Oh yeah. I was totally conscious. It's interesting because the left hemisphere thinks in language, but the right hemisphere things in pictures, and both hemispheres are constantly working together to create your perception of reality. So right now, as you're looking into your world, both of your hemispheres are functioning simultaneously. And when my left hemisphere went offline, I lost the skills of the left hemisphere, but I didn't lose any of my consciousness. I was still a full human being, totally capable of thought. I just thought in images and pictures, as opposed to thinking in language.
I relate it to, if all of a sudden, let's say you're a U.S. person and you only speak English. And all of a sudden, we take you, and we plop you in the middle of China, where nobody speaks a word of English and they all speak Chinese. You are going to have a heightened sense of certain types of perception of your environment.
You are not unconscious. You simply cannot understand the language. And that was what it was like for me. All I did was lose language. I didn't lose my consciousness. I just gained a new level of perception.
Kelly: You said that you had a nirvana experience. So with this new level of perception you were feeling bliss and peace and expansion. Can you tell us more about that?
Jill: Well, when you stop and you think about how you perceive the world, you are capable of two very different forms of perception. So let's go to the top of a mountain somewhere. And let's say we are standing on top of this mountain and looking out over this enormous vista and for miles and miles there is all this beauty and this feeling of glory. Oh my gosh, we live in a beautiful place and I feel so small and tiny little piece of this enormity.
And I feel expansive and I feel open and I feel a celebration of my life and Oh how fortunate I am to be standing here on top of this mountain. And that's my right hemisphere experience.
And then the left hemisphere starts saying "Oh yeah, this is a beautiful mountain. What's it called? What's the name of this range I am in? Oh look at the different trees. What kind of trees are those? And where is that tree line anyway?"
"What kinds of clouds are those up there", and the analytical judging decisive or a categorical organizing mind of the left hemisphere comes in and starts picking out all those details.
And you can consciously choose, "No I am not going to focus on all those details right now. I am going to go back to the open expansiveness. Well that's the experience of the right hemisphere. That's what it is perceiving in its natural ability. And then the left hemisphere categorizes and organizes and details.
So in the absence of the details, you still have the full consciousness that you are a part of this vast and open beauty and there is this innate celebration of life. It's the experience of the present moment in all of its glory. It's a wonderful experience. And so I just describe that as an experience of euphoria or finding nirvana.
Kelly: Well you really had the experience, the exclusive experience of the right brain without the left brain.
Jill: Yeah, it was really, through the eyes of a scientist it was to me, I'm sure by far one of the most profound things that will ever happen to me in my life to be able to shut down that left hemisphere and to know what is the experience of that right hemisphere in its purity and then, as time went on, my left hemisphere became well again after brain surgery, two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage. For that two and a half weeks, I just sat in a totally silent mind. And so I didn't have all those details. And I didn't have any real relationships with the external world. It was this beautiful experience.
And I would sit on my couch with this goofy grin on my face and my mother would look at me and think "Child, how can you feel so much joy when you can't walk or talk or read or write or have any recollection of your life? Where are you? And what is going on with you?"
In my absence of my relationship to the external world, I felt no stress. And I just felt this incredible euphoria and celebration of I am alive. I am this incredible living entity capable of perceiving the world around me through these eyes and through these ears and I have these hands that can reach out and touch and move things around in the world.
And I thought it was profound. I was just really at awe of my own existence. At that point, I saw myself as perfect and whole and beautiful, and it didn't matter that I had no ability to communicate with the external world.
Kelly: How long were you like that for?
Jill: I was like that for two and a half weeks up until the surgery and then for about two and a half weeks after the surgery. It took awhile for the swelling in the brain to go down. Essentially the left hemisphere cells were traumatized by this hemorrhage and too much fluid. And one of the beautiful things that the body does when it experiences any kind of trauma is it sends the immune system to that area to clear up the debris and to create a protective barrier from infection from the external world. My immune system sent more fluid to my brain on top of the hemorrhage and it just really couldn't function at all for quite awhile.
