Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard trained neuroanatomist, experienced a major left sided stroke in 1996. In this episode, she tells her story of resilience, perseverance, and the power of the connection and attention her mother bestowed on her. She gives us insight into her eight years of being differently abled, her inability to communicate like everyone else around her, and her feelings of vulnerability and vitality. Jill asks us to question the concept of "normal" and believes that to look at (and celebrate!) one's abilities is powerful and essential. She speaks to all parents, healthcare workers and educators. Dr. Taylor is Author of "My Stroke of Insight," and "Whole Brain Living," and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2008. She is the Founder of Jill Bolte Taylor BRAINS, Inc, a not for profit organization.
You can follow Dr. Jill on Twitter
@drjbt
Visit Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's website
http://drjilltaylor.com
Dr. Jill's Ted Talk, "My Stroke of Insight"
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight
The Harvard Brain Bank
https://hbtrc.mclean.harvard.edu
Fifty Trillion Molecular Geniuses Musical Composition
Cecelia Chorus of NY commissioned The Brothers Balliett for a musical composition, Fifty Trillion Molecular Geniuses, with texts drawn from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book and TED Talk My Stroke of Insight. The piece was performed at Carnegie Hall on Dr. Jill's 60th birthday.
Read more: https://ceciliachorusny.org/updates-contact/brad-doug-balliett-composing-fifty-trillion-molecular-geniuses
Moshe Feldenkrais and The Feldenkrais Method®
The Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education was developed by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais. It is a powerful approach to improving life that uses gentle, mindful movement to bring new awareness and possibility into every aspect. The Feldenkrais Method is based on principles of physics, biomechanics, and an empirical understanding of learning and human development.Since how you move is how you move through life, these improvements will often enhance your thinking, emotional regulation, and problem-solving capabilities. Read more: https://feldenkrais.com
Anat Baniel and NeuroMovement®
Anat Baniel, a student of Moshe Feldenkrais, developed and evolved NeuroMovement® from 30+ years of experience with thousands of clients using practical applications of brain plasticity principles. The Anat Baniel Method® approach is founded in neuroscience and the biodynamics of the human body, and utilizes movement and the 9 Essentials to create conditions for the brain to wake up and upgrade its own functioning.
The Nine Essentials
Essential 1 – Movement with Attention; Wake up to Life
Essential 2 – Slow; Luxuriate in the Richness of Feeling
Essential 3 – Variation; Enjoy Abundant Possibilities
Essential 4 – Subtlety; Experience the Power of Gentleness
Essential 5 – Enthusiasm; Turn the Small into the Great
Essential 6 – Flexible Goals; Make the Impossible Possible
Essential 7 – The Learning Switch; Bring in the New
Essential 8 – Imagination & Dreams; Create your Life
Essential 9 – Awareness; Thrive with True Knowledge
Read more about the Nine Essentials:
https://www.anatbanielmethod.com/about/neuromovement/neuromovement-and-9-essentials
Recommended Reading:
My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
Whole Brain Living by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor (Available May 2021, published by Hay House)
The Feldenkrais Method by Staffan Elgelid, Chrish Kresge, with forward by Jerry Karzen, this book includes perspective from 26 leaders and experts in the Feldenkrais field. It explains the importance of learning through movement with the brain’s attention as a means for physical and cognitive improvement and transformation. (Available May, 2021, published by Handspring.) Pre-order at feldenkraismovementbook.com to receive 10% off and free shipping in the US/UK.
Awareness Through Movement by Moshe Feldenkrais
The Potent Self by Moshe Feldenkrais
Kids Beyond Limits by Anat Baniel
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Notable Quotes from This Episode
You are welcome to share the wisdom from this episode. Please be sure to credit: “Ep. 6, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, Courtesy of Wisdom Shared Podcast with Carole Blueweiss.”
"How does our brain create our perception of reality?"
"I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I became a complete infant in a woman’s body. I was minutes from death."
"I knew nothing. I had no information in my left brain… I had no perception of my past. I was isolated completely in the present moment. It took eight years to recover all function of my left brain."
"I was nothing but a breathing body in a bed. That’s how my mother described me."
"I don’t use the term “victim” because I survived that day. I prefer that instead of calling people stroke victims—the victims died, the survivors survive—I encourage people to call us stroke survivors. It makes a difference. Words have power."
"If you’re going to be a good teacher, you have to go to the level of the student."
"When I experienced the stroke, I had incredible right brain ability. I was completely turned on to body language, physical language—all kinds of gifts of the right brain—far beyond the normal person. I could tell in an instant if someone was telling the truth or telling a lie, because the cells that could distract me from being able to tell that someone was telling a lie were turned off."
"I was very blessed. And this is one of the greatest gifts Gigi gave me. From day to day, I couldn’t remember yesterday or the day before because all I had was the present moment. She kept reminding me of what I couldn’t do yesterday. She was enthusiastic about my ability to get better."
"Every step is a celebration. I had to stay focused on what I could do, not on what I couldn’t do. So much of our society focuses on the disability. Let’s focus on and enthusiastically say YAY to what’s working, and then 'what’s the next thing I can learn?'"
WISDOM SHARED PRODUCTION TEAM:
Produced by: Dr. Carole Blueweiss
Audio Engineering: Keith Pyatt
Marketing and Promotion: Coby Green-Rifkin
[00:00:00] Carole Blueweiss: Welcome to episode six of Wisdom Shared. My name is Carole Blueweiss, and my special guest today is Jill Bolte Taylor. Hers is a story of resilience, perseverance, and human connection. Today, she gives us insight into what it was like for her to be differently abled, to have special needs, to be vulnerable and to be vital in spite of the inability to communicate like everyone else around her.
