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Interview: The stroke survivor who trained her own brain - NS

On 10 December 1996, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke
when a blood vessel ruptured in her brain. Robbed of her memory, motor
skills, even personality, she retreated into herself and dwelled
primarily in her brain's right hemisphere. During the eight years to
full recovery, she found ways to control her thoughts and rebuild her
mind. She tells Michael Reilly why the stroke was the best thing that
ever happened to her

What did the stroke do to you?

Because the haemorrhage was in my cerebral cortex, it wiped out my
cognitive mind. I was very fortunate, though, in that my body was
going to be OK.

Describe the days that followed.

I was in hospital for five days. On the morning of the third day my
mother came to my side. Now, I did not know what a mother was, much
less who my mother was. She came in, acknowledged everyone in the
room, and then immediately picked up the *** and crawled into bed
with me. I didn't know who this person was. I didn't know what this
person was. All I knew was that this very kind woman just crawled into
my bed, wrapped her arms around me and started rocking me, like I was
her baby. And I was her baby. She just recognised that I was an infant
again and that was that.

What did you do for your rehabilitation?

The only formal rehab I had was speech therapy. I saw a speech
therapist for about three months. My real rehab was done by my mother
from the day she brought me home. She was an angel in my life. She
would take me to the bathroom, feed me and then if I had any energy
left she would work me - children's puzzles, teaching me to read,
walking me around the apartment and then the block, those kinds of
things. I would not be here if it were not for her.

The advantage I had was that I believed in the ability of the brain to
recover itself. That meant primarily for me to get out of its way.

How do you get out of the brain's way?

My number one recommendation is sleep. The brain needs sleep. These
cells have been traumatised. The person is totally burned out and
fried, and they want to sleep. In our society, generally what happens
in a rehabilitation environment is that wake-up time is at 7 am.
Everyone gets awakened. If you are a stroke survivor and you are zoned
out and don't want to be awake, you will be pumped with amphetamines.
Stimulus is stuck in your face, often in the form of a TV set in the
room, sometimes literally a foot from your face. It's pure pain. And
then we keep these people awake through dinner. After dinner they're
put back to bed. The idea is that if you're going to recover, you have
to act like a normal person. If that had been my experience, honestly
I would have chosen not to engage. There's no question in my mind that
we're not treating stroke survivors effectively.

You have said that you retreated into the right hemisphere of the
brain. What was that like?

When I had the haemorrhage, the personality of my left hemisphere was
traumatised. I shifted all the way into the right hemisphere, because
the left-brain personality became non-functional and released her
dominance, or released the dominating neural fibres that were
inhibiting my right hemisphere. That's from an anatomical perspective.

As time went on, different circuits in the left hemisphere started to
become functional again. It was like repairs. So it was a long process
of me in relationship with my brain, day after day, year after year,
rebuilding. I was consciously choosing and rebuilding my brain to be
what I wanted it to be.

Did you actually consciously reconstruct your brain with your
thoughts?

Yes, renewing or rerunning neurocircuits was a cognitive choice. The
non-functional circuits started to come back online one at a time and
I could choose to either hook into that circuitry or not feed it. For
example, when the anger circuit wanted to run again, I did not like
the way it felt inside my body so I said "no" to its running. Every
time it tried to get triggered and run again, I brought my attention
back to it - I did not like the way anger felt so I shut it down. Now
that circuit rarely runs at all, mostly because I feel it getting
triggered and nip it in the bud.
“When the circuits came back, I could choose to hook into them or not”

It was so clear to me during my recovery that every ability I had was
because the circuit that controlled it was good, it was functioning. I
learned that certain thoughts that I had could stimulate the emotional
circuitry, which could then result in a physiological response.

So, I look at us as a collection of neurocircuitry of thoughts and
emotions and physiological responses. When you see the brain as the
kind of computer network that it is, it becomes easier to manipulate.
But you have to be willing. People say "Oh I'm so much more than my
thoughts, I'm so much more than neurocircuitry," and I'm like, yeah, I
had that fantasy once, too. I don't any more. As human beings we all
have the ability to focus our minds on what we want to think about.

This sounds like the claims made by meditators.

I think folks who meditate are willing to pay attention to their
thoughts so that they can purposefully redirect their minds. Mantras,
prayer beads, consciously thinking about one's breathing - these are
tools that provide the brain with an alternative to the constant brain
chatter, permitting the mind's focus to shift to something else. It's
the same sort of thing. There are people who are comfortable
witnessing their thoughts, while there are others who think they are
their thoughts. Learning to observe our neural circuitry and not
engage with it is a skill we all can learn.

When did you know you had recovered?

I felt I was completely recovered when I felt I had become a solid
again. Up until then I felt that I was a fluid.

What do you mean by becoming a "solid"?

I'd get up in the morning and take my dog out. I have woods out back,
and I knew I had recovered when everything blended, everything
radiated the energy of life - the trees and the light coming through
them, the grass and the sparkling dew. Everything was vivid, beautiful
and connected, and I was a part of it all. That's very different to
saying "I am a solid, and that's a tree and that's a blade of grass
and that's a drop of dew," and everything is separate. I don't know
how else to describe it.

You do a lot of stained-glass work now. Has your perception of the
artwork, and indeed your life, changed much since your stroke?

Oh yeah, everything's more vibrant, more alive and more beautiful now.
More fluid, more curves, fewer lines, more relative, less
disconnected, more similar, less different. Everything in my life has
changed like that since the stroke. If someone said to me, "Okay Jill,
we're going to put you in a time capsule and let you wake up that day
again and you get to choose to have the stroke or not have it," I
would have the stroke in a minute.

The Human Brain - With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity
is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.
From issue 2652 of New Scientist magazine, 19 April 2008, page 42-43
Profile

Jill Bolte Taylor studied neuroanatomy at Indiana State University.
She then worked at Harvard University, where she investigated the
influence of schizophrenia on the brain's perception of reality.
Having fully recovered from her stroke, she now teaches neuroanatomy
at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. Her
book, My Stroke of Insight, was published in 2006
.