But by the time, for about two weeks after the hemorrhage the brain chatter part of my brain started to come back on line and she didn't remember language, and she was essentially an infant where I had to relearn from scratch but at least she became capable of learning again.
Kelly: You had to rehab your left brain.
Jill: Yeah, yeah, the right hemisphere was fine but I had to regain the skills of the left hemisphere. I had to learn to read from scratch. I had to learn language from the beginning. My mother had to teach me vocabulary. She had to teach me that the cracks in the sidewalk were OK for me to step on but the cracks between the sidewalk and the grass there was a three dimensional difference there and I couldn't just step on that because I could hurt myself by twisting my ankle. So yeah, I had to learn the very basics again.
Kelly: But then did your memory come back after a certain point because you seem like you completely recovered from the stroke?
Jill: Yeah, I have completely recovered. Memory is an interesting thing. Before the stroke, I could not have told you what my birthday cake when I was 10 was and I can't tell you now. So it is difficult. If I don't remember that I don't remember it I can't tell you that I don't remember it because I don't remember if I remember it.
Kelly: Well, you remember what you learned as a neuroanatomist.
Jill: No.
Kelly: No?
Jill: I had to go back and relearn all that from scratch.
Kelly: Really.
Jill: Yeah. I remembered, I retained the right hemisphere. So I am a brain anatomist and a body anatomist, a gross anatomist. And, so I could draw you a picture of the abdomen but I could not label any of it. Because the right hemisphere retained the picture, the three dimensional but the left hemisphere places language on it so I had to go back and relearn all that terminology and reapply it to the images in my mind that I had retained.
Kelly: That's extraordinary.
Jill: It was fascinating because I could learn much quicker than somebody else because they had to learn the three dimensions and the image as well as the labeling. So I did find that I learned very quickly, but I required large amounts of sleep to balance any learning that was going on inside of my brain because the cells would just get overloaded and exhausted.
Kelly: And how long did this relearning process go on for?
Jill: It took me eight years before I was completely recovered. And at the eight year point, I decided that I was 100% cognitive. I could relearn my science. I was back to teaching neuroanatomy and gross anatomy at the medical school level. Emotionally, I was healthier than I ever was before the hemorrhage.
Spiritually I had this new connection with my right hemisphere which was the experience of being at one with all there is so there was no yearning for any kind of spiritual relationship because it was this new experience that was intimate with me now.
And physically my body was in great shape again and totally functional. So it took eight years for me to completely recover everything.
Kelly Howell: Have you had scans of your brain? Has anybody done any research on how your brain has developed since the stroke?
Jill: Yes, on the morning of the stroke, we had some CAT scans done which showed this enormous blood clot in the left hemisphere and then a little while after that I had some MRIs done to get a better look at what tissue is damaged. Because I was actually told that the hemorrhage was outside of the tissue and that my brain itself was fine. It was just the pressure that was the problem. Well, it turned out that was not the case, that I did actually have tissue damage and the cells in my brain that died were my ability to understand mathematics in the left hemisphere.
So people would say to me, "Jill, what is one + 1?" And I would go hunting in my brain and hunting in my brain and eventually, I would look at them and I would say "What's a 1?
Kelly: [laughter]
Jill: What's a 1?" And then they would describe for me what's a one is. Everything makes up a 1. If everything is 1, there's 1. Based on that, I couldn't imagine if everything is 1, how can you have another 1, because you can't separate the 1. The one is everything. I had this conceptual problem trying to understand anything remotely mathematical up until about year 4. Those cells, those were the cells that had died in my brain. And then the cells around that were traumatized.
When I had a brain scan in year five and we could actually see there was a regrowth of the white matter, those connecting part of the cells and that the brain cells themselves were recovering and reconnecting making new connections.
