Had a stroke and lived to describe it? This neuroscientist did.

My coworker lent me the book, “My Stroke of Insight” by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D in which she describes her experience of having a stroke and her thoughts during each moment as the hemorrhage in her brain spread blood over various parts of her brain’s left hemisphere that control important functions such as speech (Broca’s area) and understanding of speech (Wernicke’s area), limiting her ability to use them.

As a neuroscience major, the book was a good review, though not heavy in neuroscience jargon that you wouldn’t enjoy it if you weren’t one. As a well-known neuroscientist, Dr. Taylor is able to pin-point the areas of her brian that were being affected by her stroke, thus shining a valuable light on what a person may experience during a stroke. While reading her account of the stroke was interesting, what made me really love this book was how she tied in the duality of the right and left brain (how they do different things, but work together to make you a complete functional person) with how we as individuals react to situations everyday and explains which part of our brain, the right or the left hemisphere, is responsible for different functions.

A tidbit that I found particularly interesting is her explanation of anger and various emotions that we feel. When emotions get triggered, within 90 seconds, the response will have fully surged through your body and then completely flushed out of our bloodstream. Thus, if we remain angry after those 90 seconds, it is because we have voluntarily chosen to let the circuit keep running and not because it is not necessarily something chemical within us that is causing the reaction.

The more that we run particular circuits in our brain, the more our neurons will tend to fire in that direction.

From this book I realize what may perhaps be my greatest fear, and that would be “Being trapped within my own mind, not able to communicate with the outside world even though I am fully conscious inside.” A frightening example would be, one where you are anesthetized for a surgery and you wake up in the middle of it and can feel all of the incisions, but from the outside you look like you are still knocked out so no one knows that you are feeling the pain because they cannot see your reactions. Scary thought huh? In Dr. Taylor’s case, during part of the story she knew what she wanted to say, but when she went ahead to try to convey it, she didnt have the language to communicate it because the blood had invaded her Broca’s area, the area that controls her ability to speak.

At the end, she talks about her recovery and suggestions on how others can help stroke victims rehabilitate by going through what helped her the most after the surgery. It took her 8 years to “recover” with the help of friends and especially her mother. I put “recover” in quotes because she had to relearn how to read, do math, and all the basic functions such as walking, understanding what certain things meant, etc, so in a sense she doesn’t really see it as recovery, but more like relearning.

The book is a really good read (quick one too) and I would definitely recommend it to those in search for a little inspiration. Imagine going from having a Ph. D and all of this knowledge to becoming an infant (mentally) and having to learn the facets of the world all over again.

If you’re looking for some other good reads (nonfiction):