Episode 24. Stroke with Jill Bolte Taylor - Author of My Stroke of Insight скачать в хорошем качестве

Episode 24. Stroke with Jill Bolte Taylor - Author of My Stroke of Insight

In this episode I am joined by Harvard-trained neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, author of the best-selling illness memoir titled My Stroke of Insight. This now classical book spent 63 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and is still routinely the #1 book in the category Stroke in the Amazon marketplace. This podcast goes to show why she was one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2008, why she was the premiere guest on Oprah Winfrey’s “Soul Series” webcast, and why her 2008 TEDTalk was the first to ever go viral - now with well over 27.5 million views. We discuss her experience of suffering from a stroke in which she bled into the left side of her brain from a vascular malformation. She narrated the experience of watching her brain go ‘offline’ with the trained eyes of a neuroanatomist, describing not just the physical symptoms as loss of language, but also the emotional and almost spiritual and ecstatic experiences of the stroke. With her neuroscience background, Dr Taylor was also able to relate her symptoms to the location of her bleed, and the to the functions that each brain hemisphere performs. Dr Taylor passionately recounted the insights she gained from this in terms of the benefits of right hemisphere brain function, and how people can use this knowledge to maximise their physical and emotional health. She also emphasised how understanding the brain when it is not functioning properly helps us to learn how it works under normal conditions. Of significance is Dr Taylor’s depiction of her acute hospital care in which she highlighted the good practices that helped her recovery, and the healthcare practices which she deplored for their negative effects on physical and emotional well-being. She also explored her longer-term recovery, particularly highlighting how the laterality of stroke affects outcomes, and how the knowledge of right- and left-brain function helps in healing and recovery. Other themes our discussion covered included hemisphere dominance, psychological trauma, psychedelics, meditation, and where God is in the brain.