Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied her own stroke as it happened — and has become a powerful voice for how we can choose to replace our stress, fear and anxiety with feelings of joy and deep inner peace.

Why you should listen

While teaching and performing research at Harvard Medical School about how our brain creates our perception of reality, a blood vessel exploded in Jill Bolte Taylor's brain. Within the course of four hours, she could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of her life. It took eight years for her to completely rebuild her brain from the inside out.

Now, Taylor is not only an educator about neuroplasticity and the ability of the brain to recover from trauma, but she is passionate about helping people differentiate the skill sets and character profiles that radiate from our two limbic emotional and two cortical thinking modules of cells. We have much more power over what is going on inside of our brains than we have ever been trained, and replacing stress, fear and anxiety with feelings of joy and deep inner peace is a skill we all can learn.

She is the author of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (2008) and Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life (2021).

Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk

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In Brief

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Science

TED Weekends wonders: Can you reset your brain?

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One morning when she woke up, Jill Bolte Taylor felt pain behind her left eye similar to what she’d felt biting into an ice cream cone. Soon, her own appearance — from her hands to her reflection — felt utterly bizarre to her. Next she lost her balance and then her internal chatter simply stopped […]

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