My Stroke of Insight
A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey
Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D
Transcendent – ” Beyond or above the range of normal physical human experience.” A word we use to signify an experience that many of us are familiar with but have no way of sharing it with those unfamiliar with the experience because it is not like anything they have ever known. And since these experiences were happening to either individuals under the influence of some entheogen or devotes of strange eastern mystical traditions, they could be easily dismissed as brain abnormalities caused by these influences. Add to this the perceived altering of peoples priorities in ways that threaten social norms in those attracted to these experiences and you can understand how difficult it is to be on a journey that feels undeniable to you but seems aberrant and misguided to those around you. Thanks to Jill, we now have a way to understand and talk about the actual mechanisms at work in creating these experiences. Simply put, we come to these spaces through a shutting down, by whatever means, of that part of our brain that is dictating what sensory information we will pay attention to and what we will ignore. And if we are open to the experience and have developed pathways in our minds that allow us to perceive it as transformative rather than destructive, then this exposure to unfiltered sensations changes who we are and the journey we thought we were on.
Jill came to these experiences minus any entheogens or mystical traditions and is now spending her life trying to educate people about how brains work and the value of spending more time with the unfiltered part of our brain. Her new journey is just beginning but she has given us a means to understand these experiences as real and valid and a way to talk about them with those who would label them as abhorrent.
The Ted talk, which you can get to by clicking on the Ted image, is the best place to start but her short book is invaluable because it includes chapters on how the brain works.
