The brain expert who lost her mind

Jill Bolte Taylor was a rising-star neuroscientist at Harvard University in 1996 when she suffered a massive stroke, said Erica Schwiegershausen in NYMag.com. The 37-year-old suddenly couldn’t walk, talk, read, or recall any of her life. After a blood clot was removed from her brain, “I had an absolutely silent mind for about two and a half weeks,” Taylor says, explaining that she felt like “an infant in a woman’s body,” unaware of who she even was. “And then my brain started to think in language again, and as my language came back online my world got bigger and bigger.” With no means of earning a living, she was forced to move from Harvard back home to Indiana. “I remember my mom teaching me how to read. She had to teach me sounds— a, e, i, o, u.” It took four years before she could read her old academic papers, and eight years to fully recover. Taylor, now 60 and a best-selling author and in-demand public speaker, says she initially mourned “the death of who I had been” following the stroke. But now “I’m so grateful it happened. My left-brain emotional system went offline, and with that went all my negative judgment—all my emotional baggage from the first 30 years of my life. It set me on a new path of possibilities.”