[00:00:36] Jill was a Harvard trained neuroanatomist, researching and teaching brain science when in 1996, at age 37, she experienced a severe stroke on the left side of her brain. Everything she knew, how to talk, walk, recall any part of her life was gone. After eight years of hard work that included the love, support, and wisdom from her mother, G.G., Jill recovered.
[00:01:04] Jill Bolte Taylor: So here I am now. You know, the day before, I was what she called her Harvard doctor daughter. That was what she called me. And then the next day I was an infant drooling in bed with no ability.
[00:01:17] Carole Blueweiss: Jill says her goal was not to be that Harvard doctor daughter again. She says that girl died. And so Jill goes on to build her new identity small step by small step. From her firsthand experience, Jill offers us advice on how to connect with others who are differently abled or who have special needs, whether they are children or adults. Society and caregivers focus so much on disability where Jill focused on her abilities, on all that she could do, not on what she could not do.
[00:01:52] We can learn to begin to understand the power and importance of meeting our children, patients, and students where they are in the moment, and that means looking at their strengths and their possibility.
[00:02:05] A brief note about some of the methods and people Jill brings up in this interview that may be unfamiliar to you. Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais developed a way of upgrading oneself by using mindfulness, awareness, and movement to help reach one's potential. Anat Baniel was a student of Feldenkrais and went on to evolve the work into the Anat Baniel Method of NeuroMovement or ABM, which is based on nine essentials. To learn more about these methods and the nine essentials, please refer to the show notes.
[00:02:39] Now let's listen to Jill's experience, her profound discoveries, and her wonderful wisdom. Jill Bolte Taylor is here with me. Many of you already know who she is. I am going to attempt a short introduction here, Jill, and you can let me know if I miss anything.
[00:02:57] Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay.
[00:02:58] Carole Blueweiss: You are not only a huge advocate for stroke survivors, you're also an advocate for the mentally ill and spent many years on the board of directors for the grassroots organization NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
[00:03:14] Your jingle, 1-800-Brain-Bank, written by you was sung throughout the country and you became the singing scientist as a way to educate and encourage brain donations for the Harvard Brain Bank, of which you were their national spokesperson. You are a stained glass artist, a stone carver, an educator, a writer, and your new book will be soon released.
[00:03:37] You are a musician. You earned a PhD in neuroanatomy and worked as a neuroanatomist researcher at Harvard Medical School and at Indiana University. You were a professor. A symphony orchestra piece was created called 50 Trillion Molecular Geniuses, and performed in your honor for your 60th birthday in Carnegie Hall by the Cecilia Chorus of New York, and they used the words of your book as inspiration, and I can attest it was spectacular. You were also interviewed by Oprah for her Super Soul series. Oh yeah, Time Magazine also included you as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Did I miss anything?
[00:04:23] Jill Bolte Taylor: I sound like I've been very busy. Out of all of that, what matters most to you?
[00:04:29] Carole Blueweiss: There's so much that matters to me and what's most important, I'm doing this for my listeners, so I really want everyone to consider reading your book, My Stroke of Insight, because there's just so much there and there's no way we can cover it all today.
[00:04:42] The irony of someone who was as young as you were in the profession that you were in, a brain expert, you would experience such a major stroke, live to tell about, and describe it and have a remarkable recovery that you then were inspired to help other people through their trauma. And today I was hoping to focus on your inside to the outside perspective and your firsthand experience of what it was like to have this brain trauma, this stroke.
[00:05:12] And what it was like for you and how your experience may help parents understand their kids and what they are feeling or going through. And also for caregivers, to help them understand what their patients might be going through. Tell us what happened on December 10th, 1996, just to give the listeners a sense of this journey that you've been on.
[00:05:35] Jill Bolte Taylor: Sure. Out of all of that, grew up to be a neuroanatomist, studied the brain because I have a brother diagnosed with the brain disorder, schizophrenia. And my brother's only 18 months older than I am. So I realized at a very young age that he was very different from me in the way he experienced the world and then chose to look at it and interact with it.
[00:05:59] You know, I'm just a little girl living a life looking at my brother, thinking mom's not mad at us. She's terrified that we're gonna hurt ourselves. You know, there's a significant difference in how we interpreted facial expression, tone of voice, and just experiential. And so I became aware of our differences at a very early age, and as time went on, I wasn't sure.
[00:06:28] All I knew was that we were different from one another. And it was pretty clear one of us wasn't normal. But what's normal? And our society doesn't define what is normal. Our society defines what is not normal. And so actually by the time my brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I was relieved to know that, okay, well then I'm probably the more neurotypical one. And by that point, I had already invested in an education that would teach me what is normal. And to me, neuroanatomy was the answer to that. Psychology, psychiatry we're all looking at disease conditions and alternative to normal. I wanted to understand the brain and understand what is normal.
[00:07:11] So I studied neuroanatomy and became a neuroanatomist, and then I was 37 years old and I was at Harvard Medical School teaching and performing research into specialized in schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, at a cellular level, trying to understand how does our brain create our perception of reality?
[00:07:33] And what is different about someone like my brother's brain where the cells are communicating differently than in the normal brain? And then one day, I woke up and I experienced a major neurological disorder of my own. I had a ticking bomb inside of my head that I did not know was there called an Arterial Venus Malformation.
[00:07:55] So this thing explodes in my brain one morning and I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I became a complete infant in a woman's body. And I was literally minutes from death when I arrived, the busy beehive of Mass General Hospital emergency room, and they stopped the bleeding. And then three weeks later, I had to have brain surgery in order to remove this blood clot the size of a golf ball.
[00:08:25] And I knew nothing. I had no information in my left brain. My right brain, on the other hand, was working okay. But the right brain is about the present moment. And the present moment doesn't have a relationship to the past or to the future. All it has is what is happening right here, right now. And then it took eight years for me to completely recover all function of my left brain.
