When she was a young girl, brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor became fascinated with the functions of the human brain. Jill, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2008, has a brother with schizophrenia, and his brain disorder led Jill to dedicate her career to studying severe mental illnesses as a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist. While she worked to uncover the differences between the brains of people born with mental illnesses and those who were not, something remarkable happened to Jill's own brain—it went silent.

On December 10, 1996, at age 37, Jill awoke with intense pain behind her left eye—a blood vessel had exploded in the left hemisphere of her brain, and within hours, Jill could no longer walk, talk, read or write. She was suffering from an arteriovenous malformation—a rare type of stroke. While Jill struggled to phone for help, she was aware that the left hemisphere of her brain was shutting down, taking with it her language, organizing and other analytical skills. Without the dominant left side of her brain controlling her thoughts, Jill says her mind went silent, leaving only the right side of the brain functioning. Through the right side of her brain, Jill says her consciousness shifted away from reality—and the trauma her body was suffering through—and into a place of inner peace and Nirvana.

The experience was life-changing. Not only did Jill face years of recovery after her stroke—and major brain surgery to remove a large blood clot in her brain—she also discovered a better quality of life through increased use of the right hemisphere of her brain. She's now an artist as well as a scientist, creating anatomically correct stained-glass replicas of brains that are sold as fine art. She's also published My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. The book explains in scientific detail exactly what happened during Jill's stroke and how she recovered. It also takes a closer look at how the right hemisphere of the brain works and how Jill says people with normal brains can access it to find their own inner peace and improve their quality of life and the lives of others.


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