David Inge, Host: Good morning. Welcome t o the second hour of Focus 580.

This
is our morning talk program; my name’s David Inge. . . . In this hour of Focus 580
we’ll be talking with Jill Bolte Taylor; she is a neuroanatomist. She’s affiliated with the
Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. And back in 1996, she was
teaching and doing research at the Harvard Medical School when she had a stroke,
a very serious and severe stroke. On that day, as she writes in her book My Stroke
of Insight, on that day she woke up with a sharp pain behind one eye. She tried to
get on with her usual morning activities, but clearly she knew something was very
wrong. She wasn’t sure what. Uh, instead of finding answers or information, she
writes she “met with a growing sense of peace.” She writes that she felt “enfolded by
a blanket of tranquil euphoria.” 

We should talk a little bit more about the, the structure of the brain, and, and I think
that probably people have an idea in, in their head of what the brain looks like. And
that I think the thing that people think about as being the brain is in fact the cortex,
the cerebral— 

Jill Bolte Taylor: Right. 

Inge: —cortex, which is that part of the brain that sets us apart from a lot of other
living things and in fact maybe sets us apart in degree from other mammals as well.
Uh, and maybe also people are used to the idea that it has two halves, right and left,
and that the two halves are different. So, talk a little bit about that, the structure of
the brain at that level, and the two halves, the right and the left, and what makes
them different. 

Taylor: Well, they process information in, in different kinds of ways, um, but of
course they’re always both working all at the same time. So as you look out into the
world right now, whatever your perception is, you, you have choices. You can look
first at the big picture of the room and not really focus in on any of the details. And
the right hemisphere looks at things for the big picture. It blends the, softens the
boundaries between things so that you take in the bigger picture of the room. Is this
a really lovely room? Is this a great room? Um, and you just have the overall
perception. If you’re at the beach, um, you look out over the, the, um, horizon and
you look out over the water, and, and you, you allow yourself to feel expansive, and
that’s the bigger picture of everything. The left hemisphere, then, is going to—and it’s
all in the present moment. The right hemisphere is all about right here, right now.
And then the left hemisphere is going to take that big picture and it’s going to start
picking out the details. So if you’re at the beach, now it’s going to start looking at the
kinds of clouds, and it’s going to label them and it’s going to look at the whitecaps
and label them, and it’s going to look at the kinds of grains in the sand and label
them. And everything now starts working into language and the details that we can
then communicate with, so it’s looking—and, and, and in order to do that, it’s going
to compare things to things that we’ve learned in the past, and it’s going to project
images into the future. The right hemisphere thinks the big picture in pictures. 
The left hemisphere thinks the details using language, so the two hemispheres work
together constantly for us to have a normal perspective. And, and on the morning of
my hemorrhage, I lost the left hemisphere, which lost my language, it lost my ability
to associate or relate anything to the external world or to communicate either
creating language or understanding other people’s language. But what I gained was
this experience of the present moment and the expansiveness, so, so they’re, they’re
very different ways of perceiving the world. And most of us, you know, I think we can
identify that there are these two very different parts of ourselves and that we use
them together. I just had the opportunity to lose the detail of the left hemisphere so
that I could really just experience the right hemisphere untethered to the left
hemisphere. 

Inge: Our guest on this hour of Focus 580, Jill Bolte Taylor; she’s a neuroanatomist.
And of course questions are welcome. Line 1. Hello. 

Caller: Hello. 

Inge: Yes. 

Caller: I find this fascinating. I’m, I’m an experimental psychologist, retired. And,
um, there’s an old, uh, out of the behavioristic tradition, you know, they believed that
consciousness was intrinsically tied to language. And it sounds like that’s out the
window now because you evidently didn’t lose consciousness and, uh, because you
—but you did lose your language. But what I’m interested in, is did you lose the
concept of future and past? It sounds like you were living entirely in the present. Is
that true or not? 

Inge: All right. 

Taylor: Thank you. Yeah. No, that’s a great question. I did lose my perception of
past and future when I had that hemorrhage in the left hemisphere, and I lost all of
the consciousness of the language center. I lost the portion of my brain that said, “I
am an individual. I am Jill Bolte Taylor. These are all the data connected to me.”
These are all the memories associated with who I had been and when that person
went offline, which is the best way for me to explain it, I lost all of her likes and
dislikes, and I didn’t—but I was still completely conscious. And in the process of
recovery, I essentially had to say that woman died that day, and I was now an infant
in a woman’s body. And this new consciousness was going to regain the function of
the left hemisphere, but I was not going to regain being whom I had been before. So,
um, uh, I love your perspective on it. At the, at the same time I, I see it as, as, just as
far as language is concerned, picture yourself as a, a purely English-speaking
person and then you wake up one day and you’re in the heart of China where
nobody speaks any English whatsoever, so you’re no longer dependent on the
language. You’re dependent on having a heightening of your other experiences, the
inflection of voice and facial expression, and, and you’re, you’re really in the present
moment, then, in order to gain information about what, where, where you’re at and
what you have to do. So we do function; there’s a whole part of us that is non-
language, and once that language goes off, I was still a whole human being, even
though I didn’t have my language center and the rest of my left hemisphere was, was
swimming in a pool of blood. I still had the experience that I was perfect and whole
and beautiful just the way that I was even though I only had part of my, my mind
functioning.