And it is just beautiful when you think about this incredible organ made up of all these cells and the cells themselves are the ones that are responsible for our ability to think any thought or experience any kind of feeling or have any physiological circuitry run in our body. I think it's quite profound.
Kelly: Yeah and I've read too, that the brain will recruit other parts of the brain and rewire and recircuit.
Jill: Right, right.
Kelly: in the whole healing process.
Jill: And that probably happened in my brain for mathematics and I am looking forward to being invited into someone's functional imager in order to perform some basic simple math to see which cells in my brain are active.
Kelly: I know I was thinking in reading your book I was thinking of Dr. Richard Davidson and wondering what he would see with your brain. He is at the Keg Lab and he did the scans of the monks meditating on compassion.
Jill: Right.
Kelly: And the right hemisphere, the frontal lobe would just light up.
Jill: Right. As well as the parietal. Andrea. Newburg also did that in Pennsylvania for both monks and nuns into a Spec machine in order to determine when does someone experience euphoria.
Kelly: And where in the brain.
Jill: They both showed it was quieting of that left hemisphere.
Kelly: How has your life changed since the stroke?
Jill: Really completely. I am no longer driven by the priorities and values of the left hemisphere so I am more relaxed and I'm calmer. I take more time to really connect with people, much more compassionate and a priority in my life is taking care of myself and giving myself the time that I need at a reasonable pace.
Kelly: Are you able with all the stress of traveling and doing all the publicity that you are doing now and speaking and teaching, are you able to retain that sense of joy and bliss that you felt?
Jill: Yeah, for me that never went away. It is interesting, it's like once a blind man has seen light and can see, even if he goes blind again you don't forget. And so for me I am so clear where that bliss and euphoria is and all I have to do is realize that I almost died that day and the world went around just fine without me on it. And so, the reality of the importance of me, I am the center of my own universe but at the same time, that's my ego that is saying that to me. And when the ego is not online and not playing a primary role, it's so easy for me to turn her off now.
And so, she's the part of me that gets stressed and caught up in all the what ifs and what ifs and all the rights and wrongs and the goods and the bads. I just don't really go there anymore. I just live my life. I celebrate that I am alive.
I'm having a great time doing the publicity. The book, the feedback I have been receiving is so heartwarming and so beautiful. It has just been a joyful experience for me.
Kelly: Well, you have been giving so much hope to other people that have had strokes, brain damage or head injuries of any kind.
Jill: Yeah, it is bringing tremendous hope to caregivers. Don't give up. There are strategies that actually work in helping somebody recover. Anybody with brain trauma are feeling like "Oh my gosh, look, she can recover from that, I can recover from this. What do I need to do?" In the book, there are 40 recommendations for recovery at the cellular level. I am a believer that trauma happens at the cellular level so if we can heal the cells at the cellular level then they can regain their health and part of their health is performing their function. So if we go to the cells and we heal the cells, then ultimately the function can come down the road.
But also, what I gained in learning about how to get my brain to do what it wants to do is a tremendous message for anybody. So even people who have had no trauma whatsoever are really recognizing "Oh my gosh, this experience of euphoria or nirvana is a thought away.
And I am programmed to have that. How can I find that inside of myself and capitalize on that so that I feel I am more peaceful and I am projecting more peace into the world?"
Kelly: Do you believe that anyone is capable of experiencing that?
Jill: I think it's a choice that we make moment by moment and I think that the more time we spend consciously recognizing when we are in our joy, when we are experiencing euphoria, when we are in the present moment is just circuitry. And the more tuned in that we come to our own brains and what it feels like to be hooked into that circuitry as opposed to our stressful circuitry which is all about the past and all about the projection of fear into the future.
And the left hemisphere is routinizing and going on these loops of cognition that are just drama and trauma, we have a choice to pay attention to that, to listen to that stuff or not.
And so I encourage people to observe but not engage with that circuitry. And when I start feeling anger inside of my body, recognize that anger is nothing but circuitry.
