PDF Summary:My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor

When neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke on the left side of her brain, she was uniquely qualified to observe and report on the experience of losing her cognitive functions. However, she was surprised to learn that as her stroke silenced her mind, she developed feelings of deep inner peace and connection that had lain dormant in the right half of her brain. Taylor’s newfound capacity for empathy and stillness redefined her awareness of herself and the world, and led her to believe that we can all find that peace if we become aware of how our brains function and consciously tap its hidden resources.

In this guide, we’ll cover Taylor’s account of her stroke, her recovery, and her insights on mental and emotional self-care. We’ll discuss Taylor’s recommendations on how best to support stroke survivors, and we’ll compare her experience to the findings of experts on neuroscience, psychology, and mental well-being.

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After the Stroke

On the afternoon of the day of her stroke, Taylor woke to an entirely different sense of awareness than she’d ever felt before. Though her left brain was dying and in shock, her right brain was fully aware and cognizant. Taylor recounts the experience of being in the world from a purely right-brain perspective and how it affected her physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

Her first sensation was a tremendous amount of pain, and not just in her head. Her senses seemed extremely sharp, so that every sound, light, and touch was nearly too much to bear. Beyond that, she realized that she no longer had any sense of her body’s physical boundaries. Instead, she felt like a liquid part of a universal continuum that included everything around her. Taylor recalls that she perceived herself as a being of energy tied to a painful material husk, and her energy was severely depleted. Every interaction with other people in the hospital threatened to drain her energy even more, prompting a desire to withdraw inside herself.

(Shortform note: Some of the sensations Taylor describes, such as an overwhelming feeling of peace and a sense of disconnection from her own body, are similar to those reported by people who’ve had near-death experiences and complex partial seizures in which portions of the brain go dormant while others remain fully active. Likewise, people who’ve taken psychedelic drugs report a weakened sense of self and a feeling of connection with everything around them. Because certain psychedelics, such as psilocybin and DMT, can reduce neural inflammation and promote neuroplasticity, doctors are currently exploring the possibility of using psychedelics as a recovery treatment for stroke survivors.)

However, Taylor also remembers feeling a great sense of peace between moments of painful intrusions from the world. Her left brain had shut down, but her right brain was fully active and conscious. Because the right hemisphere doesn’t perceive time, she experienced her existence fully “in the moment,” with no memory of the past. In that sense, she had regressed to the nonverbal mental state of an infant who lives in a perpetual “now.” Because her right brain was fully engaged, she was very aware of the body language of the people around her. If they were gentle and caring, they restored her sense of energy, but if they were anxious or hurried, she felt they depleted what reserves she had left.

(Shortform note: Connecting with other people’s emotions and feeling them yourself is a real biological process. In The Whole Brain Child, Siegel and Bryson identify specific cells called mirror neurons that reflect and absorb the actions and emotions you see expressed around you. For example, if you see someone near you get angry, your mirror neurons activate as if you’re the one who’s angry. When Taylor’s left brain was damaged, she lost the cognitive ability to differentiate between others’ feelings and her own. If her mirror neurons reflected the tenderness or anxiety of the people around her without the filter of her left brain’s sense of self, it may have heightened her sensitivity to those feelings.)

Taylor says she was struck by the silence she now experienced in her mind. She recognized that her brain was no longer functioning normally, but without her left brain’s sense of ego, she didn’t feel any grief. With very little access to language, when someone spoke she had to absorb each word as an individual unit and puzzle them together in a painstaking process. Without her left brain’s ability to catalog and order her sensations, she had to focus on each individual sense and make a concerted effort to identify what every incoming signal told her. Interacting with the world was a painful distraction from the deep, inner calm that her right brain continued to offer as an alternative.

(Shortform note: Taylor’s description of her stroke is vivid, but it isn’t the only post-stroke account, nor is it descriptive of every stroke experience. The CDC, AARP, and the Stroke Awareness Foundation offer stories from a variety of stroke survivors, including those of a man whose first symptoms were cramps in his left arm and leg, an attorney who experienced a series of mini-strokes, and a businessman whose gut instincts warned him that his symptoms were more serious than his emergency room doctors initially believed.)

Recovery Begins

Despite the temptation to sink into the bliss of mental silence, Taylor understood how important it was to keep her mind active in order to have any chance of regaining her cognitive abilities. During the immediate post-stroke recovery period, she focused on maintaining her energy, challenging her language skills, and strengthening her body and mind enough to undergo a surgery to remove the mass of blood that had congealed in her head.

