The Wisdom Page 

 

Stroke of Insight

 

Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist at Harvard who had a massive left-hemisphere stroke. In the two videos below she explains how the stroke left her in a state of right-brain facilitated bliss, and how she struggled for 8 years to regain the use of her left brain hemisphere.

Streaming video feed from the Canadian Broadcasting Company of the 2009 piece Stroke of Insight
(If that doesn't work for you, view or download the Flash [FLV] or Windows Media Player [WMV] video.)

Streaming video feed from the TED website of Jill Bolte Taylor's 2008 TED Conference Talk
(If that doesn't work for you, view or download the Flash [FLV] or Windows Media Player [WMV] video.)

The CBC video goes more deeply into the recovery process, the TED video more deeply into the neurology.

NOTE: If you have a Windows computer and Windows Media Player, the .wmv files will stream immediately if Windows Media Player has been set up as the default player for .wmv files. The .m4v files must be fully downloaded before playing on Quick Time Player — which, if it is to start automatically after the complete file has been sent to your computer, must have been set up as the default player for .m4v files.

In these videos, her book My Stroke of Insight, and her public lectures she notes that we all have a similar right brain hemisphere, and she encourages us to enter this state of always-available inner peace and happiness. Many meditative practices are designed to help us do this by quieting the active, thinking, planning, noisy left brain hemisphere.