There’s a TED video making the rounds to some high acclaim these days. The video features Jill Bolte Taylor giving a video presentation entitled “My stroke of insight.”
Here it is in a nutshell. Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke in 1996. She has recovered quite well from a serious challenge, as you can see from the embedded video. Her topic is one that fascinated me, and I watched her video with undivided attention. If you decide to watch this video, you might also be especially interested in her description of the struggles that she faced at the moments during which she was actually having her stroke. She describes experiencing the successive losses of her abilities to interpret visual and auditory input. Written words began to look like meaningless scribbles. Things became even more surreal when she “realized” that she couldn’t understand simple conversations.
It pains me to write what I am about to write , because I really want to believe that Bolte Taylor is accurately portraying real-life events. What she is describing is fascinating and her narrative is gripping. I am relieved to know that she has made a fantastic recovery and I admire her for stepping into the public eye in an attempt to provide a unique personal perspective regarding strokes. I have serious doubts about her narrative, however. I am concerned that Bolte Taylor is confabulating. I have several reasons for suggesting this.
The first thing I noticed was Bolte Taylor’s absolute lack of doubt or hesitancy regarding any of the claims she is making. Her story sounds too well rehearsed and her presentation appears to be too much like an acting performance. Can the human mind accurately process, remember and then describe the experience of a stroke? This is highly debatable among reputable scientists. People are prone to all kinds of perceptual and memory distortions during illnesses, even illnesses that are much milder than strokes. For instance, I recently had an experience where I fainted for a couple seconds when I was sitting a few feet from a doctor. He is certain that I fainted (briefly) based upon what he saw. I have no recollection of losing any consciousness at all, however. I have no reason to doubt my doctor, because he was there and he attended to me when he saw me slipping away. I trust his observations more than my own, because my mind was in the process of shutting down at the critical moment. Even though I fainted, I would be an accurate witness only to the events leading up to fainting, not to the act of fainting itself.
I’m not suggesting that Bolte Taylor was unconconsious. But even when people are fully conscious and not suffering massive strokes, there are severe limitations to using instrospection. It is highly unreliable in many cases of self-diagnosis.
Memory is highly prone to distortions. Remembering something is not at all like hitting the play button on a tape recorder. There are thousands of studies demonstrating this fallibility of human memory. Some of these studies concerns flashbulb memories, where people who were certain that they knew the details of where they were and who they were with during major tragic events, turn out to be quite mistaken regarding many of those basic details. When there are extraneous reasons to believe (including, potentially, the attention one might receive by touring from place to place to give a talk that is well received by gentle audiences) the risk of confabulation is even greater.
We all have heard claims of of patients that they started floating down tunnels with a glowing light in the distance. Many of these people interpret this phenomenon as a journey down a path toward heaven or Jesus.
The people who relate these stories of floating down tunnels are sincere. They aren’t trying to fool us. They believe what they are saying. Similarly, I believe that Bolte Taylor believes what she is telling her audience. Believing what you are saying does not necessarily make what you are saying true, however. Nor does suffering a stroke necessarily make you a credible witness as to what it was like to have a stroke. Whether you are a credible witness depends upon whether you were brain was capable of accurately observing and remembering what was occurring while you’re brain was also in the process of severe biological breakdown.
What is confabulation? Most importantly, it is not lying. There is no intent to deceive anyone. On the other hand, all of us have the tendency to fill in gaps where our memory is not sharp. That is the point of an article called “Mind fiction: Why your brain tells tall tales,” from New Scientist:
It isn’t fibbing, as there is no intent to deceive and people seem to believe what they are saying. Until fairly recently it was seen simply as a neurological deficiency – a sign of something gone wrong. Now, however, it has become apparent that healthy people confabulate too.
We may all do it routinely. Children need little encouragement to make up stories when asked to talk about something they know little about. Adults, too, can be persuaded to confabulate, as Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and his colleague Richard Nisbett have shown. They laid out a display of four identical items of clothing and asked people to pick which they thought was the best quality. It is known that people tend to subconsciously prefer the rightmost object in a sequence if given no other choice criteria, and sure enough about four out of five participants did favour the garment on the right. Yet when asked why they made the choice they did, nobody gave position as a reason. It was always about the fineness of the weave, richer colour or superior texture. This suggests that while we may make our decisions subconsciously, we rationalise them in our consciousness, and the way we do so may be pure fiction, or confabulation.
