'Stroke of Insight' spreading across America

By Mark Bennett
THE TRIBUNE STAR (TERRE HAUTE, Ind.)

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. April 17, 2008 09:49 am

— Jill Bolte Taylor tells an amazing life story. Lately, the reaction to that story amazes her.

She’s explained her gripping saga, full of irony and drama, all over America for several years.

But when the 48-year-old Terre Haute native recounted her recovery from a devastating stroke to a cutting-edge crowd in California last month, her story suddenly found an infinitely larger audience.

On Monday, Taylor will be in Chicago. Oprah Winfrey wants to interview her for a July installment of “Oprah’s Soul Series,” a program on XM Satellite Radio. Since Taylor’s 18-minute presentation at last month’s TEDtalks conference in Monterey, Calif., major publishers have shown interest in her 2006 book, “My Stroke of Insight,” and Hollywood and Broadway producers have inquired.

“It’s all very exciting,” Taylor said Wednesday by telephone from Bloomington, where she lives and works.

The fascination centers around a life-changing morning — Dec. 10, 1996.

At the time, Taylor was a 37-year-old instructor and researcher at Harvard University Brain Tissue Research Center. That day, her studies of the human brain became crushingly real. Taylor woke up in her Boston home, realizing all too well that something dangerous was occurring inside her head.

In a four-hour span, a rare, congenital malformation of blood vessels unleashed a major hemorrhage inside her brain’s left hemisphere.

She phoned a colleague, but struggled to explain her calamity. Her ability to walk, talk, communicate and remember vanished. “I essentially became an infant in a woman’s body,” she said to listeners in Monterey last month.

With her expertise, Taylor understood what was happening to her.

That knowledge, along with the support of her mother, G.G. Taylor, helped Jill endure a long recovery, heal and restore herself, and actually emerge as a better, more compassionate person.

She eventually resumed her academic career, and currently teaches neuroanatomy for the Bloomington Medical Sciences Program at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and studies brain cancer cases at IU’s Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute. Taylor also has traveled the country as “The Singin’ Scientist,” armed with a guitar and a glass jar full of preserved brains.

Then TEDtalks happened.

That annual, four-day event features both household names and fascinating people yet unknown outside their fields. The 50 guest speakers must deliver their message in 18 minutes or less to a who’s-who audience of more than 1,000, including corporate high-rollers and actors such as Robin Williams. Those attending paid $6,000 a seat to hear lectures, this year, by luminaries such as Al Gore, Amy Tan (who wrote “The Joy Luck Club”) and Jordan’s Queen Noor.

It’s the latest, hottest, above- and under-the-radar lineup in technology, entertainment and design — hence the acronym, TED.

Even amid such a stimulating cast, Taylor’s 18-minute talk stood out.

“The place went nuts after my presentation,” she said. “The place just exploded, and they loved on me and loved on me, and then I went back and figured that was that.”

But that was just the beginning.

Video of her appearance hit the organization’s popular Web site www.ted.com. Within 24 hours of its posting, that clip got an estimated 250,000 views. It wound up embedded in 80 different Web sites. E-mails from interested fellow scientists, researchers, stroke patients and their families, and curious folks poured into Taylor’s queue, and that tide hasn’t lowered much since.

“I am essentially validating the stories of these people who’ve had these right-brain experiences,” Taylor said.

The left brain, where her hemorrhage occurred, handles methodical thought, the past, the future, the self, she explained. The right deals with the present and its atmosphere and our connection to others. With her left brain frozen by her stroke, Taylor lived a right-brain existence, focused on the humanity and life surrounding her. Through her recovery, she’s seen how that enhanced appreciation can benefit others.

That’s the message she carries in her book, and in that presentation now spreading across the Internet.

“For me, it’s been an absolutely beautiful experience,” Taylor said.

Mark Bennett writes for The Tribune Star in Terre Haute, Ind. He can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com.

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.