[00:08:47] Carole Blueweiss: Wow. One could call that a miracle. I'm sure you have other words for it.
[00:08:52] Jill Bolte Taylor: Or a lot of hard work!
[00:08:53] Carole Blueweiss: A lot of hard work. I mean, and that's -
[00:08:55] Jill Bolte Taylor: A lot of hard work.
[00:08:56] Carole Blueweiss: Hard work. And a mentality and a mother and obviously very good doctors and a whole support system. But a lot of it came from, yeah, your inner strength and your intent to do what you needed to do.
[00:09:11] And one thing that really struck me was in the very beginning when you were at the hospital, you describe in your book so well, that feeling of being a child again. Of being a baby again, your recall of your mom coming and like you just said, you weren't sure exactly what a mom was, but yet she climbed into bed with you. Can you tell us about what that meant to you?
[00:09:33] Jill Bolte Taylor: Because I had no left brain, I had no perception of my past and my past is my relationships, so I was alone. I was completely isolated from, it didn't matter if people who I knew were around me, I didn't know them anymore because I had to have a left brain in order to be able to define myself as an individual, as well as have language in order to communicate with the external world.
[00:09:59] So because the left hemisphere shut down, I was isolated. Just completely in the present moment, and to me, everything became energy. The left brain takes information of the present moment and creates a structure on it so that it can define details, it can create language so that we can communicate with one another through words.
[00:10:21] I felt as though I was as big as the universe. I didn't have that preconceived notion that I begin and end at my skin. And so to me, I'm an energy being as big as the universe and the people around me are energy balls. I saw them as balls of energy. I didn't see them as, oh, that's Dr. So and So.
[00:10:41] I had zero communication going on. Everybody's excited, it was day three because my boss had called G.G., my mother, and said Jill's had a stroke, but she's been stabilized. Well, in my mother's mind, stabilized meant I was okay. You know, I would have some residual of this stroke, but I was 37. No one that was expecting it to be this big thing.
[00:11:03] So she thought stable meant I was gonna be okay. And so G.G. walks in and she realizes, you know, I'm nothing but a breathing body in the bed. That's what my mother described me as, a breathing body in the bed. And she looked at these doctors and she looked at me, and she was devastated by the condition that I was in because it was clear I was a major stroke victim here. And I don't use that terminology, because I survived that day. So I really prefer that instead of calling people stroke victims - the victims died, the survivors survived. So I encourage people to call us stroke survivors.
[00:11:40] Carole Blueweiss: Yeah.
[00:11:40] Jill Bolte Taylor: It makes a difference. Words have power.
[00:11:42] Carole Blueweiss: Sure.
[00:11:42] Jill Bolte Taylor: So, G.G. comes in and she's looking at me and she's saying, you know, this is my baby girl. This is my infant. And she said there was nothing else for me to do. What do you do in order to comfort and nurture your child? You wrap them in your arms and you love them. I didn't even know what a mother was, much less who my mother was. G.G. just comes in, puts her stuff down, opens up the sheets, crawls in bed, wraps her arm around me, and starts to rock her baby.
[00:12:13] So here I am now. You know, the day before, I was what she called her Harvard doctor daughter. That was what she called me. And then the next day, I was an infant drooling in bed with no ability. And I didn't know what G.G. was, but everybody was excited over the last couple of days. G.G.'s coming to town, G.G.'s coming to town.
[00:12:33] It's like, what's a G.G.? And it's like, oh, this is a G.G. Oh, this is nice. You know, because somebody was actually having physical connection with me and comforting me. And my mother was a mother and in, you know, her heart and soul, she was a lot of things. But boy, that girl was a mama bear. And she crawled right in and wrapped her love around me.
[00:12:56] And what that said to me was, I'm not alone. Here's my teammate. Here's my vocalization into the world. This woman is going to help me find my way. Because I was completely lost. I knew nothing. So just to know that she was on my side and that I had a teammate was the beginning of everything.
[00:13:19] Carole Blueweiss: Wow, that is so powerful. Because me being a medical professional, I'm a physical therapist, I feel that we don't get enough education, and I speak for, I think, all medical professionals who are in this system, of what it's like to be the patient. We don't really get that empathic. I mean, how can we? There's only so much you can understand without having experienced it. So what was so interesting is that you talk about what you were feeling. How can we as professionals, or your mother had it intuitively, but how could parents get to that part of them where they can feel what is needed for their children or for their patients?
[00:13:59] Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, I think one of the most important things G.G. did that day was she came to my level of being. I was a lump of lead in the bed and I had nothing to give, and the only way that she could give to me was to come to where I was. And in order to do that, she had to completely calm her energy.
[00:14:23] She had to shut out all of her busyness and all of her fear about the external world and about everything else, and she had to concentrate and focus and be present with me. And I think that, you know, as soon as she's present with me or any professional would come in and be present with me, then I felt like I could be safe in their care.
[00:14:46] But if somebody came in and they were clearly on their phone or they were unhappy or busy or they never looked me in the eye. Take a big deep breath or two before you walk in my room and then come in. Let whatever was on your mind drift away. And when you come in, be calm with me. Be present with me, connect with me.
[00:15:06] Look me in the eye. Touch me appropriately. But if I'm a stroke survivor, I may have no clue who you are. Even though I've seen you for the last four days because you've come in to do rehab. But I'm not connected enough to be able to know that. I can't differentiate enough. My thinking is not refined enough to be able to distinguish you from the other five people who've come in and done things with me.
[00:15:31] So tell me who you are. Remind me who you are. Don't treat me like I'm stupid, but treat me like I'm wounded and with that respect of I'm wounded, come back in and say, Honey, it's good to see you. And take my hand and look me in the eye and really calm and connect with me. Tell me your name. Tell me why you're here. So if I'm a child and I have a disability, and even if you're my parent, if my brain is not connected in a way that offers me refined thinking, then I cannot distinguish between you and the other 20 people who I've been in the presence of.
