Taylor seen reflected in her own brain scans taken after her stroke.

There’s an online video of Bloomington neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor that’s getting an average of 20,000 hits each day. In it, she describes how she watched her mind deteriorate on the morning of December 10, 1996. She had woken with a crippling headache, and soon began to notice a curious sense of detachment followed by the incremental loss of her physical and mental faculties. As a brain researcher, she was able to deduce the cause of her eroding cognition: she was having a stroke.
The video clip is from this year’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference, the celebrity-studded invitation-only California event that features the likes of Stephen Hawking, Amy Tan, and Al Gore. Taylor’s presentation was a crowd favorite, earning the previously unknown scientist instant fame, along with hugs from Robin Williams, Meg Ryan, and Paul Simon, among others. Three months later, she has already done a series of interviews with Oprah, sold her self-published book to Penguin’s Viking division, received a number of offers for a movie deal, and been named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in The World.”
Viewing the 18-minute video is a moving, visceral experience. But arresting as the play-by-play of her mental breakdown may be, it’s the message of the presentation that is perhaps most unexpected. Though Taylor is all for stroke prevention, she says she learned something even more valuable from her golf ball-size hemorrhage than the importance of recognizing early symptoms. While incapacitated, she says, she discovered a new—and better—way of being.
“I experienced euphoria,” she says. “I was entirely in my right brain, and it was so peaceful.”

In Her Right Mind

Taylor’s closing words at the end of her TED presentation reveal the motivation behind her journey to Monterey for the conference: “I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be,” she says, adding, “And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.”
Sitting on her couch in Bloomington, 11 years after the stroke and fully recovered, she clarifies her position on the relative importance of the right and left brain.
“I’m not encouraging ‘right hemisphere, period,’” she says. “I’m advocating for the balanced brain. I’m advocating for balancing the time I’m on ‘go-go-go’ and the time I’m just being healthy and peaceful and contemplative and open to new possibilities. If I spent all my time in the right hemisphere I would be zoned out and nonproductive. But we’re not balanced generally in our society; we’re always in the left brain. And it shows: We’re exhausted.”
The left brain, she explains, functions like a computer’s serial processor: it ticks sequentially through information, categorizing, analyzing, and arriving at a point of conclusion. It was this logical ability that Taylor lost after her stroke. The right brain, by contrast, “is like a parallel processor,” she says. “Everything happens at the same time. It’s like standing at a beach: You’re smelling the salt, hearing the rhythm of the waves and the birds, and feeling the sand and it’s wet between your toes. That experience is an explosion of information about the present moment.”

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