Comments on: Can someone really know what it’s like to have a stroke? A skeptic considers Jill Bolte Taylor’s “Stroke of Insight.”

By: Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:43:25 +0000

Today I read through several significant chunks of Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight. I even more disappointed with the book than with the video. Bolte Taylor makes sure the reader’s know that she is a “PH.D” right on the front cover, then proceeds to say almost nothing of scientific value. If it a book of unsubstantiated fluff; a book that is both simplistically and condescendingly written, that even goes so far as to romanticize having strokes.

Having a stroke doesn’t make one necessarily qualified to talk about having strokes.

Here’s another way of summing it up: “I was expecting something quite profound. Instead, it sort of reminded me of someone in high school describing an acid trip.”

And here’s one more comment that hits home for me: “The single worst book regarding neuroscience I’ve read. She oversimplifies EVERYTHING in a grotesque manner. Making statements about the ‘right brain’ and the ‘left brain’ that we simply have no real evidence for. The brain is not nearly as simple as ‘creativity on the right side’.”

By: Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:35:11 +0000

Don: I agree that empathy is critically important. But why excuse Bolte Taylor’s highly questionable account of her stoke in order to pull out that uncontroversial, universally recognized pearl of wisdom?

By: Don Horsley

Don Horsley — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:22:21 +0000

I am a psychotherapist working mainly with couples. On a weekly basis I bear witness to spouses/partners incapable of generating empathy for the other — unable, in other words, to “step to the right”. No matter what you think of Bolte Taylor’s rendition of her stroke and recovery, that one piece of wisdom from her is worth hearing and is worth acting upon.

By: Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:38:35 +0000

Gail: Thank you for comment, but I think you missed my point: that humans have limited powers of introspection. I am asking whether, in light of many psychological experiments suggesting otherwise, Bolte Taylor could accurately claim to know the details of what was happening to her while she was in the process of having her stroke.

By: Gail Nicolosi

Gail Nicolosi — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:34:13 +0000

I want to add ‘thank you’ to Bolte for sharing her experience because had I not seen it, I would have accepted what the Doctors were telling me - that she would not ‘revive’ and was unconscious.

By: Gail Nicolosi

Gail Nicolosi — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:29:58 +0000

My mother has been taken off life support and is NIL by Mouth as of four days ago after a massive left brain stroke. I found Bolte Taylor’s video on the net. The message I got from that was that we need to remember that we’re not all powerful, all knowing beings. So few of us have had massive strokes and been able to talk about our experience. My mother’s right brain is working and there’s no doubt that she’s aware we are with her. She squeezes our hand gently in response to our asking her to, and raises her arm up to feel her hair as if to feel like its still there, and grabs her bedcovers and tries to fling them across her body, and her right eye has started to open to look right at me when I talk, then looks to her little 11 year old grand daughter crying.
The thing to remember is that every person is different and we shouldn’t generalise and put people in boxes - otherwise how else can we evolve and grow? There is so much we still don’t know. Erich Vieth, I respectfully suggest you keep your scepticism and powers of critical assessment but keep your mind open - it’s the discovery of new things, the evolution of us as a species, that makes our human experience so amazing. My mother will die very soon but not without knowing how much we all love her. Gail

By: Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:18:19 +0000

Elisabeth: I haven’t read the book. Though it’s been awhile since I viewed the video, I don’t believe that Bolte Taylor discusses her recovery in detail. The only thing she discusses in detail is her subjective experience of the stroke itself, something that seems far-fetched, as I discuss in the post.

By: Elisabeth Tampier

Elisabeth Tampier — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:00:29 +0000

From people who have read the book I’d like to know if it focuses in a detailed way of how she recovered. My husband had a bad stroke in the left brain almost 3 years ago, at the age of 59, and is still recuperating very slowly, so this aspect interests me more than left brain/right brain dichotomy, and all the New Age stuff. Neurologists keep saying “all strokes are different.” Can you really learn from the experience of others?

By: BrokenBrilliant

BrokenBrilliant — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:31:26 +0000

As a long-term multiple traumatic brain injury survivor (injured in 1972, 1973. 1983, 1995, and 2004), I was really enthused to follow the link to Bolte Taylor’s TED talk. But after about half the talk, when she started to arrive at all sorts of conclusions about the human experience and the nature of our brains’ inner workings (including the right brain/left brain presumptions), I grew very uncomfortable and irritated for reasons I didn’t fully understand until recently, as I’ve read this post and others like it.

I don’t question the power and impact of her experience — and I don’t question the possibility of her recovery. I’ve recovered from multiple brain traumas to the extent that very few people guess there was ever anything “wrong” with me. But it’s worrying to me that she resorts to the binary dichotomizing of human experience - which points in the direction of left vs. right, good vs. bad, men vs. women, logical vs. artistic, holistic vs. segmented, traditional vs. modern. Splitting the world into two halves not only lessens our appreciation for the complexity of live, but we often end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and losing sight of positive aspects of ‘bad’ sides.

There are many points in her talk that I found troubling, not least of which was her emotional delivery. I felt as though I were being coerced to feel for her, after a fashion, and she was playing on my emotional “right brain” side to make a point that eluded her (or she thought would elude her audience) logically. What worries me the most, in all this, is that by using her “fluffy bunny” “new age” approach, stating things like “peace is just a thought away” (from http://mystrokeofinsight.com) and painting the doorway to nirvana with a pretty blurry brush, she’s undermining the hard science that can actually do us some good in understanding the wider world beyond her own personal experience.

I would have been much more comfortable, had she actually taken one side or the other — be factual and scientific and really stick with the hard facts, no matter how disorienting they are to the general pop public… or recount a personal experience that is moving in and of itself. Combining the two sides, and playing into the territorialist “camp” of the “the right brain is nicer and better and gentler and kinder to Planet Earth and holds the answers to everything that boggles our left brains” just muddies the waters.

I yearn for reason in these things. Norman Doidge’s 2007 book “The Brain that Changes Itself” does it for me! (and no, I’m NOT linking to it on Amazon, so you can buy it through me and give me affiliate earnings — it’s just a really great book that changed my life

By: projektleiterin

projektleiterin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:55:11 +0000

I know people who would find her inspirational. To me it seems she had taken some happy drugs, something that makes you become one with the world spirit. People after a trip often describe similar feelings and sensations.

And it is weird if a scientist insinuates that one brainpart is good and exudes an all encompassing love and the other one causes you to be a selfish individual.