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Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. authored the best-selling book My Stroke of Insight; A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey after the Harvard neuroanatomist made a full recovery from a massive hemorrhagic stroke of her own.

In 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, was a 37-year-old neuroanatomist working at Harvard and researching the brains of the severely mentally ill. Fourteen years later, Taylor is a best-selling author and was named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2008. The recognition comes not as a direct result of her research into other people's brains, but rather, from the unique perspective she gained into the brain's functions as the survivor of a massive hemorrhagic stroke of her own.

Taylor wrote about her experiences with the debilitating stroke and her recovery in her book My Stroke of Insight; A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (Viking Press, 2008). The morning of her stroke, she was able to take note as one brain function after another shut down, and silently marvel at the process as a scientist even while experiencing a life-threatening medical emergency.

Hours later, she was rushed to the hospital where she was diagnosed with a rare arterio-venous malformation (AVM). Two and a half weeks after, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital would remove a golf-ball sized clot that was putting pressure on the language centers of her brain's left hemisphere. The slow recovery of all her lost functions would take another eight years.

Because of the remarkable nature of her recovery and the insights she gained into what stroke survivors may be experiencing and what they need from healthcare professionals, Taylor's book already is becoming required reading at many medical and nursing schools around the country.

Taking time from a speaking tour, Taylor discussed her thoughts about what she would like healthcare providers to understand about stroke patients with Medical News of Arkansas via an e-mail interview.

The hemorrhage in Taylor's left frontal lobe severely damaged the ability of her left brain to sort and process information and silenced the constant chatter of her mind's inner narrative. As a result, the Harvard scientist lost the ability to speak, walk, understand language, remember anything about her life, or even to distinguish the boundaries between what was a solid object and what was not. The quieter her left brain grew during that first morning of the stroke, however, the more her right brain flourished.

Taylor describes much of her stroke experience as a euphoric, peaceful state in which she was aware of the interconnectivity of the universe. The feeling of nirvana was so seductive that it took all the will and presence of mind she could muster to call for help and later, after it was clear she would survive, to make the decision to try to recover.

"I believe I did have an advantage because I believed in the ability of this beautiful organ to heal itself," she said. "Rarely do you find a medical professional who believes this and promotes this attitude."

While giving full credit to the surgeons and neurologists who attended to her hemorrhage and saved her life, Taylor said one of the things she needed the most from her medical team during her hospital stay was to let her sleep as much as her compromised neurocircuitry needed to begin repairing its broken connections.

"The brain knows better than anyone else what it needs to recover. If the person is exhausted because he is on stimulation overload and his brain is not capable of making sense of the incoming stimulation, then let that brain go to sleep and then awake on its own time," Taylor said.

"Second, we know that a typical sleep cycle is 90-110 minutes and that people who are not allowed to go into REM sleep become psychotic. It would be so easy to shift taking vitals from every hour to every other hour so the person could get their much-needed REM."

Other things she needed and received from her medical caregivers were similarly low-tech.

"I needed them to look me in the eye, speak to me directly and treat me with respect," Taylor said.

Her right brain in full blossom was especially sensitive to positive and negative energy. She explains, "I needed (people) to take responsibility for the energy they brought me. It was really important that my caregivers realize that I had shifted into a consciousness of deep inner peace and they had to make themselves really attractive energy for me to want to work as hard as I had to work, to try to connect with me. At that point of illness for me, there were only two types of people. Those who brought me energy and those who took it away."

Taylor told Medical News that true medical healers, the sort of people who helped make her recovery possible, are "medical professionals who actually see the person rather the disease, those who make an effort to make a connection with the patient and generally treat that person with respect."

She continued, "Those who are too caught up in their own minds, who can't be bothered to really see the patient as a person, are too busy or too burned out don't really show up as healers but are more engaged in medical maintenance."

Dr. Taylor recommends that clinicians be open to thinking about stroke differently. "I think it is really important that we always ask the question, based upon what circuits this person's brain no longer has functioning, what has this patient gained due to the neurological dis-inhibition?" she said.

Taylor said the most surprising and exciting discovery she made as a result of her stroke was that, neuroanatomically speaking, holding onto negative emotions and thoughts is entirely optional.

"Before the stroke I understood that I could focus my thoughts and train my mind to pay attention to certain things, but I had no idea that I could also control the circuitry of my emotions," she told Medical News of Arkansas. "Learning that I am merely neurocircuitry and that I don't have to run a negative emotion for more than 90 seconds has been a very empowering and freeing experience."

In her book, Taylor explains that she learned when her judgmental left brain was silenced that physiologically, negative emotions run their course in 90 seconds. Any bitterness, anger, pessimism or other such negativity after that time was a choice or habit, not an incontrovertible fact. She made a conscious choice to feel any emotion for the 90 seconds it took to process it and then let go anything that was not productive or positive. Taylor still uses this insight to live a life filled with simple joys.

Tying into this fresh sensitivity to negativity, Taylor said the language and attitudes commonly employed when discussing with stroke patients are often overly pessimistic.

"Please stop calling us stroke victims. Anyone who has survived a stroke is a survivor and should be treated like one!" she implores. "Also, who decided we suffered a stroke? I had a stroke, just like other people have a heart attack or diabetes. This negative terminology is unnecessary and not productive."

Taylor now teaches at Indiana University at Bloomington and travels the country discussing her experience and promoting the Harvard Brain Bank, a repository for brains of deceased mentally ill people to help researchers find more effective treatments for mental illness. She is also the consulting neuroanatomist for the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute.

She said one of the most important things clinicians and caregivers can do for stroke survivors is help keep their hope alive.

"We know that neuroplasticity is an ongoing process inside our brains and that on special occasions, some new neuronal growth can occur. We must stop telling patients that they will stop getting better after 6 months! It's just not true." Taylor said. "I documented my ongoing cognitive recovery over an eight-year period of time and there are lots of survivors like me."

From the start, one of the core motivations for her recovery, she wrote in her book, was the chance to share her story and insights with the world, and promote a greater understanding of what someone who has had a stroke may need to recover.

"The more medical professionals understand the differences between the right and left hemispheres, then the better understanding they will have about what the experience might be like for the patient…" Taylor wrote Medical News. "It warms my heart to know that My Stroke of Insight is being adopted as mandatory reading by many medical schools, nursing schools, PT, OT and Speech Therapy schools. Many physicians are already encouraging their patients to read the book so they can apply what I learned to their own personal experience."

Tags:

arterio-venous malformation, AVM, hemorrhagic stroke, Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight, stroke

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