Her Stroke of Insight

 Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor captivated the audience Monday as she described the massive, debilitating stroke she suffered in 1996 at age 37 and her "journey into and back out of the silent abyss of the wounded brain." On the morning it happened, she "could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body." She looked at her arm and realized that she could not "define the boundaries of my body. I couldn't tell where I began or ended, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall." Two and a half weeks after her stroke, surgeons removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on her brain. Although she lost her ability to communicate with words, her eyesight and hearing became more acute. She experienced things only in the present moment with no linearity, having to lift up her feet, for example, one at a time because there seemed to be connection between the two. But after eight years of intensive therapy, she was able to recover her faculties. "I now feel peaceful," she concluded, "because I have lost 37 years of emotional baggage."