Book Report - My Stroke of Insight

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Jill Bolte Taylor is an American, Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who majored in Mental illnesses and more specifically Schizophrenia, influenced by her brother’s disease. She was really involved in her work, she worked for the NAMI (National Alliance of Mental Illness) and also for the Harvard Brain Bank where she was known as the “Singin’ scientist” because she created a song to encourage people to donate their brain (after their death of course!).

But in 1996, she experienced a rare form of stroke due to a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain that made her lose every capacity like walking, talking, writing, reading and even recalling any of her memories.  In her book, she exposes this event but also how she succeeded in relearning everything and her new philosophy of life.

She became really famous thanks to a TED talk, she made that went viral. After that, she made a lot of interviews including one with Oprah Winfrey, her book became a New York Times bestseller and she was chosen as one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2008.

But all of this fame wouldn’t exist without this autobiographic book. Thus, she shares with us her story from the Morning of The Stroke, where she explains with details how she lost all her abilities one by one, through the 8 years of re-habilitation during which she courageously relearned everything from scratch with the precious help of her mother, like she had been born for a second time, to how she thinks and feels now about life, about the world and about what this stroke provided her.

What’s interesting in her storytelling is that she explains every situation in two ways: what happened subjectively, how she felt but also the mechanisms that was happening in her brain. Indeed, she teaches the reader that the brain is made of two hemispheres and each one has his own personality. The left hemisphere, which has been affected by the stroke, is the headquarters of all our “rational abilities” like verbal language, concept of time, judgmental capacities and memories but it also includes the motor cortex and the area that allows to define the boundaries of our body. All of these aptitudes had been altered by the hemorrhage. And the right side of our brain enables us to be creative, to identify non-verbal language and to be empathic. It perceives the moments like timeless and abundant and it remembers them like a whole picture instead of focusing on the details.

These two different parts work together in synergy to make us who we are and what we live, nevertheless, each person has a predominance of the left or the right hemisphere. By giving these pieces of information, the writer incites us to pause our reading and to begin an introspection to discover which side is stronger according to how we perceive the world.

This major event changed a lot the way of thinking of the neuroscientist. She used to be a lefty person (“hemispherically” speaking), but since she lost almost every abilities of her left side, she became a righty and loved it. She describes it like a peaceful land where everybody is equal, and everybody is just a set of molecules like everything, every object that surrounds us. Since she had to “rebuilt” her left, she decided to not totally abandon this thought of peacefulness, also, she could customize her set of emotions by choosing which one keeping and which one not. And she tells us in her book that everybody is able to do it.

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