[00:16:10] So we come in making all these assumptions about what you know and what you don't know. And if you're going to be a good teacher, you have to go to the level of the student. If you're, if I don't even know what a one is and you're gonna teach me math, you can't move into addition.
[00:16:28] Carole Blueweiss: Right. It reminds me of someone coming into a room instead of listening first, you start to talk at somebody. And what health professionals and even mothers can't hear it enough, is that the listening part is where so much information is. I mean, I don't know if that's related to how you speak about energy, but it really can't be ignored that there is this nonverbal something that goes on between two people and that has to be acknowledged.
[00:16:58] Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, it has to be acknowledged primarily because it is the fundamental form of communication. So when we're born, both hemispheres are functioning like a right hemisphere, and the right hemisphere is about the big picture of things. So I'm gonna be watching you as you come in, and I'm going to notice if you're paying attention to me or if you're distracted with something else.
[00:17:23] I'm gonna notice if you are speaking really loudly to me. If I have aphasia, you're scaring me. You're, it's not about, I don't hear you. It's about I don't understand and I don't have the capacity to understand you. So really paying attention to what is the body language that you are bringing to me? What is the verbal cues and the facial expressions that you are bringing to me?
[00:17:49] And if you're constantly attached, and I keep going back to technology, because the level of addiction of us to our technology is off the charts. And, you know, that thing ought to go in your pocket. And unless it buzzes you for a professional reason, it ought to stay in your pocket because otherwise you're communicating to me, well, I'm busy, I'm preoccupied with my phone. And my phone and what's going on somewhere else and another space and time is more important than what's going on right here.
[00:18:19] And I'm sorry, but it takes work for me to pay attention to you. So I have to want to work with you if I'm going to work with you, because that takes effort. It takes energy, it takes focus, it takes my willingness and to try and to retry and to miss. And it hurts, the agony of recovery. People don't understand, but it hurts in order for us to try to create new learnings.
[00:18:45] So let's say that you parachute out of an airplane and you land in China and you don't speak Chinese. All these Chinese people come running to you and they're speaking in Chinese to you, and there's this overwhelming sense of, oh my gosh, first of all, am I safe? And if I am safe, I can't understand. I can't understand. And so then we all have to slow down and figure out, okay, well, how do we communicate with one another other than through the use of language?
[00:19:17] So it's really important that you recognize you are a communication. You're, you walk into a room and you've just given off a hundred messages to people who are sensitive to reading that kind of messaging. And if I don't have my left brain working functionally and distinguishing between details like a normal left brain does, then it can first of all be an overwhelming amount of energy coming at me, and I need it to calm down and I need it to come slowly and more specifically so that I can focus my energy on what you think you want me to focus on.
[00:19:56] Carole Blueweiss: Even as a mother of a child or as a medical professional with the attitude that you have to learn who is this person in front of you? Because actually everybody's different as opposed to you are the diagnosis. And especially for the parents of kids out there, labels and these names of what you have. And that takes away from that unique person in front of you. And I think you do such a great job of identifying the importance, and the actual crucial missing link, to a lot of how people are treated in the medical system. Or even if you have a disability as a child, once you get that label, you lose your individuality. And, you know, what is normal.
[00:20:34] Jill Bolte Taylor: Right. So this is where I think the value of neuroanatomy comes in. You know, we are just a collection of cells. This absolutely magnificent and glorious collection of some 50 trillion cells. And each and every one of those cells contains the exact same DNA as that original zygote cell, which was half the DNA of mom and half the DNA of dad. When someone comes in, let's say I have some kind of a damage, whether it happens in utero and I have some kind of disability when I come out, essentially disability defines the cells that are not functioning.
[00:21:11] So there are a bunch of cells that are functioning. We're probably still breathing, our heart's still beating. Our arms may still be moving, but whatever a disability is, it's really cells that are not functioning. If cells are disturbed but not dead, then it's a matter of how do we encourage the other surrounding cells to stimulate those cells that are not functioning normally inside of the net so that they can participate actively and become normalized and we can experience recovery.
[00:21:43] If a group of cells has died, well, we have duplicate. We have two different complementary halves to our brain, and we know that if you have damage before puberty in one or the other hemisphere, the cells in the opposite hemisphere can be trained to take over that function because they're morphologically physically designed to perform a function.
[00:22:06] So depending on what the trauma is and what the disability is, it's really a group of cells that may be working in connection with one another in circuits in order to show a patterned response of problems. So if you're gonna have a diagnosis of autism, for example, you're going to have groups of cells that are functioning fine, and then you're gonna have certain groups of cells that are functioning differently.
[00:22:34] So these people are differently abled, and I think it's really important that we look at it as differently abled because when I experienced the stroke, I had incredible right brain ability. I was completely turned onto body language, physical language, all kinds of gifts of the right brain, far beyond the normal person. So I could tell in an instant if someone was telling the truth or telling a lie because the cells that would distract me from being able to tell that someone was telling a lie, those were turned off.
[00:23:11] Carole Blueweiss: Yeah, that's fascinating.
[00:23:12] Jill Bolte Taylor: If you, now, if you've lost your left hemisphere and it's not functioning and distracting your right brain, then you have a whole new skill set that you can sell. So go to the police department and let them know you can tell when people are telling the truth and when they're telling a lie.
[00:23:28] You have to look at people as differently abled. When I look at anybody who is differently abled, what have they gained? And so even with the diagnosis of autism, many of these people have incredible skill sets that we don't, in our left brain skewed dominant society, have a lot of value for or focus on because we want a good, strong left brain. But what are they really good at? And based on what they're good at, how can we then rewire that brain? Because that's what you're asking to do. How do we wake up the brain cells so that these other functions can come online as well?
