Time for another TED Talk talk! This time it is about one of my all time favorite subjects amongst all my eclectic grab bag of interests, brain science. Neurology. The science of the MIND!

Hey, when you live between your ears like I do, you begin to wonder about the neighborhood!

And this talk is gripping on a few levels, because it consists of not only science fact, but one person, one scientist’s harrowing, terrifying, yet highly illuminating personal tragedy that gave her a great deal of insight into more than just science.

She got a glimpse into a very different mode of being.

Now before we start on her amazing personal story, I just want to say that I had no idea, before now, that the right half of the brain is parallel and the left half is serial. It makes sense, and actually makes for a very powerful combination. The parallel right brain gathers an enormous breadth of information from the world, filled with subtlety and rich with information. The left brain then sorts through this sensory feast and turns it into sequential consciousness. And all this happens so seamlessly that our frontal lobe can add its pattern seeking predictive powers, the amygdala can give it all emotional context, and the whole thing can be sythesized into one single big process that we are happy to call our “everyday consciousness”.

Just think, even as you read my words, this whole complicated orchestra is coordinating and combining in your head and you do not feel a thing. It is so good at its job that even knowing all this crazy stuff is going on means nothing. Just seems like another day at the office to you.

It is like a very well run stage production, where in the background there is what looks like madness and chaos but is actually highly complex levels of coordination and order.

But all the audience sees is a play, and because it is so well produced, the audience can forget all the details and just enjoy the story.

Now on to Jill Bolte Taylor’s personal story. I was completely unprepared for it. This was, after all, a TED Talk, and she began her talk in quite acceptable academic yet accessible TED mode, and then wham, a bombshell, the fact that she had a massive stroke in her sleep and woke up in a very terrible state, medically and scientifically speaking.

This immediately freaked me out a fair bit, and I am feeling a little freaked right now just writing about it, because this is exactly the sort of nightmare scenario that I worry about. I have a lot of weird mental moments, where my consciousness is not at all normal, and it is only through a concentrated effort for a long period of time that I learned not to panic myself over these moments by imagining they all mean that I am having a stroke or that I am finally going crazy.

So hearing her tell the story of waking up in a highly disordered mental state and that actually literally meaning she was having a stroke and in great danger and yet being unable to get it together enough to get melt at first… well, let’s just say it stirred the embers of a long suppressed fear and made me wonder about the amount of mental noise I suppress just to get through the day in my sad little life, and makes me wonder how much of that might actually be signal.

It helps that she tells her story with such charming casualness and wit, and that we can see that clearly, she is fine now, so we do not have to worry about how it all turns out.

And I was quite pleased when she talked about thinking something like “Wow, what a great opportunity for a brain scientist, to be able to observe her own brain while it breaks down!”, because I had been thinking more or less the same thing and feeling sort of guilty about it.

So when she said that, I laughed out of both humour and relief.

But what really impressed me about the whole thing is how she had basically had a transcendental experience of the exact same kind that others achieve through prayer, meditation, drugs, fasting, and so forth and so on.

The feeling of oneness with the universe, the perception of the universe as being entirely made of energy, the discovery of the infinite eternal now… these things all map precisely to the spiritual revelations of mystics, prophets, gurus, and other transcendental experience seekers all over the world and throughout history.

But this time, it was happening to a scientist who was in the unique position of being able to understand some of what was actually happening in her brain, and so she could interpret the experience without being entirely overwhelmed by it and leaving her grasping at straws to find a way to express it.

The idea that this transcendental experience has something to do with shutting off the left hand side of of the brain fascinates me. One might be tempted, after hearing about he transcendent euphoria, to say “To hell with the left brain, it sucks! I want what she had!”

But remember, it was her left brain that saved her life, and the lack of it that made saving herself so difficult. Spending time in the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind might well do all of us a lot of good, but it is no place to raise your kids. Like she said, she was basically an infant.

And I think it is a tribute to her very strong mind that she was able to keep it together enough to eventually get some help and save her own life, instead of just dissolving into La La Land and never coming out because she died there.

Still turned her into somewhat of a mystic, but then again, after what she has been through, who can blame her for being kind of a hippie?

I would honestly like to have the same experience myself.

Um, without the massive brain trauma, obviously.