It's just a bunch of cells in my brain that have been triggered for some reason by a thought that I have thought triggering the emotional circuitry which then triggers the physiological response and I don't have to run that circuit.
If I recognize that it's just circuitry then I become much more in control of what's actually going on inside of my brain and body, and I can pick and choose more easily how I want to be.
Kelly: How do you suggest that other people do that though? I've meditated for a long time, many years, and it's easy for me to watch, observe myself, almost where I can step back and go "oh, you know, I'm upset right now." And I can choose at that moment whether I want to be upset or just move away from it. And you had your stroke.
Jill: Right.
Kelly: And you had the full right brain experience. How do you teach that to other people?
Jill: Well, I think that the first thing is willingness. First thing, they really have to be willing to let go of the drama and the trauma. And, one way of doing that is by paying attention to when you're already happy. Pay attention to what it feels like and what your circumstances are around you. Go to that mountain top, even if it's in your own mind. Go to the mountain top and remember what it feels like to look out on this enormous gorgeous vista. Or go to the beach and look out at the big huge expanse of the horizon and allow yourself to feel the feelings that you get when you allow yourself to shift your consciousness into that bigger picture.
And, we all have these experiences. And, we all have certain things that we love. Well, why do you love it? You have to ask yourself "what is it about this that I find really attractive?" And also pay attention to what it feels like when you're hooked in to your details. Some people are great with numbers and their mind is just routinizing, routinizing, routinizing.
Well, pay attention to what's going on in your forehead. You know, if you have that furrow in your brow. Is your jaw clenched? Are your shoulders raised? Are you breathing deeply or shallow? Pay attention to the thoughts that you're thinking and how they trigger a response in your body.
And, then once you become more and more familiar with those patterns it becomes much easier for you to choose "no", I feel that anger circuitry being triggered and I don't like the way that feels in my body, so I'm going to stop thinking the thoughts about you that make me mad and you can come into my face and you can harp at me and try to make mad. But, you know, you don't have that power.
I am the only one who has the power to think the thoughts that are going to trigger my circuitry. And, just because you're pushing it on me, doesn't mean I have to make it mine.
So it's really a very freeing experience to be able to pay attention to your thoughts, pay attention to how those thoughts make you feel emotionally inside of your body. Are you feeling angry? Are you feeling sadness? Are you feeling joy? And, then watching. What is it? What's going on physiologically inside of my body?
And, I think one of the most profound things I learned was that from the time I think a thought and that thought triggers an emotional circuitry and then that emotional circuitry triggers some kind of physiological response in my body, like I feel angry and my anger circuit runs and then I'm going to have this noradrenalin rush through my blood from my brain.
It takes less than 90 seconds from the time I thought the thought to trigger that circuitry, to have that noradrenalin flush through my body and flush completely out of me.
So, in and of itself, that emotion, that physiological response to that emotion takes less than 90 seconds. If I stay angry for longer than that 90 seconds, it's because I have either consciously or unconsciously chosen to rethink the thoughts that restimulate that emotion, which restimulate that physiological circuitry.
I have some say in whether or not I'm going to rerun that loop. I think we all do.
Kelly: People get into habits though and then also there's the aspect of when you're in an environment with a lot of people. As you know we are all one. We have connections energetically. It's difficult. I find people get caught in loops.
Jill: Yeah. Part of the beauty of the brain is that we have these incredible cells, the mirror cells that are designed for me to mirror empathy with what you're feeling. So, if you're angry and you come in and you're angry, well, it'd be really great if I wasn't angry with you, or against you, but that I could just hold a neutral place. But you're energetic; comes in, you have this anger hostility, you're raised up, your voice is raised up, your shoulders are raised up, you're breathing really shallow, you've got this look on your face, and I'm responding to that with my own hostility. It's like "yeah, let's duke it out here". [laughter]
But that's a choice. And my other choice is to just say "whoa, man, you are running some painful circuitry". And I can just hold my space and I can validate for you "man, I'm so sorry that you're feeling the way you're feeling" but I don't have to absorb your hostility or your anger or your fear. I don't have to do that.