[00:24:07] Carole Blueweiss: Yeah, and that's more to so fit into our binary black and white society. Unfortunately, in an ideal world, we would just create the world that they would thrive in.
[00:24:18] Jill Bolte Taylor: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:24:19] Carole Blueweiss: Right?
[00:24:20] Jill Bolte Taylor: Exactly. Oh yeah. If you look at the brains of individuals with schizophrenia, these people are amazing. And there are societies in the world that actually value the schizophrenic brain and they treat them as special people in order to gain more of an access to a different kind of thinking that does have benefit, but not in our left brain skewed society of the US.
[00:24:46] As far as we're concerned, this is a problem that needs to be fixed, where other societies might look at different people who have different gifts as a result of the way that they are wired and value them, be it something like a shaman or some type of energy healing that requires much more of a right brain focused energy ability that the left brain doesn't understand and doesn't value because it's not what we would describe as normal. And that goes back to your how does a society define what is normal? And it's like, you know, go back to that bell curve and if 70% of the population is going to say, this is what is normal, well, that's totally subjective.
[00:25:34] We could all decide in an instant that something else is our normal. And that that's what we're gonna value and that's what we're going to reward, as opposed to what we currently do. So what is normal become subjective.
[00:25:50] Carole Blueweiss: Right. Back to your mom. I mean, the brilliance of what your mom did, I don't know if it would be the right brain or the left brain of her, or the combination, but on so many levels was tuned into you completely. And she had that motherly desire and intuition to do that. And that's not to say that you didn't have to work really, really, really hard, but she made you want to work.
[00:26:15] Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah, she set me up for success. She paid attention to what I could do, and she gave me every opportunity to try to do that safely. So here's an example. So, I was highly motivated. Why was I highly motivated? I don't know. But I was highly motivated, you know, a little voice inside of my brain said, I'm alive.
[00:26:40] I'm alive and here I could not walk, talk, read, write, no recollection of my life. And I really had to start as that infant. And part of that was, you know, she had to teach me how to walk. She had to teach me how to roll over and sit up and stand up. She was all of my PT, she was all of my OT, because she was there full time.
[00:27:04] When I needed to go to the bathroom, I don't know how I communicated that to her, but it maybe she just knew it was time for me to like go try. And so eventually I was standing at the sink and I remember standing at the sink and I had both my feet squared deeply so that I could lean in and have my tripod and I could hold myself up.
[00:27:26] And I thought, okay. You know, and she showed me, you know, dishes, water. She showed me water and I wanted to try to do the dishes because I wanted to get that right arm to work again. And so it was more like a stub, but, you know, I could still manipulate it enough to be able to do this. So, I'm washing these dishes and I'm, you know, I'm sticking 'em in this rack over here.
[00:27:50] Well, you know, it takes two or three plates wrongly placed, and the thing is full. You know, there's nowhere to put any more dishes. So I had zero geometry, I had zero analysis. I had zero judgment of how do I put,, you know, 10 plates or bowls or things in this dry rack, and G.G. is watching me do this and realizing, wow, you know, one step at a time and the next obstacle was for her to show me how these things line up inside of the dish rack so that I could fit more things.
[00:28:31] And so it was that constant of unfolding.
[00:28:35] Carole Blueweiss: Attention.
[00:28:36] Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah. She paid attention to what was my next obstacle, what could I do, and what was the block for me to gain the next awareness. So that I could take the next step in learning.
[00:28:49] Carole Blueweiss: The way we met was at an Anat Baniel Method NeuroMovement training, and a lot of what you're talking about, what your mother did, is a lot about that way of working with kids and people. Do you want to talk about how that resonates with you? This way of working with people, the Anat Baniel Method and Feldenkrais method and methods like that, that work with the brain?
[00:29:10] Jill Bolte Taylor: I'm a neuroanatomist, which means I study the anatomy of the brain. And I'm a cellular neuroanatomist. So I think about the brain as a group of cells, and it's a world unto itself. And then you put, you know, a bunch of those together, and now you're looking at these biological systems and saying, okay, well how do they interact with one another? And how do they influence one another? So if you look at a tree and the leaves are out, and you can look at the leaves on that tree and you can say, oh, that tree has a disease.
[00:29:41] The tree's not well, and you can tell because the color of the leaves isn't vibrant or they've wrinkled. So you're not going to try to heal that tree by healing the leaves, right? That are like the thoughts and the emotions of the human being. You're gonna go to the roots and you're gonna treat that tree at a root level and the root of everything human, or everything that is alive, is the level of the cells.
[00:30:09] And so the reason why I love ABM and Feldenkrais and the man himself, wow, what a human being. They go to the cells. Let's say I've got a lower back pain, and so the problem's not a problem with my back. More than likely there could be, but the problem is at the level of the cells in my brain.
[00:30:30] And so in order to protect the body, the brain cells, they say, now we're gonna move that area like a block. And so then the surgeons go in and they do whatever repair they're gonna do. Six months later, person may still move like a block. Because nobody bothered to tell the brain at a cellular level that it's okay now. It can go back to more refined connection to the individual pieces making up that block.
[00:30:56] So that's why I love Feldenkrais and ABM and try to figure out, well, what is happening actually between the body and the cells, the brain? Why is it so effective? And the reason why it's effective is it's going back to the root of the problem and the root is going to be the brain cells. Everything, in my opinion, goes back to the brain cells.
[00:31:20] Once a rotator cuff problem and the surgeons go in and they fix that problem, then the shoulder's fine, but it still moves like a big old brick or a big old block if it moves at all, because you have to go back and wake it up to the brain so that the brain can divide its cells back up into very refined movement pattern.
