For years, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor devoted her professional life to studying the brains of people with severe mental illness. Together with her colleagues at Harvard Medical School, she researched the brains of patients with schizophrenia, convinced that scientific tools would eventually allow her to uncover the roots of the illness. She never imagined that the most profound insights of her career would emerge not from the laboratory, but from an unexpected source—her own brain.
It all started one December morning in 1996. Taylor woke up with a sharp pain piercing her head, just beneath her left eye. She tried to get out of bed and begin her usual routine, hoping the pain would quickly pass. Instead, her body refused to cooperate. Her arms and legs felt heavy and rigid, moving as if in slow motion.
When she attempted to step onto her exercise machine, she stared in disbelief at her hands, which suddenly appeared to her like enormous, clumsy hooves. A powerful sensation of disconnection washed over her, as though she was watching herself from the outside.
After struggling off the machine, she dragged herself toward the shower. When she turned on the water, she lost her balance. Bracing herself against the wall, she felt her physical body begin to dissolve. “I can’t define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and the molecules of the wall,” she said in a TED Talk.
As she tried to understand what was happening, she noticed something even more unsettling: Her mind had gone completely silent. The constant stream of thoughts, plans, questions, worries, and emotional turbulence that had always occupied her mind had vanished. “At first, I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind,” she said.
“But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was and merged with all the energy that was there, and it was beautiful there.”
From time to time, she felt compelled to remind herself: I am Jill Taylor. I have a serious problem. I need help. But moments later, she would slip back into a euphoric state of timelessness she described as a kind of “wonderland.” Over the next four hours, she oscillated between bliss and terror as the pain in her head intensified.
When her mind briefly cleared, she attempted to call for help. But how could she locate the correct phone number among a stack of business cards? How could she use the phone, dial the number, and explain that she needed assistance? After 45 minutes of failed attempts, punctuated by fleeting moments of clarity, she finally managed to call her workplace. When she tried to speak, no words emerged but only a jumble of syllables, groans, and sounds. The colleague who answered understood that something was terribly wrong and called an ambulance.
At the hospital, Taylor said, she sank even deeper into what she experienced as a wondrous state. Her body felt like a vast field of energy; the people and objects around her appeared to be the same clusters of energy immersed in an immense cosmic force. “My spirit soared freely, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria,” she said.
Doctors diagnosed her with a rare stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. By the end of that day, she had lost all function associated with that side of the brain.
‘Jill Taylor Died’
“I lost my rational thinking, my education, and my ability to speak,” she said in an interview. “I also lost the emotional history of Jill Taylor. I could not remember anything from my life. On that day, Jill Taylor died. I lost my individual identity.”
Then she added, with unmistakable joy, “But what I gained that day was an awareness of the present moment. I felt an immense, infinite love for everything around me.”
It took Taylor eight years to fully recover, regain her cognitive and motor abilities, and recover her memories. Before the stroke, Taylor wrote in her book “My Stroke of Insight,” she was goal-oriented, organized, controlling, manipulative, and judgmental. Emotionally, she carried with her a heavy load of painful childhood memories that often erupted as anger, jealousy, insecurity, depression, and a desperate need for attention and validation.
After the stroke, as the left side of her brain shut down, all of these traits, constructive or destructive, were erased. By any rational measure, she should have felt profound grief over the loss of her abilities and her personal history. She also lost what had been one of her central ambitions: advancing up the academic hierarchy at Harvard University. But the right hemisphere of her brain, which remained intact, did not care about any of that.
In the new reality shaped by her right brain, Taylor lived entirely in the present moment, without pain or regret over the past and without fear or anxiety about the future. She describes herself as a state of consciousness made up entirely of peace, love, compassion, and joy.
Rehabilitating her left brain was an immense challenge, as she recounts in her book. After three years, she could play solitaire again. After four, she learned to walk smoothly and fluidly. After five, she could solve simple arithmetic. After six years, she could skip up two steps. After seven, she began teaching anatomy at Indiana University.
And after eight years, she stopped perceiving herself as a fluid or pure energy and once again experienced herself as a separate, solid individual: “Jill Taylor.”
Searching for One’s True Self
Chris Niebauer, a professor of neuropsychology at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, spent years searching—often in frustration—for a way to achieve what Taylor and other stroke patients stumbled upon unintentionally: to detach from memories, thoughts, and the entrenched emotions of pain, grief, anxiety, and depression that had taken hold in his own mind.
In an interview, Niebauer said that early in his career, he believed he could free himself from these emotions by understanding how the brain works. This led him to study the brain’s mechanics, the way it identifies with the physical body, and how it filters the endless physical, social, and mental stimuli from the environment based on perceived importance. Yet the deeper he pursued this path, the further he seemed to drift away from his goal.
At the same time, he began to explore a very different avenue: the wisdom of the East. The research methods in Eastern teachings were radically different from those of Western science, which typically involve the construction of theories and then the design of objective experiments to test them. In Eastern traditions, by contrast, understanding the mind—and indeed the universe itself—comes through quiet, inward observation.
“One of the most fundamental insights of the East,” Niebauer explained, “is that our individual ‘self’ is closer to a fictional character than to something truly real.” In other words, the concepts and narratives formed in our own head since early childhood are not our true selves, but layers added on top of us. The question, then, is how to access the “true self” beneath them.
With the development of brain-imaging technologies such as MRI and fMRI, researchers attempted to answer this question scientifically. One line of inquiry involved separating the two hemispheres of the brain, a condition Taylor experienced firsthand.
