Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight

Report I Title: Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight Link: http://www. ted. com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight. html Speaker: Jill Bolte Taylor Affiliation: http://www. drjilltaylor. com Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who dedicated her career to research into the severe mental illnesses. She had a stroke while she was researching about biological differences between healthy brains and brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder at1996.

One of her blood vessel exploded on the left side of her brain and it caused the stroke. In the seminar, she explains her observations about the 4 hour after the stroke as a neuroanatomist. According to her experience she could not able to walk, talk read, write or recall any of her life. In this talk, initially she explains the major functions of the brain with a real human brain. Then she clarifies her stroke according to these functions. She tells the results of her bleeding step by step with examples and helps us to imagine a stroke.

After all she finishes her speech with explaining her feelings after she survived and recovered. Beside Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight video, I watched videos about being happy “Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy? ”, about intelligence of plants “Stefano Mancuso: The roots of plant intelligence” and about brain damages “VS Ramachandran on your mind”. I generally watched the videos about brain and intelligence because I interested in the human intelligence and brain functions. Mr.

Gilbert’s talk showed me the effects of our psychological immune system to be happy, Mr. Mancuso’s talk represented me the intelligence of plants which is similar to animals’ and Mr. Ramachandran’s talk helped me to illustrate the brain functions of human while he was talking about the brain damages. All of these topics were interesting but I mostly interested in Taylor’s topic because she had a disease which is about her researches and she survived from it without any permanent damage. I liked to hear this neuroanatomy specialist’s own life experiments about brain disease.

Favorite quotes and sentences: “I essentially became an infant in a woman’s body. ” “For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. ” About Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight video, I did not understand why and how she felt that she is in nirvana after she woke up after the surgery. I strongly recommend this video to the other students because it is one of the most interesting speech I have ever heard.