In 2008, I watched Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s Ted Talk My Stroke of Insight. and was blown away as were many of my friends and colleagues in health care. Working in the field of traumatic brain injury (TBI) for many years, as well as in other fields of chronic and life threatening conditions, Taylor gave me a new approach to healing, resiliency, neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Consequently, I’ve recommended her book and TED Talk to many.
Taylor is a neuro anatomist who lost the left hemisphere of her brain due to a stroke when she was 37. She couldn’t talk, walk, read, write or remember her past. An eight year journey learning to re connect her brain, allowed her to observe and share her experience (she was her own research subject) as only a neuro anatomist could. In fact, she said she learned more in experiencing her stroke then she did in her years of study and research.
As a neuroanatomist, what's interesting to me about brain trauma isn't what's lost but what now flourishes. When one system goes off-line, another starts firing. The blood vessel that erupted in the left hemisphere of my brain that day in 1996 shut down my ability to communicate and move, but the right hemisphere opened to new levels of clarity and connectedness. I felt somehow woven into the universal tapestry, and that feeling drove my recovery over the next eight years. HarvardResearcher’s 8-Year Quest to Regain Her Health After a Massive Stroke
At the end of her TED talk Taylor noted, So who are we? .. we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world… Not surprisingly, over 300,000 people wrote asking how to make such choices.
How to respond was puzzling. After all she came to this from having a stroke, which was not the experience of those asking the question. In May, she released Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters that Drive Our Life as an answer to “How to.”
Over the years, and particularly this past week, I’ve read various articles, re read parts of My Stroke of Insight, and watched a lot of talks Taylor’s has recently given on her new book. Wow! She’s so excited by what she’s learning it’s pretty infectious. She’s also very intense.
It’s important to remember Taylor’s scientific background as she continues to see the brain at a cellular level. Although we have been trained to believe that our left brain is our rational brain while our right brain is our emotional brain, the limbic tissue responsible for our emotions is evenly divided between our two hemispheres. As a result, each of our brain hemispheres has both an emotional and a thinking module of cells, and each of these modules of cells results in not only a predictable skill set but a character profile or personality. A Neuroanatomist On The 4 Ways Your Brain Operates
Taylor identifies four character of the brain that have unique “personalities.” Knowing these characters, which she highly recommends naming, allows us to make a choice which character we want to embody at any time. To her “this is true personal freedom.”
The four characters are:
Character 1: Left thinking: Our rational thinking brain that interacts with the eternal world. Ego. Like’s to organize. Likes to control people, places and things. Thinks quickly. Likes to be the boss. Defines what is right/wrong. Defines the structure of our lives. Hierarchical thinking. Makes judgement. Not negative. Critical analysis. Not emotional. It’s thinking tissue. Type A personality. Taylor’s name for this character is Helen-Hell on Wheels. Gets the job done.
Character 2 Left emotion: Contains the emotions of the past and is able to compare to the present to the past in order to decide “fight or flight.” Alarm! Alarm! Alert! Alert! Pay attention! Pay attention! While designed to save our lives, it can also cause us to feel shame, guilt, self-loathing. It is completely related to our experience with the external world and is our bridge across time. It gives us both past and future. Likes things that are familiar be it people that look like us, talk like us etc. Addiction is rooted in this character.
Character 3 Right emotion: Right here, right now. Experience of the present moment. It’s an adrenaline junky. Communal, tribal. It’s creative. No judgement. It likes chaos. Outside the judgment of right/wrong or good/bad that happens in our left hemisphere, the emotional experience of the present moment is free to explore, create, and indulge itself with whatever it fancies. Enjoys exploring new types of people, places, and things. Risk taking. Taylor uses the name from the Peanuts’ Cartoon, “Pigpen,” who was content and good in the swirling dirt that surrounds him.
Character 4 Right thinking: It’s the consciousness connecting us to the consciousness of the universe. It is the thinking tissue that perceives itself as a collection of atoms and molecules moving fluidly through space and time at one with all that is. Nurturing, supportive, compassionate and loving, we reach this part of the consciousness though prayers and meditations. This part of ourselves is filled with a sense of gratitude for life itself and a deep sense of peace because it knows that whatever is, is a gift, and all is well. Another way of thinking of this is “quantum consciousness.”
In essence, our brain has checks and balances at the cellular level that work to help us be peaceful, capable of working when it’s time to and to act when the best response is to flee.
Keep in mind that Taylor only had her right brain emotional and thinking capabilities after her stroke, which she found blissful and quite peaceful. Yet, to return to a fully functioning person, she had to figure out how to reengage the left hemisphere.
When emotions are triggered, Taylor describes the “90 second rule,” When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. …After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.
Instead of looping the circuitry after something triggers your 90 second response, Taylor recommends a “Brain Huddle,” whereby you take a pause, tap into the four characters and think of your next move. Easy to remember, as the acronym is BRAIN. She describes it as follows:
- Breathe and focus on your breath. This enables you to hit the pause button, interrupt your emotional reactivity, and bring your mind to the present moment with a focus on yourself.
- Recognize which of the Four Characters' circuitry you are running in the present moment.
- Appreciate whichever character you find yourself exhibiting, and appreciate the fact that you have all Four Characters available to you at any moment.
- Inquire within and invite all Four Characters into the huddle so they can collectively and consciously strategize your next move.
- Navigate your new reality, with all Four Characters bringing their best game.
I found it interesting that in one of her interviews she was asked about whether they discussed consciousness when she was doing research at Harvard. She said it was frequently discussed over lunch but not in the lab. However, in 2018, researchers at Yale identified activity in the parietal cortex as being linked to spiritual experiences and Columbia University has created the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University. A lot has changed since 2008 when Taylor did her TED Talk that some scientists referred to it as “pseudo-science.”
BRAIN is turning out to be a useful tool for me and “brain huddling,” is yielding good results. It’s even spread into my work for the Cavendish Historical Society.
It’s given me insights into Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had a tamping rod go through his brain in 1848, survived and ushered in the modern area of neuroscience. This accident occurred in my town and every September I do a “walk and talk” around the date of the accident.
If this is of interest to you, check out Taylor’s books, watch videos, follow her on Facebook or listen to podcasts. Lots out there and more to come.
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