“They discovered that the sense of ‘I’ is constructed by the left hemisphere, which also contains the language centers,” Niebauer explained. “There were a series of ingenious experiments conducted with epilepsy patients who had undergone surgery severing the connections between the two hemispheres.”
Following the surgery, scientists sent commands to the right hemisphere of the brain. For example, they might instruct the patients to stand up or raise a hand, and they would comply. Meanwhile, the left hemisphere, which had been ‘disconnected’ from the right hemisphere, had no idea why the action occurred, except for that it did happen.
“When researchers asked the patients why they were standing or raising their hand, the left hemisphere immediately invented an explanation,” Niebauer said. “They might say something like, ‘My leg fell asleep,’ or ‘I needed to stretch.’ And they were completely convinced they were right. This was a clue that the left brain invents stories and insists on certainty about everything happening around us. One of those stories is the idea of ‘self.’”
However, Niebauer said, scientists failed to locate the true “self” in the brain. “They never found it. This question has preoccupied neuroscientists since the 1960s and ’70s.”
Choosing Between Four Personas
This is where Taylor reenters the picture, hoping her rare experience can enrich the field with new insights. During her recovery, she explained, her primary motivation as a neuroscientist was to preserve and document what she had witnessed.
She vividly remembers how her right brain functioned after the stroke. “I had no words or language; I could only think in images. I had no linear sense of time, no past or future, only the present moment. I perceived the big picture but couldn’t focus on details. I focused on similarities rather than differences, and I had no judgment about the present. I simply accepted what was.” She called this mode of thinking “Persona 1.”
“When I was disconnected from my left hemisphere,” she continued, “I was also far more friendly, trusting, compassionate, and filled with unconditional love for those around me. This was the emotional aspect of my right brain. I called it ‘Persona 2.’”
When her left brain eventually returned to full function, so did her former patterns of thought. “I became rational again. I was thinking in words. I focused on the past and future and searched for differences. I was self-aware. I called this mode of thinking ‘Persona 3.’”
She also discovered the emotional side of her left brain. “I was selfish, aggressive, skeptical, and capable of love—but with conditions. I called this ‘Persona 4.’”
According to Taylor, we can train ourselves to recognize these four personas through inward observation and tell which one is operating at any given moment. Once we recognize their patterns of thought and emotional responses, we can consciously choose which persona we want to be in different situations. “Anyone can do this,” she said. “You don’t need to have a stroke.”
Q: How does this work in practice?
A: Imagine a colleague that harshly criticizes my work. Automatically, Persona 4—the emotional side of my left brain—kicks in. If I let it take over, thinking that it represents my true self, I become defensive, offended, aggressive, insecure, and irritable. But if I remind myself, from the perspective of a neuroscientist, that this is just a group of neurons firing together, something remarkable happens. The chemical substances associated with those emotions take less than 90 seconds to flush out of the bloodstream. Neurologically speaking, the emotional wave passes quickly. I call this the ‘90-second rule.’
Q: So you imagine what’s happening in the brain?
A: Yes. Of course, I can also choose—consciously or unconsciously—to keep holding on to those emotions. In that case, I repeatedly activate the same neural circuit. But if I don’t, or instead of clinging to the difficult feelings, I can invite other personas into the conversation. I can choose to be rational, or to respond with compassion.
Q: Does that mean knowing how the brain works allows us to control these personas?
A: It’s not easy, but it’s possible. It’s an anatomical choice—deciding which neural circuit to activate in a given moment. The more often you activate a circuit, the stronger it becomes, and the easier it is to return to. That’s both my scientific understanding and my personal experience. It’s like learning to play the piano. First, you have to really want to play. At the beginning it’s awkward, slow, and difficult. Over time, it becomes fluid. Eventually, you realize you can choose which thoughts you think and which emotions you feel, rather than letting them control you.
Q: Why, then, do most of us do the opposite?
A: It’s difficult in Western culture because we live predominantly in the left hemisphere. We are analytic, achievement-oriented, and competitive. That’s how I lived before my stroke. Our education system emphasizes this as well, often removing subjects like art and music that nurture the right hemisphere.”
At the same time, she noted, many people today practice mindfulness, meditation, and heartfelt prayer. “All of these bring us closer to the most sacred part of ourselves or to our connection with something far greater than us, who are like ants scurrying across the Earth.”
Niebauer agrees. One of the greatest challenges of Western culture, he believes, is our overreliance on analytical and scientific thinking and our fixation on the idea that such thinking can solve all our problems. “It doesn’t always work that way,” he said.
When we succeed in making the separation of personas that Taylor describes, Niebauer added, it is, metaphorically, like pulling the plug from an electrical outlet. “The first time I practiced this, I felt an enormous relief from suffering and anxiety.”
As we approach what he calls a state of “pure awareness,” decision-making—including moral judgment—often becomes easier. “It may sound paradoxical,” he said, “but the less we identify with our thoughts and simply observe them quietly, the clearer our thinking becomes. The best decisions arise from stillness.”
He offered a simple example: We are on the way to an important meeting and get stuck in traffic. Our navigation app predicts we’ll be 10 minutes late. Our mind immediately begins spinning stories. The boss will be angry. This will ruin the project. My credibility is at risk. When we believe these stories and identify with them, a wave of stress and anxiety follows. But in reality, we don’t know what will happen. Perhaps the boss is also stuck in traffic and will arrive even later. Our thoughts about the future, he says, often create unnecessary suffering.
“My conclusion is that the brain is an excellent tool, as long as we use it and it doesn’t use us.”