Taylor explains that the doctors and nurses who treated her weren’t cognizant at all of how their interactions depleted her energy, so she took responsibility for managing her reserves. If hospital staff treated her gently, she would respond and cooperate with what they wanted. However, if they were forceful and taxing, she would ignore them as much as she could. She discovered that sleep was the most important factor in restoring her energy levels, so she learned to respect her body’s need for rest.

(Shortform note: Even for people who haven’t suffered brain trauma, sleep is vital to human cognition. In Brain Rules, biologist John Medina explains that in addition to maintaining your biological rhythms, sleep plays a role in encoding information into memory, helping you retain what you learned while awake by solidifying new cognitive pathways. He says that sleep also lets the brain flush out toxic chemicals that build up throughout the day, creating a fresh mental slate with which to process even more information when you wake.)

Unlike sleep, the act of thinking was a great drain on Taylor’s energy, but she knew that keeping her brain active was also vital to the recovery process. To exercise her mind, Taylor worked to regain control of her body and her ability to speak, but even the simplest of tasks, such as walking or speaking simple words, were too much to tackle all at once. Taylor describes the process she went through to break every physical or mental action down into its smallest possible steps.

She uses the example of getting out of bed, for which she first had to master the skill of rocking back and forth. Once she could rock her body in successively greater increments, she could then move on to the next step of rolling into an upright position. For mental tasks, her caregivers focused on multiple-choice questions, rather than simple yes-or-no answers, as a means to reactivate her dormant mental connections.

(Shortform note: In Brain Rules, Medina says that even the act of paying attention to something is a multistep process, much like getting out of bed. Different parts of the brain must activate in sequence—alerting you to stimuli, orienting your awareness toward it, then engaging your higher brain functions. He argues that splitting your focus doesn’t work, especially in situations when concentration is vital. Attempting to multitask presents the brain with a constant stream of interruptions, after which the attention process must repeat itself again and again. For Taylor, focused concentration was absolutely essential because she had to relearn every step of every process she’d previously taken for granted.)

It was important for Taylor to regain as much energy and cognitive function as she could to improve her chances of successfully coming through a surgery that was needed to repair her AVM and remove the mass of blood from her left hemisphere. At that point, says Taylor, only some of her brain cells had died, but many more were still in a state of shock. While the surgery was needed to prevent further damage, it ran the risk of taking away her capacity for language or bodily control completely. Nevertheless, two weeks after her stroke, Taylor’s surgery was a success. When she woke afterward, she felt emotionally lifted, and she retained the power of speech she’d worked so hard to regain.

(Shortform note: While any surgery comes with an amount of risk, operating on the brain is especially dangerous. Potential side effects include mental impairment, swelling, bleeding, infection, and another stroke. As part of the recovery process, doctors have to continually assess the patient’s neurological and physical functions, as well as take measures to ensure that harmful blood clots don’t form. Once released, the patient and their caregivers must be alert for signs of worsening cognition or physical pain that may warrant a return to the hospital.)

Surgery didn’t guarantee that Taylor would regain enough of her cognitive abilities to function as a fully independent person. In fact, it took eight years of dedicated work—rebuilding memories, vocabulary, motor functions, and scientific knowledge—for Taylor to reach the point where she considered herself to be fully recovered from her stroke. Some of that work included reconstructing her memories of the stroke in light of her restored left-brain functions.

Taylor is careful to point out that how she defines “recovery” is subjective. She hasn’t regained every skill, memory, or emotional response, and some of that has been deliberate. As she relearned who she was and how to live, the stroke gave her the opportunity to choose who this new version of herself would be and to leave behind parts of her previous life that she didn’t want anymore.

(Shortform note: Though Taylor eschews standardized stroke recovery timelines, the medical community offers guidelines to manage expectations for stroke survivors and their caregivers. Johns Hopkins Hospital suggests that the first three months are crucial for healing and recovery, while improvements will proceed more slowly after six months from the stroke. Physical therapist Signe Brunnstrom established a series of benchmarks used to determine progress in body coordination and mobility. The Stroke Recovery Foundation provides a cognitive and emotional to-do list for recovery without attaching time expectations.)

