Jill explains with humor and self-deprecation how the portions of her brain affected by the stroke lead to loss of faculties. Blood is fatal to brain cells and when the rupture of a major blood vessel bathes the brain in blood, big swaths of brain cells die. (My first thought: how can blood be fatal to brain cells? What part of evolution was responsible for that little kink?)
More than 75% of hemorrhagic strokes happen in the left portion of the brain. I wonder about this. Do strokes occur in the left side more often because that side is busier or because that side is responsible for our negative ideas about life and ourselves? When you've had a stroke on the left side, you lose things like interest in achievement and success, time, society, fitting in, excelling. What about those who have a stroke on the right side and retain the capacity for despair while losing the big picture, and an innate sense of well-being that has nothing to do with accomplishment. I am fascinated by Jill's post-stroke thoughts about left and right brain. She says,
"Moment by moment, our right mind creates a master collage of what this moment in time looks like, sounds like, tastes like, smells like, and feels like.... In the absence of the rules and regulations that have been defined (by our left mind) as the correct way of doing something, the right mind is free to explore the possibilities that each new moment brings. By its design, our right mind is spontaneous, carefree, imaginative... and it allows our creative juices to flow free without inhibition or judgment."
The left brain on the other hand is not carefree. It organizes each moment of our life into linear and methodical configurations so that we know to put on our socks before our shoes. Our left hemisphere uses words to describe, define, categorize and communicate. Our left hemisphere examines a flower and categorizes it: stem, leaf, petal, stamen. The right brain feels the joy of the whole picture, feels beauty, smells fragrance and is enticed, soothed, excited, or sorrowful. The left brain dissects the image of a rainbow into ROY G. BIV. The left brain thrives on weaving details into story. It excels at academics and manifests a sense of authority over the details it masters.
The voice that moves us forward, task by task, stems from the left brain. When Jill's left brain in incapacitated, the "brain chatter" stops. Jill says,
"One of the jobs of the left hemisphere language centers is to define self by saying, 'I am.' Your brain repeats over and over the details of your life so you remember them.... I personally love the color red and am inclined to collect a bunch of red things -- I drive a red car and wear red clothes. I like red because there's a circuit in my brain that gets very excited and runs automatically whenever anything red comes my way. From a purely neurological perspective, I like red because the cells in my brain tell me that I like red."
But that is all left brain, and when her left brain is wiped clean so are many aspects of Jill's personality: her ability to read -- or even determine what letters and number are -- her ability to walk, to speak, to drive, to make sense of the cracks on a sidewalk.
Here's the flip side. The loss of left brain means a right-brain view of the world. Jill says,
"Although I experienced enormous grief for the death of my left hemisphere consciousness and the woman I had been, I concurrently felt tremendous relief. That Jill Bolte Taylor had grown up with lots of anger and a lifetime of emotional baggage that must have required a lot of energy to sustain.... In my present form, I had not inherited her fundamental hostility. With the obliteration of my memories, I felt both relief and joy."
It took eight years but Jill was able to recover most of her faculties. She explains how brain cells repurpose themselves by comparing the cells in different portions of her brain to kids at a playground. If the merry-go-round is taken away, she says, those kids will run to other parts of the playground and try to find another spot to play. The strongest aftereffect of stroke was holding on to the enormous relief that came with loss of the left-brain chatter. When her left brain begins to heal (i.e. cells that survived the stroke take up some of the work of the cells that did not), Jill writes that "it seemed natural to blame other people or external events for my feelings or circumstances" even while she knew it was unrealistic to blame others for how she felt. She even says she wishes there were a safe way to silence the left brain so that people could experience a right-brain existence, if only for a few minutes.
So I'm thinking of my two hemispheres. I'm picturing my right brain as a sort of pre-hippie Berkeley bohemian, long stringy hair, shapeless purple caftan trimmed in gold. At one time she studied modern dance. Her house is an absolute mess. My left brain is an army sergeant, one who has been kicked out of the service for lack of organizational skills and yet he tries valiantly to maintain some semblance of order. He sees that he doesn't have much sway over caftan woman but still he pokes me constantly, disgusted by my piles of paper, my unpacked boxes, my dining room table filled with things for Any Soldier, the fact that it takes me days to make it to the post office.
Jill describes how her perception of her own body shifted after her stroke:
"I no longer perceived myself as a solid, an entity with boundaries that separated me from the entities around me. At the most elementary level, I was liquid. Of course I am a fluid! Everything around us is made of atoms and molecules vibrating in space."
Our left brain makes our skin solid and impermeable to everything but air while the right brain feels us to be a part of everything around us. I drink my Earl Grey tea and try to let both halves of my brain have a taste. My left brain chatter reminds me of Rachey, who adores Earl Grey, and the Sullivans at the Ritz-Carlton every December and of being in London where I sipped Earl Grey by Hyde Park, watching as a huge black coach rolled past pulled by black horses with red plumes. I try to ease Sergeant Left Brain off the controls so I can feel a bigger picture, the cup smooth and warm in my hands, the tea fragrant and I feel myself as liquid, like tea, like water, like ocean, like air.
copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack
Here is Jill, talking about how her stroke changed her for the better:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
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