大象传媒

“Over the course of four hours, I watched my brain go offline, circuit by circuit, until I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life.”

Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist who used the experience of suffering a stroke to map her own brain circuits failing. Then, drawing on her phenomenal knowledge, she eventually rebuilt her new self.

Jill leads Nicky Campbell deeper into this mind-blowing story via a route map of our brains. A journey exploring psychosis, schizophrenia and our subconscious, via hippocampi, amygdala and the lesser-known thalamus. What was so special about Einstein’s brain? How is our grey matter linked to reptiles? And the biggie - what is the meaning of life?

Jill has been interested in brains since she was a little girl, sparked by the differences she noticed in her younger brother, who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

“I became curious and that took me into a PHD in neuroanatomy.”

But one day, aged just thirty seven, she woke up and was experiencing a haemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain which, as a scientist, she found fascinating.

“I had brain surgery two and a half weeks after the major stroke, then it took eight years for me to come to use the skill sets of my right hemisphere to completely rebuild my left hemisphere circuitry.”

Jill explains the importance of sleep in the recovery of anyone experiencing neurological trauma.

“This is when the garbage cleaners come out. They clean up the waste made by these billions of neurons that are working so hard for us to have a perception of reality.”

She talks about the different functions in our brain and how they work.

“It’s mind blowing to me as a scientist that there are actually cells in our brain that step out of the consciousness of the present moment, so that we can have a past and a future experience that isn’t even there.”

Sounds complicated? It is a bit. But in talking to Nicky, Jill breaks it all down into awe-inspiring nuggets. One great example is her explanation of the leap from reptile brains to human consciousness.

“We have the same group of cells, the brainstem that reptiles have. Reptiles are pretty much on-off switches…Then mammals have an additional tissue on top, which is the limbic or emotional feeling tissue. And then humans have tissue added on top of that, which is the cognition.”

There’s much discussion about psychopathic behaviour and whether it's possible to retrain the brain of someone with a propensity to harm others. Jill talks about normality. What is normal?

“You only have to have something occur 70% of the time for us to decide that it’s normal. That’s 30% of us are skewed away from normal… I mean, you know, we’re very diverse…We can learn a lot about societal norms based on what we know about the neural circuitry of the brain.”

In the case of rebuilding her own brain, Jill felt it was an ongoing negotiation between the left and right hemispheres. She had to think hard about what she wanted back.

“Language, of course…I wanted to become a functional human being again. At the same time, I did not want to lose the peaceful euphoria that I gained out of the experience in that present moment.”

Asked how she feels about her life now, Jill believes her whole perception is different.

“Life is this precious entity. I live my life differently. It was a profound experience.”

And the meaning of life?

“I’m going to go to the single cell, because that’s the simplest model that we have.”

You can hear more about Jill’s extraordinary life and work by searching ‘Different with Nicky Campbell’ on 大象传媒 Sounds. Look for ‘Stations of the Mind.’