[00:31:40] Carole Blueweiss: Why Moshe Feldenkrais, I think, was such a genius, is that the idea of movement affecting the brain as opposed to just looking at the brain affecting movement, that it's the brain or the roots of the tree that you're trying to address, not just that local nonintegrated area.
[00:31:56] Jill Bolte Taylor: Right. That's the key. It's the integration. I mean, that's, that is it. It is integrated to itself as a mass, but that's not where the power is. You have to hook it up to the power system. And the power system is the brain. And if the brain is just sending out a big bloom, you're gonna have big movement. But if you've got a whole bunch of different fibers going to all those different little muscle fibers, that's when you regain the refinement of that movement.
[00:32:25] And that's why I believe these techniques work from the outside in. If you come in and you just say, okay, I need to you to just be able to abduct or adduct or whatever, flex that shoulder, you can do that for me and my brain can move in a block and say, okay, now I can do these big movements, so I'm done. And it's like, well, we know that's not true. There's a hundreds, if not thousands of little beautiful movements that that shoulder can make, that allow me an incredible level of artistry and agility.
[00:32:57] Carole Blueweiss: And part of that beauty and intricacy might come from the foot.
[00:33:02] Jill Bolte Taylor: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:33:05] Carole Blueweiss: So when parents of children come to you, if their child had some kind of a brain trauma?
[00:33:11] Jill Bolte Taylor: I send them to ABM. I send the whole world to AnatBanielMethod.com. Anat does for other people what I did for myself. And she communicated that to me by giving me her book on the nine essentials. And I read it on the way home. We were both presenting on neuroplasticity at a conference in New York. And the one on the nine essentials was so exactly what I did intuitively on my own from the inside out in order to gain my own recovery.
[00:33:47] And I was so relieved and excited about this method because people who are trained in that technique do from the outside what I did from the inside. And that's why it's so effective. I don't know another example of a me of who was that far gone and has recovered this well. I mean, I'm a thousand percent and full force in my energy level and my functional level and my focus level because I practice those nine essentials in my daily living.
[00:34:19] Carole Blueweiss: Nine essentials. Can you explain what those are?
[00:34:22] Jill Bolte Taylor: Let's say I'm a stroke survivor and you come in and you're going to work with me. Well, the first thing you need to do is you have to get my attention. So when you look at the nine essentials, let's go through them together, and I'm gonna start with slow because everything has to happen in slow motion for me to be able to attend to or learn anything. Anything that a biological system can do quickly, it can do quickly because that path is already rooted in and active.
[00:34:52] Well, if I'm having a problem and I want to learn something new, I have to back off of the fast and I have to do it just my new micro movement. In order to figure out how do I get from A to Z, I have to go slowly and learn.
[00:35:10] Carole Blueweiss: Learning a new skill, the way to learn it is to go slow. Once you know that skill, then you can go fast. In our society, I think it's so hard to slow down.
[00:35:20] Jill Bolte Taylor: Slow's where it is. If I'm going to try to figure out how I have to organize all these different muscles in my body to be able to walk across the room, I can do it quickly. Because I have trained my body and those circuits inside of my brain are well developed.
[00:35:35] But if there's been a break in the connection, or I've been blocked off because there's been a trauma, now the brain says, okay, we're gonna move that like a block. Because any intricate movement creates pain and we want to protect ourselves from more trauma. Then I have to try a lot of different micro movements in order to find my way.
[00:35:56] And if you're going to do a micro movement, you have to do it exquisitely slowly. Exquisitely slowly because it is in the slow where you're saying to a cell, I want you to do something new. And learning at the brain level is nothing more than a group of cells creating new connections among themselves to create a new pattern response. That's all it is.
[00:36:21] So if you're going to learn, you have to slow down and go to the slowness of the cells. And that way then you're giving direction to the cells of what you want. And so part of it is intention and attention to that movement. If you come in and you start moving my arm around, well, that's great because at least my arm is getting some movement.
[00:36:48] It is sending a signal back to the brain. But if I am purposefully focused on and intentionally trying to do something, and even if it's a micro-movement of possibility, I'm actually communicating with the brain cells inside my head that this is what I want and they will perform. Cells in the brain are amazing. They're amazing.
[00:37:13] I mean, look at us as human beings, but you have to slow it down. And go to the level of the cell, and that's why it's better if my learning switch, which is one of the essentials, my learning switch is turned on, which means I'm alert, I'm aware, and I can pay attention in this moment. And if I'm exhausted and I'm tired, or if I'm, if I have PT scheduled for 3:00 and I'm just absolutely exhausted at 2:30 and I will, I need to fall asleep and a typical sleep cycle is 90 to 110 minutes, and you come in, in the middle of my REM sleep, then I'm just no good to you because my learning switch is not turned on. I'm exhausted and other things are taking over inside my brain in order to keep my systems going. And respecting sleep and respecting the quality of sleep and the cycle of sleep I think is so important.
[00:38:09] Carole Blueweiss: Yeah. And that's, it's so difficult to do in our society, right?
[00:38:12] Jill Bolte Taylor: It is.
[00:38:13] Carole Blueweiss: Like, I know when I work with people who have had stroke, they are very tired often. And, you know, there is that fear that if you sleep too much, you'll get weak and you'll go in the opposite direction. On the other hand, sleep is so important and you make that so clear in your book and from your experience.
[00:38:30] Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah, G.G. let me sleep 12 hours. She learned early on if she awakened me to feed me or get me on some other schedule, I was irritable. I was unhappy. I had this incredible pain inside of my head. You know, I used the phrase cooking. It was clear I was not cooked. And when we sleep, our temperature goes up and all kinds of things happen inside of the brain. The garbage is taken out. The waste is cleared out of the brain, which is why if we don't get adequate sleep, we feel foggy. It's because the garbage cleaners come out at night and clean up the city, you know?
