Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied her own stroke as it happened -- and has become a powerful voice for brain recovery.
Why you should listen to her:
One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor's brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness ...
Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the "Singin' Scientist."
"How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I've gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career."Jill Bolte Taylor
Blog Posts on TED
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Stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com – March 12, 2008
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.)
Watch Jill Bolte Taylor's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com.
TRANSLATIONS:
Read the talk in German here (in the "Hintergrund") >>
Read the talk in Portuguese here >>
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Visualizing TED2008 with BigViz – March 14, 2008
At TED2008 in Monterey, two sketch artists captured the Big Questions live as they happened -- watching each speaker, sketching their impressions, and feeding everything into a groundbreaking new system for sharing and connecting ideas. Autodesk's BigViz system is an interactive way to record and synthesize big ideas in a collaborative environment -- what better place to show it off than at TED?
Two visual cartographers, David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, made more than 700 sketches in the Steelcase Simulcast room using Wacom tablets and Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro, highlighting memorable quotes ... great questions ... unexpected connections. Their sketches of TED2008 have been turned into a 200-page book, available for download as a PDF. Visit the Autodesk site to learn more about the tag-team process of sketch-blogging and the groovy touchscreen from Jeff Han's Perceptive Pixel.
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Dick Clark on Jill Bolte Taylor – May 1, 2008
Among the many TEDTalks stars on this year's Time 100 list, Jill Bolte Taylor gets perhaps the coolest biographer: Dick Clark. He writes:
Through her writings and lectures, she has done perhaps more than anyone else to explain, both to the healthy and the stricken, what a stroke is.
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