And if I'm paying attention to what is rising inside of myself and my own circuitry, again it's just circuitry, it's just cells having some kind of physiological reactivity, and I have some say in whether or not I'm going to prolong that.
You know, you can... going back to the environment, if I'm in an environment that's hostile and angry and ugly, well, first of all I'm inclined to leave. And I do have that power as an adult on the planet to make some choices about the environment that I put myself in. But let's say that I'm at the airport. I'm at the airport and all of a sudden the airline gets cancelled.
And, so different people handle that very differently but inevitably there's usually some of us who get really angry and really, really childlike and we [inaudible 31:43] into total fear, and we're loud and we're mean and we're ugly and we're, you know, we're just causing a scene.
Well, we have a choice as to whether or not, how we respond to that person. And we can judge them negatively with our left hemisphere and say "oh man, that guy's a baby, you know, he needs to chill out" or we can just sit back and say "you know, I'm just going to send you a bunch of love because you're obviously in a lot of pain".
I have a choice. I have a choice in how I choose to respond to the information coming in in my environment.
Kelly: It's true, it's true. We all have that choice. Sometimes it seems that the circuitry just does its own thing. [laughter] People do feel that it just takes over once those neurochemicals and hormones flush into your system, it's hard to shift, isn't it?
Jill: Well, for 90 seconds. You know, for years people have been saying "you know, you feel yourself getting mad, turn around, walk away, count to 10". Well, that's essentially saying wait for 90 seconds. Wait for the physiology to flood out of you. Because the decisions you make during the time that the circuitry is stimulated can be the difference between life and death. You know, when you look at people who are in jail, most of the people who are in jail are beautiful, normal human beings.
But something happened in the course of their lives and during a three minute period, studies have shown this, within a three minute period, they made a bad decision. So, for three minutes of their lives, they're going to be spending the rest of their lives in jail, because during that period of time they did not respond appropriately when that circuitry got triggered.
But we do have choices. We have choices on a regular basis of when we get mad. You've probably done it yourself, you know, in this moment I could get mad and I could start pounding on the table. Well, the more I start pounding on the table, the more I am mixing my circuitry saying when I get angry, I can have a kinestatic, satisfying experience of pounding on the table.
Well, once I start hooking that circuitry, once I start linking that circuit together then all of a sudden I start pounding on the walls and then all of a sudden I am pounding on a person.
So it's circuitry and the more we are willing to look at ourselves and circuitry and recognize that we have say in what circuitry gets linked and what circuitry gets activated and what circuitry gets prolonged, as soon as we start recognizing that then we start observing it more as opposed to engaging with it.
Kelly Howell: And I think the key is feeling because when you pay attention you drop into your body and feel what anger feels like. It's not fun. It feels awful.
Jill: It's painful.
Kelly: It's very painful.
Jill: It's very painful.
Kelly: And that's the moment that we can make that choice.
Jill: That's absolutely right.
Kelly: Do you believe that this is more difficult or easy for people that are left or right brain dominant and do you believe in that dominance theory anyway?
Jill: Well, I think that we both have, we all have two hemispheres. And generally, we have migrated more towards either the big picture or the small picture. I think that there are a lot of people on the planet who have very balanced brains. I think that our culture in the U.S. because of the big right hemisphere, are you a right hemisphere child or are you a left hemisphere child? Well, if you are a right hemisphere child then we are going to nurture your right hemisphere skills so that you can blossom. And I think that was exactly opposite of what we should have done. I think what we should have done is Oh, you have natural right hemisphere tendencies so you already going to be good at those things naturally.
Let's stick you in a left hemisphere environment so that we can train both hemispheres.