[00:39:07] And if you don't clean up your office, you know, on a regular basis, you know what that looks like. Well, imagine what that's like for a brain that is having a hard time trying to make sense out of the external world. So respect the cycle of sleep, if at all possible.
[00:39:20] Carole Blueweiss: And everybody will have a different cycle.
[00:39:22] Jill Bolte Taylor: Everyone will be different. So enthusiasm, as one of the essentials, from my perspective, if I'm on the inside, I needed to believe that I had the ability to get better if I put the effort into it. And so I was enthusiastic about learning. When I was approached for learning during my learning switch time, when I was alert and eager and ready to do it. If I'm hungry, forget it. If I gotta go to the bathroom, forget it. If I'm half asleep, forget it. I'm no good. I can't learn like that.
[00:39:55] But otherwise, I was very blessed, and this is one of the greatest gifts that G.G. gave me, was that from day to day, I couldn't remember yesterday or the day before, because all I had was the present moment and she kept reminding me what I couldn't do yesterday and she was enthusiastic about my ability to get better.
[00:40:17] Now compare that with the stroke survivor who has a doctor come in and say, if she doesn't have it inside three or six months, a year at the longest, forget it. She's never gonna get it back. Well, you say that to any organic system. And the people around me hear, oh my God, we're in a hurry now. And if Jill isn't better inside of three months, then she's lost her window of learning and forget it.
[00:40:41] And then we're, she's stuck wherever she is. And so everybody's enthusiasm goes way down. And we're not celebrating the wins. And we had to celebrate the wins. And if the wins meant something as small as I can now, instead of rolling over in the bed, and if I can get to the point where I can roll over and you can teach me how to help in that twist, and I can sit up.
[00:41:07] So now I can just put my feet on the floor and stand up. That's something worth celebrating. I mean, I'm not going to the floor, going to all fours and pushing up. I'm not taking 10 steps now. I've cut that to five. That's worth the celebration.
[00:41:21] Carole Blueweiss: Well, step number one, I mean, any part of that, is the celebration, right?
[00:41:25] Jill Bolte Taylor: Any! Every, every step is a celebration.
[00:41:28] Carole Blueweiss: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:41:28] Jill Bolte Taylor: And I needed that. I needed that enthusiasm within myself of I did it. Achievement. I had to stay focused on what I could do, not on what I could not do. So much of our society focuses is on the disability instead of, I just had this horrendous stroke.
[00:41:47] My heart cells are still beating, my diaphragmatic muscle is still allowing me to breathe. My whole left side is still functioning. I can still tell when my bladder capacity is full. I mean, there are a billion things that are still working on me. Let's focus and enthusiastically say yay to what's working, and then what's next? What's the next block? What's the next barrier? What's the next thing that I can learn?
[00:42:15] Carole Blueweiss: And I think it's so important that you say that because there's also mixed messages. Like you don't wanna say that everything someone does or a child or you don't wanna clap. What am I trying to say?
[00:42:26] Jill Bolte Taylor: But I do want the overall clap. I want you to come and look at me like I'm a miracle of life. And I got some problems. Yeah, well, we all do, right? And we're gonna focus on those problems. But overall, I'm okay.
[00:42:40] Carole Blueweiss: Now what about like, Anat will say this? She'll say, a child will do something. Sometimes she'll say, don't clap. Because I think what she's getting at is she wants the child to feel that success and not have that success interpreted for them so.
[00:42:55] Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, but the overall picture is that child needs to know they're good and they're loved and you're connected. And that's the enthusiasm. It doesn't have to be an applause of a behavior. It's that child needs to enthusiastically feel of value, and then with everything that it achieves, then yeah. I wanted the wins. I needed G.G. to celebrate the wins, and I knew I had wins because everybody was calling on the telephone all the time and G.G. was saying, oh my God, she couldn't do this yesterday. She can do this today. And I got to hear her hope. And I need hope more than anything. At the core of everything, I need hope.
[00:43:42] Carole Blueweiss: It's great to hear you articulate that. As obvious as it is, to hear someone who's been through it and has, how it affected you is very powerful.
[00:43:50] Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah, I needed that. I needed that. I really needed the people to focus on I was good. I was fine. Our goal was never to get me back to whom I had been before. Me being a Harvard doctor daughter, that was gone, that girl died. We needed to grieve that loss and let her go because these cells were so severely disturbed. That if that was my goal, if sitting up is your goal, I'm going to fail.
[00:44:21] Carole Blueweiss: So that brings us back to what you said in your book, and you said it already here, that meeting the person where they are. And not taking a child who is not ready to sit up or to walk, just because they're of a certain age.
[00:44:35] Jill Bolte Taylor: Right. So you can't come to me and say, okay, the goal is to sit up. You have to go to the cells and say, these cells are not connected at all. So I can't get from A to Z. I have to make the connections along the way. And the brain has to figure out, okay, well, and then try a million different variations.
[00:44:57] Carole Blueweiss: In rehab, that's not necessarily how rehab is done, is not necessarily to go to that micro level and painstakingly slowly watch those learnings step by step. It's more the get to the big step.
[00:45:10] Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah. Well, you gotta get to the big step because the big step is what's gonna get you more PT. So there's the treat, there's the carrot, I gotta get that carrot, or I'm not gonna be able to get anymore carrots. And it's like, well, so if that's the goal, if I have fear that I'm not going to achieve, then that gets in the way of everything. If you have fear that I'm not going to achieve, then that gets in the way of everything.
[00:45:33] So part of it is knowing if you believe you have to build it up from the inside out instead of from the outside in. And you trust that if I can get all of this in here to work, if I can get those roots to grow again, then the rest of the tree can blossom. You gotta go to the cells, you gotta go to the micromovement.
[00:45:54] Carole Blueweiss: That leads us to subtlety.
