Video: Brain Researcher at Harvard Talks About Her Stroke and More

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight. The brain she is holding in the video is a real one.

Read the transcript. From the TED Conference:

"Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another."

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. "It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader."

The byline of TED is "ideas worth spreading." Not surprisingly, Dr. Taylor's talk is about more than her own stroke:

"So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading."

Link via O'Reilly and Scobleizer.
YouTube link to the video.