My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

In December 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, experienced a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she watched her mind deteriorate within just a few hours, Taylor alternated between the euphoria of the intuitive right brain, in which she felt a sense of peace, and the rationality of the logical left brain, which recognized that she was having a stroke and enabled her to seek help. Here Taylor relates the lesson she learned—that by "stepping to the right" of our left brains, we can uncover feelings of well-being often sidelined by "brain chatter."