[00:45:55] Jill Bolte Taylor: But I'm gonna match subtlety with imagination because if I imagine, and I did this for so much of my recovery, I would imagine pushing my foot up against a wall. And if I could get up against a wall and I had the energy to do that, then I would have my mom push a chair up against the wall and I would just push, push, push against that wall in order to kind of say, there's the stimulation and here's the cell. Build that circuitry. And if I couldn't access that and I'm laying in bed, I could still in my imagination recreate that, push that reconnection.
[00:46:38] When people come in and they say, squeeze my hand. Well, if I'm disconnected, I don't know what a squeeze is, and I don't know what a hand is. It might take me hours of painful focus to try to figure out what's a squeeze and what's a hand. And so then by the next time another person comes in and they just happen to hold my hand and I squeeze their hand and they're going, oh, she squeezed my hand! She squeezed my hand! And the doctors are saying, you know, no, that's a reflex. We asked what, five hours ago, and I'm going, oh my God! You know, I figured out what a hand is! I figured out what a squeeze is! I've been waiting for somebody to stick their hand in there so I can, like one chance, I get one chance because I don't have any energy. And boom!
[00:47:19] Carole Blueweiss: Yeah, that's crazy.
[00:47:20] Jill Bolte Taylor: And then the message I receive is, don't bother to try.
[00:47:25] Carole Blueweiss: That's so interesting.
[00:47:26] Jill Bolte Taylor: We're going to place this external judgment and things don't work like this. You know, it takes time for cells to reconnect and figure themselves out.
[00:47:36] Carole Blueweiss: Such a basic idea that the measuring tool is not measuring what it says it's measuring.
[00:47:41] Jill Bolte Taylor: Right. And that's part of it. If you are asking a biological system to learn something new or to do something different, you're making the judgment of success or failure on your time table. That's wrong because I'm experiencing trauma, which means you can't say, squeeze my hand, and I squeeze your hand. It might take minutes or hours for me to learn. I don't learn on your timetable, then you judge me as failed. And that's not fair.
[00:48:10] Carole Blueweiss: Any other essential you want to talk about?
[00:48:11] Jill Bolte Taylor: I think flexible goals is really important. Because if you have the intention of me doing something a certain way, I'm probably going to have to try, that goes back to variations, a whole lot of different pieces of possibility in order to get to your one goal. If you want me to abduct my shoulder and that's it, you don't care about all the millions of little movements that it takes of me moving all those muscle systems in there in order to get to that movement. And so I may end up having to pull more on maybe my anterior fibers of even my pecs in order to get myself there.
[00:48:55] If you don't value that, and all you want me to do is, you know, those trapezius muscles, boom, the deltoid, boom. That's it. You will train me to the limitation of that. We will groove that into my brain as the movement and all that subtlety of possibility will be lost.
[00:49:13] Carole Blueweiss: Yeah. As opposed to maybe that information of trying to do that will get you on another path.
[00:49:18] Jill Bolte Taylor: Exactly.
[00:49:18] Carole Blueweiss: Let's try something different now.
[00:49:20] Jill Bolte Taylor: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:49:22] Carole Blueweiss: Is there anything else you'd, in general, that you'd like to?
[00:49:24] Jill Bolte Taylor: I think looking at the brain, looking at whomever you're working with, looking at your partner, your children, looking at everyone, your client as a beautiful collection of cells and saying, okay, what is step one to get them to step 100? And not jumping in at step 50 to get to step 100. Listening, being aware.
[00:49:49] Carole Blueweiss: Thank you so much, Jill. You really did help us understand so much your way of communicating to us in words that we understand. You help us to empathize. And because you've been through this and you have the professional language, it's, but not only that, I mean you're just, your generosity of just trying to, you genuinely, I met you. You genuinely wanna help those children, those parents, those stroke survivors.
[00:50:12] And you really are an example of really caring and obviously, but your mother had that as well. And we can see the power, call it energy, call it love. But you do have something special, and I really appreciate that you shared that with us because it'll hopefully multiply 20 times after this is done and people will hear this and really be inspired by you and want to help other people. And thank you for sharing your private world. You have a new book coming out. I don't know if you want to say what it's called?
[00:50:42] Jill Bolte Taylor: It's a beautiful book. It's gonna come out May 11 through Hay House, and it is all about really getting to the root of our thoughts and our ideas at the level of the brain instead of just approaching it from the outside in, but really understanding what's going on and which groups of cells and what do they feel like and how can I have relationships with them and really work at the level of the cells as characters inside of our brain. It's an amazing book, I have to say it. And it's gonna be a lot of fun to take out into the world.
[00:51:15] Carole Blueweiss: Maybe, hopefully you're gonna be going into more detail about the right brain and left brain.
[00:51:19] Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh yeah.
[00:51:20] Carole Blueweiss: Thank you so much for being here today.
[00:51:23] Jill Bolte Taylor: Thank you. [singing] Brains is what I do. I'm a brain banker, asking for a deposit from you. Don't worry, I'm in no hurry. Have you considered the contribution you can make when you are heaven bound? Your brain can hang around and help humanity find the key to unlock this thing we call insanity. Just dial 1-800-BrainBank for information please. Educate and donate. It's free!
[00:52:08] Carole Blueweiss: On the next episode of Wisdom Shared, join me in conversation with Beril Tokcan, a single mother and author who is raising her nine-year-old twins in Turkey, one who is differently abled and one who is neurotypical. Her book, I Am Free Now, was just translated into English and will be available soon.
[00:52:33] Thank you so much for listening to Wisdom Shared. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to check out all our other episodes. Visit caroleblueweiss.com. If you like what you are hearing on Wisdom Shared, please spread the word and share this podcast with your friends. Leave a review and subscribe so you can receive wisdom every month.