My Stroke of Insight

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To experience peace does not mean that your life is always blissful. It means that you are capable of tapping into a blissful state of mind amidst the normal chaos of a hectic life.” For me, it's really easy to be kind to others when I remember that none of us came into this world with a manual about how to get it all right. We are ultimately a product of our biology and environment. Consequently, I choose to be compassionate with others when I consider how much painful emotional baggage we are biologically programmed to carry around. I recognize that mistakes will be made, but this does not mean that I need to either victimize myself or take your actions and mistakes personally. Your stuff is your stuff, and my stuff is my stuff.” Even when she was still recovering from her stroke, Taylor felt a strong desire to share her experience. Anyone can achieve the right-brain tranquility that she experienced after her recovery. Her recovery wasn’t easy, but it was worth it in the end. She’s eager to tell others how they can recover as well. Key Takeaways At the time, I had been serving on the board of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. That’s a brain-related network, so after my stroke, word spread that I was recovering and I started getting invitations to keynote about the brain and the ability of the brain to recover. At that point, doctors were still telling stroke patients that if they didn’t recover in three to six months, then forget it. It made me angry. If you’re told by your doctor, “Don’t even bother to try,” then nobody’s going to recover. My brain was still recovering six, seven, eight years after the stroke. Before the stroke, I had been an advocate for the mentally ill, and then after the stroke, I became an advocate for the ability of the brain to recover. https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/keizer_w09.html Keizer, Bert, "Step to the Right", Threepenny Review, Winter 2009.

My Stroke Of Insight straddles the line between science and self-help. Between the compact summary of how the human brain works, the gripping tale of Taylor’s life-threatening injury, and the nearly unbelievable description of her remarkable recovery, there’s something in here for everyone. While Taylor does tend to downplay how difficult it can be to tap into our right brain peace of mind, there’s something comforting about the thought that it’s lying in wait. Who would I recommend My Stroke Of Insight summary to? Dr. Taylor] brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities.”And I must say, there was both freedom and challenge for me in recognizing that our perception of the external world, and our relationship to it, is a product of our neurological circuitry. For all those years of my life, I really had been a figment of my own imagination!” 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. Bert Keizer, a Dutch geriatrician, [3] reviewed the book and described it as "neurosophy", where the author sees brain neurons as the foundation for religious experience. Consequently, the author became interested in the way the human brain functions. She embarked upon intense academic training so that she could research the biological grounds for schizophrenia.

Based upon my experience with losing my left mind, I whole-heartedly believe that the feeling of deep inner peace is neurological circuitry located in our right brain.” Taylor believes that her spiritual experience was biologically determined. She likens it to the Buddhist concept of nirvana, which means a state free from suffering. Her left brain was damaged and quieted her inner voice, which is a stream of constant commentary. This freed up her right brain to experience bliss. Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think” Bob Miller Flouted Own Rules For Stroke Book by Leon Neyfakh". Observer.com. 2008-10-21 . Retrieved 2012-10-23.

Sentence-Summary: My Stroke Of Insight teaches you how to calm yourself anytime by simply tuning into the inherent peacefulness of the right side of the brain. Bolte Taylor was accepted as an undergraduate at Indiana University where she studied human biology. At the same time, she got a job at the Terre Haute Center for Medical Education. It was here that she worked as a lab technician in both the Human Anatomy Lab and the Neuroanatomy Research Lab. Have you ever had that feeling of getting an epiphany, grasping something you didn’t before? Most of us have experienced that moment when a stroke of insight makes us understand or see something in a new light. Now imagine that it was an actual stroke. I was teaching anatomy, physiology, and neuroscience, and I had to sit down and relearn the material. I would spend the two days before a lecture mastering that terminology again. It was an enormous workout, but it was a fantastic exercise in pushing my brain to its highest capacity. It was what my brain needed to push it to that level of function, with a ton of sleep in between.

While she was recovering, she had several epiphanies. Firstly, she realized the importance of being surrounded by others who believed in her recovery and treated her accordingly. On several occasions, she heard doctors say that those who have survived a stroke shouldn't expect to ever fully recover – especially if they haven’t done so within six months of the incident. By the eighth year, I felt I had completely recovered, so I wrote the book. It was an enormous task for me to undertake, and at the same time it was incredible for my brain to challenge itself in that way. It wasn’t easy, but it was important and necessary. I self-published the book, and then about a year later I did the TED Talk, and then I sold the book to Penguin. That was life exploding. 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.When recovering from a stroke, it can be useful to break down large tasks into smaller ones. Key Takeaway 1: Health care providers should be more patient-centered in their care.

Want to learn the ideas in My Stroke Of Insight better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of My Stroke Of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor here. 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. 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? 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. Before the stroke, I was climbing the ladder at Harvard. I wanted to teach and do research. I was interested in understanding, at a cellular level, the differences between the brains of people who would be diagnosed as neurotypical and the brains of people who would be diagnosed with a severe mental illness. After the stroke, I had to mourn the death of who I had been before — but it was never my ambition to grow up to be that person again or to do the things that she had done.Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.” 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. After the stroke, I was spending literally six to eight hours a day on the phone speaking to people who had neurological trauma or their caregivers. My mother said to me, “Jill, you have to write this down and give it to the world, because you don’t have any time for your life. You’re on the phone all the time.” 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. If I am not persistent with my desire to think about other things, and consciously initiate new circuits of thought, then those uninvited loops can generate new strength and begin monopolizing my mind again. To counter their activities, I keep a handy list of three things available for me to turn my consciousness toward when I am in a state of need: 1) I remember something I find fascinating that I would like to ponder more deeply, 2) I think about something that brings me terrific joy, or 3) I think about something I would like to do.”