In this powerfully moving video, brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor recounts what it felt like to have massive stroke. She describes with intense passion the experience of watching her brain functions shut down one by one, losing speech and motor functions, and ultimately losing self-awareness, culminating in a feeling of oneness with everything.
Her experience brings to mind the stories of enlightenment and transcendence found in many mystical and spiritual traditions.
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Awesome. Even got teary eyed at the end… go figure.
While liking the idea of a transcendent experience, I am not certain I am wanting a stroke to 'get there'.
Along similar lines, there is the book — Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg . Where they scanned brains of folks who were high level meditators and seemed to find the region of the brain where the leap to mystical/transcendent moments tend to arise.
I got teary eyed too. I can't imagine what it must have been like to watch her own brain shut down bit by bit, to be aware of what was happening but to be utterly helpless to do anything about it. It must have been terrifying. That makes it all the more amazing to me that she was able to come away from the situation with such beautiful insight.
I haven't read the book you mentioned. I'll add that one to my reading list.
Kris,
thanks for sharing that video – what a powerful talk by a powerful woman. I love how she can hold the transcendent nature of reality simultaneously as her "strange creature body." she never reduces her experiences to the brain, either (unlike Newberg btw). rather she seems to suggest that the right hemisphere is picking up on a material reality that our culture happens to not promote. wonderful!
Hi Ryan,
It's so refreshing to see such an open approach from someone in the scientific community. I love how she's willing to give equal weight to all the possibilities, and you're right about how she never reduces the experience to a purely brain-driven phenomenon. Maybe someday science will be able to explain the transcendent nature of reality, or maybe not. I'm a skeptical mystic, so I'd love to see it happen, but at the same time I wonder if defining and labeling the experience via a scientific explanation would dilute the impact of it. Sometimes the otherness of the experience is what makes it so powerful. So I'm torn about it, which is why I find videos of talks like hers so fascinating.