Lessons Learned

Though recovering from her stroke was a long, arduous, and often painful process, Taylor says she decided to view her stroke and recovery as a gift. Her experience taught her valuable lessons about the inner workings of the mind that she wanted to share with others. These include the insight that understanding your mind lets you change the way you think, take responsibility for your emotional responses, and tap into the well of inner calm and peace that we all have embedded in the wiring of our brains.

Take Charge of Your Thoughts and Emotions

The first life lesson Taylor learned in the process of rebuilding her cognitive functions was that it was entirely up to her which parts of her past she reclaimed or left behind. Taylor argues that she’s living proof of the plasticity of the human mind—that who you were in the past doesn’t strictly define who you can be in the future. She highlights the differences she discovered between her left and right hemispheres in terms of personality and emotion, and she suggests that if you’re aware of how your different hemispheres influence your mental state, you can make the deliberate choice to control your thoughts and emotional processes.

(Shortform note: In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge argues that neuroplasticity is a blessing and a curse when it comes to reframing your emotional responses. It’s only because of your brain’s plastic nature that you’re able to reshape your ways of thinking, but since your brain reallocates unused space, any neural paths you’re not used to using may be appropriated by other mental functions. For example, if you’ve formed the habit of viewing time spent with your family in a negative light, then the mental circuits for enjoying time with your family might have been directed elsewhere, such as enjoying a hobby or sport.)

For Taylor, this truth was thrown into stark relief when her stroke forced her completely into right-brain thinking for a significant period of time. As she worked to regain her left hemisphere’s functions, Taylor felt when the left brain’s emotional patterns began to resurface, and she questioned whether she wanted to bring all of her old personality back. After all, it became clear to her that her right hemisphere was the source of many of her positive emotions, such as happiness and empathy, while her left side had housed her anger and judgmental tendencies.

(Shortform note: Despite Taylor’s subjective experience, a survey of neurological research studies shows little support for the theory that specific classes of emotions originate in different parts of the brain. Instead, the data support the view that emotions arise from networks of cells located throughout all areas of the brain. Further research shows that prior studies were flawed because they were conducted primarily on right-handed people. As discussed in the earlier section on brain lateralization, left- and right-handedness has been shown to signify different arrangements of cognitive functions between the left and right hemispheres.)

Taylor says that some of our “negative” feelings are intricately linked with the left brain’s cognitive functions, such as assigning cause and effect to sensory information. However, when growing into her new sense of self, Taylor worked to disentangle her higher left-brain functions from her old self’s previously ingrained emotional cycles. When she recognized judgmental or anxious thought patterns forming, she made the conscious choice to redirect her mind and frame her thoughts in a more calming light, which helped to create new neural pathways to replace the ones that existed before. In many ways, she was becoming a whole new person, and she learned to be deliberate about which pieces of her old life she kept or left behind.

(Shortform note: Taylor’s system of self-reconstruction is similar to the therapeutic practice of Internal Family Systems (IFS), as described by psychologist Richard Schwartz in No Bad Parts. In IFS, your mind is treated not as a single unit, but as a multiplicity of competing “selves,” almost like a family of personalities with complicated interpersonal dynamics. The goal of the practice isn’t to excise unwanted traits, but to untangle your disparate selves from each other and take conscious control of your emotional life.)

The Root of Negativity

Taylor explains that strong emotions arise in the “animal brain” of your limbic system, which responds to stimuli faster than your right or left brain can process information and floods your brain with chemicals to put you in “freeze, fight, or flight” mode. However, those chemicals are flushed out of your system in approximately 90 seconds and any emotions you continue to feel are entirely in the realm of your higher brain functions. By this point, you’ve often unconsciously chosen to let your initial reaction continue, feeling it with your right brain and justifying it with your left. While Taylor was rebuilding her reactions from scratch, she realized that if you’re aware of this process, you can choose to short-circuit it and elect a more balanced response.

(Shortform note: The limbic system serves many more functions than Taylor describes, such as triggering the brain’s reward system, storing and retrieving memories, and managing the body’s autonomic functions. Taylor doesn’t cite any scientific studies to back her claim that the limbic system’s chemicals fade after 90 seconds, nor does she identify which chemicals she means. Adrenaline, for example, can stay in the body for up to an hour. Nevertheless, Taylor’s “90-second rule” has become a touchstone for therapists, who tout it as a powerful technique to promote self-control, deal with stress, and build emotional resilience.)