And the same thing for the very left hemisphered children who are going to be really good with details, really good with numbers, really good with organization etc. Those were the children who needed to spend more time in art and music classes because they needed to be able to get out of the details and have the balanced brain.
So I am really an advocate for a balanced brain model where we capitalize on the unique skills of each of the hemispheres.
Kelly: I have always been more right brain. I don't know if I like that theory. [laughter] I don't think I would have had very much fun in school if I couldn't have my art classes or if I had to do more math than I really wanted to. [laughter]
Jill: The left hemispheres feel the exact same way. Oh it's painful.
Kelly: To do art.
Jill: I really think because I was more right hemisphered growing up. And it wasn't until I became an anatomy enthusiast that I became academic, and then I just fell in love with anatomy and wanted to learn all the details about that. So I then became left hemisphere dominant. But when I lost the left hemisphere then I still had this healthy right hemisphere to fall back on. And I do believe that contributed greatly to my ability to recover the left hemisphere because I had a strong right hemisphere already to work with.
Kelly: Now could you go over a little bit more about the difference between the two hemispheres and what they are responsible for? You mentioned big picture, little picture.
Jill: The right hemisphere thinks in pictures. It is the big scope. Information streams in through all your sensory systems about this present moment. So this present moment is rich and diverse and everything is connected and I feel at one with all that is because everything outside of me is energy and I am an energy being and as a result of that I feel compassion for those around me because I am sharing atoms and molecules with all that is.
And it's an experience of the present moment with no judgment; just this celebration and I have this experience of euphoria and joy.
And the left hemisphere then is going to take this big enormous picture and start taking apart the details and the details and the details about those details.
And they are going to analyze it and categorize it and organize it and reassociate it with everything in the past I've ever learned and project into the future all my possibilities and it's this cognitive mind that is anywhere other than right here, right now.
So the two hemispheres are two very different machines inside of our brains that are working together. Some 300 million fibers are interconnecting the cells in each of the hemispheres. And so I have the perception of the world that I have a single brain, but really I have two very different brains that do things, very differently.
Kelly: Jill, how can people find out about your lectures, seminars?
Jill: The best way to learn anything about me is through my website which is drjilltaylor.com. Because right now, the book is on the bestseller list which is very exciting. It's so exciting to me.
Kelly: Congratulations. It's so exciting.
Jill: Yes, thank you. I am just thrilled. I am getting over 100 emails a day from people and it's beautiful. In the morning, every morning, I get on my treadmill and I read these emails and I just cry. They are just so beautiful. This book is being so meaningful to so many different people for so many different reasons. It has just been wonderful.
Kelly: It's not just for people who had a stroke.
Jill: No.
Kelly: It's really not.
Jill: It's for anybody who has a brain.
Kelly: Yeah, yeah,
Jill: Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah.
Jill: And they want a better relationship with it and want to figure out how to get it to do what they want it to do. And for many of us, that is to find more peace. And for many of us, it's how to get it to be more functional. It's a very diverse audience.
Kelly: Well, it's a beautiful book and thank you so much for all the work you are doing. You are helping many, many, many people.
Jill: No, it's just been an excellent experience. I just feel blessed. I just feel blessed to have survived and then to be able to recover and to be able to document this and to share it. And it's been great that people are really finding it of value.
Kelly: Well, we are and we are blessed that you wrote the book and you had your experience.
Jill: Thank you so much.
Kelly: Thank you so much for coming on the show, Jill.
Jill: It's great. It's great.
Kelly: OK.
Jill: I appreciate that you have a show where people actually want to learn about their minds.
Kelly: Oh my. I can't believe how many people we have listening to this show.
Jill: Excellent.
Kelly: Yeah. OK well maybe we will talk again.
Jill: Excellent. I appreciate it Kelly.
Kelly: Alright. Take care.
Jill: OK, bye bye. [music]
Kelly: That was Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and her website again is drjilltaylor.com. Hey everybody, thanks for listening and until next time, be well.