Stroke of Insight

From the new book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey:

I was literally thrown off balance when my right
arm dropped completely paralyzed against my side. In that
moment I knew. Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! I’m having a
stroke! And in the next instant, the thought flashed through
my mind, Wow, this is so cool!

…Feeling cast out of synchrony with the life I had
known, I was concurrently disturbed and fascinated by what
I was witnessing as the systematic breakdown of my
cognitive mind.

Jill Bolte Taylor describes the experience in detail, as well as her well-organized recovery, in a compelling memoir.

As a trained neuroanatomist, I believed in the plasticity of my brain – its ability to repair, replace, and retrain its neural circuitry. In addition, thanks to my academics, I had a “roadmap” to understanding how my brain cells needed to be treated in order for them to recover.

…In my own unique way, I had become severely mentally ill. And I must say, there was both freedom and challenge for me in recognizing that our perception of the external world, and
our relationship to it, is a product of our neurological circuitry. For all those years of my life, I really had been a figment of my own imagination!