It helps to become mindful of how emotions manifest themselves in your body. By becoming aware that certain emotions were physically upsetting, Taylor learned that she could avoid those emotions. Doing so led to the realization that how she felt from moment to moment was entirely her own decision. This is where the left brain comes into play, with its constant stream of internal dialogue. Taylor’s inner voice slowly returned as she exercised her language skills, and she learned that she could talk to herself about the way she felt. Instead of letting your own inner voice spin stories that reinforce resentment and anger, Taylor suggests that you can use your self-talk to draw a line between which emotions are helpful and which are destructive.

Emotional Self-Regulation

In How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett goes a step further than Taylor and suggests that “feelings” and “emotions” are two separate things. Feelings, she says, are your body’s internal signals, such as pleasure or discomfort. Emotions, on the other hand, are mental constructs created by your brain to give your feelings meaning. Like Taylor, Barrett argues that you can consciously manage your emotional responses, both for your sake and the well-being of others around you.

Though 21st-century neuroscience has confirmed the brain’s ability to rewire its emotional responses, the idea has been around since at least the fifth century BCE. In Happy, Derren Brown extols the ancient Greek philosophies of the Epicureans and the Stoics, both of whom cited taking responsibility for your emotions as a cornerstone to happiness and life. In The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama explains a comparable Buddhist process of cultivating happiness through consciously examining and retraining your thoughts and emotions.

That’s not to say that you should never feel emotions like anger, sadness, or regret, but only that you should do so consciously, so that those emotions don’t control your life. Taylor says it’s particularly useful to give yourself a 90-second break whenever you feel a strong emotional reaction. That allows you time for the limbic system’s chemicals to wash out of your system, after which you can consciously decide on the appropriate emotional response. If it’s necessary to indulge a painful emotion so that it doesn’t go unresolved, Taylor proposes setting aside a specific block of time to feel it, and then telling yourself it’s okay to let it go.

(Shortform note: In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman gives other practical tips on dealing with feelings such as anger, fear, and grief, but he highlights the importance of being aware of your emotions first. He presents managing your emotions as a preferable alternative to fighting them, which consumes even more energy. He lists the pros and cons of repressing unwanted emotions—some people do it through healthy self-management, while others are simply out of touch with themselves. He does suggest that repressing emotions has been linked to heightened neural activity in the left hemisphere of the brain.)

Find Peace Inside You

Beyond our capacity for taking control of our emotional lives, Taylor says the most important lesson her stroke taught her was that a deep sense of peace and connection with the world is hardwired into the human brain, if only we can learn to engage it. She describes the overwhelming feelings of peace and connection she experienced during and after her stroke, and she gives advice on how to engage that mental process without having to go through the ordeal of a stroke.

When Taylor’s stroke silenced the left side of her brain, she felt a deep, abiding sense of calm that was separate from her ego or the confines of her physical form (both of which are defined by left-brain perceptions). With only her right-brain processing to guide her, she saw and felt herself and the world as a flow of energy, not as simple matter. Because she’d lost her perception of time, Taylor concludes that peaceful awareness lies in the right hemisphere’s perception of the present moment, not in the left brain’s remembrance of the past or ambitions for the future. While she worked to bring her left hemisphere back from its trauma, Taylor was determined not to lose sight of the sense of peace and connection she’d discovered.

(Shortform note: In Essentialism, Greg McKeown discusses focusing your thoughts on the present in the context of managing time, energy, and resources. He argues that when you ignore the future in favor of what’s most important in the present, you’ll be more relaxed and time will move more slowly. Just as Taylor did when she rebuilt her cognitive functions, McKeown recommends devoting your energy to one task at a time without worrying about the next. He even advocates putting your brain on “pause” when you’re distracted, taking a quick time out, and letting go—much like Taylor’s method of dealing with unwelcome emotions.)

Taylor insists that she didn’t develop feelings of inner peace because of her stroke—they’d been there all along, inside her right brain, but she’d been distracted by the nonstop verbal chatter of her left hemisphere. Just as many meditation experts suggest, you can achieve that sense of peace if you can learn to quiet your thoughts. The process entails slowing your mind, listening to your thoughts, learning which ones trigger negative cycles, and encouraging those that foster calmness, empathy, and joy. It may take lots of practice to quiet your inner voice, but if you do you’ll find a wellspring of compassion and contentment that’s been hidden in your brain’s right hemisphere.

