My Stroke of Insight

In 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist, experienced a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she observed her mind deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life—all within four hours—Taylor alternated between the euphoria of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical left brain, which recognized she was having a stroke. It would take her eight years to fully recover. For Taylor, her stroke was a blessing and a revelation.