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DR. JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: This is my brain bar. It's my brain collection.
NARRATOR: As a neuroanatomist, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's passion is the human brain. That knowledge became invaluable one fateful day in 1996.
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: I woke up that morning, and I had a pounding pain behind my left eye. So I get into the shower, and as I turned the water on, there was this surge of sound that knocked me backwards. My arm was actually blending into the wall, and I could no longer define the boundaries of where I began and where I ended.
And my right arm went totally paralyzed, and that's when I realized, oh, my gosh, I'm having a stroke, having a stroke. But I felt zero urgency in the present moment. And it really wasn't until I tried to speak and I could not enunciate language, then I'm realizing I am in really bad shape here.
My one goal was to call my colleague, and I knew that he would get me help. But I could not distinguish the pixels making up letters versus the background versus the symbols. I had no concept of a number. So matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad-- [LAUGHS], it was quite a task.
By the time I was in the ambulance, I was so disconnected from normal reality, from external world, family, job, anything. I was a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. It was beautiful. It was beautiful and peaceful. I arrive at the emergency room, and they take my body and they start manipulating me.
NARRATOR: Dr. Taylor had suffered a hemorrhage in the cerebral cortex, the brain's processing center of sensory information. As surgeons evaluated Dr. Taylor, her mother Gigi raced to the scene.
DR. JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: And I don't know what a Gigi is. All I know is everybody's excited that Gigi's coming. So my mother comes in, and she lifts up the sheets and crawls in the bed, and she wraps her arms around her baby and she rocks her baby. So I thought, oh, this is a Gigi. This is nice. I liked it. But I had no understanding of what a mother was. All I knew was that this was Gigi, and this was love.
NARRATOR: But a radical surgery and long rehabilitation still lay ahead.
DR. JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: Once the surgery happened, I immediately felt this brightness in my spirit again. Gigi came in and she's just saying, speak to me, speak to me, speak to me. And I could speak. I had language. And that was the new beginning.
When I was growing up, I was very musical and very artistic. Gigi eventually showed me my music space, and she would hold an instrument against my body and pluck the strings so that I could feel that vibration. She reintroduced me to my world.
I used to live my life based on what I'm doing in my job and climbing the ladder. I was very content being in the lab for hours upon hours alone and having very little human connection. And since the stroke, I'm much more gregarious and much more interested in having people around and having meaningful connections with people.
You know, in this moment, am I going to get mad at you, or am I going to be compassionate with you? You can either engage with that level of anxiety and frustration, or you can turn on your favorite music and you chill. So for me, living fully in the world is living where I can pick and choose. We all have the ability. It's a choice.
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