(Shortform note: Consciously slowing and quieting your thoughts is a skill that takes time and practice, but it can be achieved. In Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana differentiates between being aware of a thought and thinking it. In meditation, the idea isn’t to stop thoughts completely, but to notice them when they occur and let them pass. Gunaratana says that a thoughtless state of mind is as detrimental as one that’s continually distracted. The practice of mindfulness meditation encourages letting go of your ego and the barriers you put up between yourself and the world, and it does so in a gentler way than what Taylor experienced with her stroke.)

What Stroke Survivors Need

While every stroke will be somewhat different, depending on which parts of the brain are most affected, Taylor’s experience provides an important guide to how doctors and loved ones can help stroke survivors cope with the realities of their new lives. People should be mindful of stroke patients’ energy levels, their need for positive reassurance, and the importance that caregivers maintain their belief that stroke patients will recover, while celebrating every step along the way.

Taylor makes it clear in her description of her stroke that her energy levels quickly plummeted and were difficult to maintain during recovery. For someone whose brain has been traumatized like hers was, anything that requires concentration is draining. This includes any personal interaction. It’s important that doctors and caregivers be careful about the demands they make on stroke survivors’ time and energy. Rest is crucial both to healing and recharging, and it has to be taken as the body demands, not forced to conform to family members’ needs or the schedule of doctors making rounds.

Allostasis: The Brain’s Unsung Duty

One function of the brain that’s taken for granted but rarely discussed is allostasis—the process by which the brain budgets and allocates the body’s energy usage. In Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett calls allostasis the brain’s single most important function. Through allostasis, the brain goes so far as to adjust your sensory perceptions in order to regulate energy usage. It does this by drawing on past experience to create the sensations your body needs in order to regulate temperature, food intake, and threat response.

Energy management is especially important when healing from brain trauma, since the brain accounts for 20% of your daily energy usage. Our brains use twice as much energy as those of our closest evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees, but studies show that it’s not because of our relative intelligence. Rather, the determining factor seems to be the size of the brain in relation to the body—marmosets have a similar proportion of brain-energy usage to that of humans.

In What Is Health?, Peter Sterling argues that allostasis can fail when the body is stressed for extended periods (such as by fast-paced urban lifestyles on our Stone Age hunter-gatherer bodies). The result is higher energy demands that trigger a shift in what the brain considers “normal.” Damaged allostasis expresses itself in hypertension, depression, addictive behaviors, and many other modern ills. Properly functioning allostasis, on the other hand, is crucial for healing the brain and the body.

Doctors and family members should also be aware that while a stroke survivor may be nonverbal, they might still be fully conscious and sensitive to their emotional environment. Taylor acknowledges that being around someone who’s had a stroke can be stressful, but she warns that a stroke survivor can pick up on that stress and may strongly react to others’ negative emotions. What stroke patients need most is to be treated with gentleness, compassion, patience, and respect. Doing so can help give them the necessary courage and feelings of support to face the difficult challenge of recovery.

(Shortform note: Responding to a stroke survivor with empathy—a sense of connection and understanding—rather than sympathy, which conflates sadness and pity, can put you in a painfully vulnerable position, so much that people who deal with it regularly can suffer from compassion fatigue. However, in Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach advocates accepting your own pain in order to show true compassion for others—a compassion that reinforces your connection and helps you give support to those in your life who need it.)

Recovery itself doesn’t adhere to any timetable and will take different shapes for different people. Arbitrary benchmarks and schedules should be ignored, and every step forward should be celebrated in order to give the stroke survivor the encouragement needed to keep going. Taylor points out that it’s important to remember that the person who recovers after a stroke will not be the same person they were before. Friends and family need to cherish the person they become rather than dwell on the person who was lost. In addition, Taylor says that what’s most encouraging of all is to always treat the person you love as if you’re certain they’re going to recover. That, in itself, may be the ultimate boost they need.

(Shortform note: Because stroke recovery is a difficult process fraught with challenges and setbacks, it’s important to help stroke survivors maintain a positive outlook. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor argues that such an outlook is a mental habit that can be learned through practice. The benefit of such a habit is the self-perpetuating cycle it creates. A positive mindset reinforces itself by recognizing and grabbing opportunities for progress. In addition to celebrating each success, as Taylor says, such a mindset increases feelings of gratitude and connection to a wider community of support.)