Q&A: Jill Bolte Taylor

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist and spokeswoman for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital, had a stroke at 37 that traumatized her left hemisphere and eliminated her math and language skills. Her right hemisphere, which typically houses nonverbal and artistic tasks, has taken up the bulk of her cognition. Yet Dr. Taylor’s intimate knowledge of the brain has lent her the determination to recover – a seven-year process during which she created stained-glass brains as both a means of expression and a therapeutic tool.

I asked Dr. Taylor a few questions about the links between her art and brain recovery just before the publication of her memoir, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. In it, she recounts her recovery and describes what it was like to struggle with diminished mental abilities while the neuroscientist in her was thinking, “Wow, this is so cool!”

When you were making stained-glass brains, how much were you creating from experience looking at and handling brains, compared to images in neuroanatomy reference books?
I have a three-dimensional picture of the brain in my mind’s eye and the stained-glass brain image is my artistic impression of the different parts of the organ and how they intersect. It is a composite of how others depict the brain in two dimensions and what I know to be true about the brain in three dimensions from dissection.

How much is science, how much is art, and how do they intersect for you?
Art is beauty to me, the brain is beautiful to me; therefore the brain is beautiful art to me, whether in glass or in our heads.

This was a form of art therapy; what differences did you notice between your recovery and others who didn’t benefit from it? Were certain abilities re-established more easily or quickly?
I cannot compare this project to anyone else’s recovery. All I can do is speak to what it helped me with:
1. Balance and equilibrium to stand still in front of a workspace and manipulate the project.
2. Gross motor movement. Handling glass is very delicate and dangerous. I was highly motivated to be very careful for both the glass and myself.
3. Fine-motor dexterity. Cutting glass is a precise activity; grinding glass requires holding my body firm. Equilibrium, pushing into the grinder – gross motor – and then lining all of the pieces up – fine motor.
4. Cognitive development. This type of a project is a long-term project with lots of steps. It helped me in my linear thinking.
5. Cartoon development of the original image required a combination of intuition and sensory organization.
6. Focus and concentration balanced with sleep.
7. Artistry. How does one tweak it all to make it remarkable and beautiful?

What about your creative thinking?
When I lost my left hemisphere I lost all of the normal “in the box” thinking. When we think about shifts in the brain it is inadequate to focus on the loss because with every loss there is a gain. As a society we do not focus on what someone has gained in the absence of something they have lost. When I lost the ability to define, organize and categorize information, I gained the ability to be intuitive and creative. In the absence of the left mind and its dominating inhibition, I gained a completely uninhibited right mind which processes information in a completely unique way when compared to the left mind.

That’s something many people strive for, and Dr. Taylor achieved this serenity in a unique way. Don’t wait for a stroke, cultivate your right-brain functions now.