Here’s another reason I don’t trust Bolte Taylor’s account of her stroke. Although she claims impressive academic credentials, she doesn’t talk like a disciplined cognitive scientist. She stirs vague non-scientific terms into her talk only after attempting to firmly establish her credibility with the cachet of science. She grossly oversimplifies the lateralization of the brain in ways that all reputable cognitive scientists would resist (I’m not doubting compelling evidence exhibiting lateralization). In the words of this Wikipedia article on lateralization, Bolte Taylor speaks to us as a popular psychologist rather than as a measured and disciplined neuroscientist:
Popular psychology tends to make broad and sometimes pseudoscientific generalizations about certain functions (e.g. logic, creativity) being lateral, that is, located in either the right or the left side of the brain. Researchers often criticise popular psychology for this, because the popular lateralizations often are distributed across both hemispheres.
She doesn’t stop at lateralization, either. She employs flowery ideas that you’d never hear from anyone trying to be faithful to the experimental literature on neuroscience. Things aren’t as simple as Bolte Taylor portrays them to be, and it was annoying to me to see and hear her fearlessly marching forward with her sweeping claims (of what it is to be a “left brained person” for instance). In the end, I was annoyed with Bolte Taylor, despite her passionate way of speaking and her obvious talent for drawing us into her story.
You’ll find that many people on the Internet absolutely love Bolte Taylor. They find her to be inspirational. These people, however, are no more self-critical than Bolte Taylor is herself. You’ll see this yourself when you read their comments and see the cheerleader-type praise they heap upon Bolte Taylor.
It is thus with some trepidation that I write this post at all. I don’t want to rain on Bolte Taylor’s parade. On the other hand, my skepticism has never been aimed only at religious claims or claims regarding the paranormal. I am equally skeptical of many of the claims made by ordinary and well-motivated people.
I am not alone in my concern about Bolte Taylor’s presentation. A post at Mindhacks expresses some of the same concerns:
It’s a bit poetic in places. You can almost hear the sound of a thousand cognitive scientists gritting their teeth as she describes the supposed functions of each cerebral hemisphere and probably the sound of some of them fainting when she describes the “deep inner peace circuitry” of the right hemisphere.
Much of what Bolte Taylor has to say about the experience of having a stroke makes perfect sense. My concern is whether she was actually “there” to witness what happened to her. Whether or not she was “there,” she certainly tells a good story about what it might be like to have a stroke.
I enjoyed watching part of her video about a month ago. I didn't detect anything too disingenuous (either). She has obviously been inspired by her illness/misfortune, which is a good thing, I would venture to say. As the stroke set in gradually, perhaps she did have time to form coherent memories, which remained in tact during the stroke. It is hard to tell. Either way, it is fascinating to hear her tell first hand the way she experienced how the brain works (and how scary and debilitating when it doesn't work).
I would suggest you read her book. While the book is relatively short, and catered to a general audience (meaning, not catered to other neuroanatamists who have a deeper understanding of the brain) it will definitely give you a better perspective of her stroke experience and knowledge base.
I think any oversimplifications you had issues with came from the time limitation (TED talks are 20 minutes long) and a realization that a general audience would not be as receptive to the technical details you might prefer to hear. Furthermore, of course she rehearsed her speech, this is a TED talk, and anyone would be crazy to not practice their speech and perfect it beforehand. I think she did a terrific job. The talk is captivating.
Finally, as a true skeptic, I'm sure you realize it's equally important to be skeptical of your own opinions, and aware of the general belief system you operate out of. A true scientist, or a true skeptic, is not chained to any beliefs, as that only influences what they see, and leaves them unopen to possibilities – as strange as those possibilities may be. You have both the ability to be critical – and the ability to watch that critic. Be careful to keep those in balance.
Sure, her experience may not be 100% accurate. On the other hand, it might be. As a true skeptic, and because you cannot prove otherwise, you have to admit that both possibilities exist. Do not close your mind to things just because they are outside the realm of your own experience.
I've been recommending a book by Jill Bolte Taylor called "My Stroke of Insight" to everyone I know. It's an amazing story, both uplifting and powerful on three levels: physical, emotional, and spiritual, but the spiritual aspect alone makes this the best book I've read all year.
How often do you get to hear a neuroscientist describe having a stroke, nearly dying and finding Nirvana, and then making a miraculous recovery so that she's back to teaching medical students!?!
I came away with a renewed sense of understanding, wonder and hopefulness about the capabilities of the human brain. I give "My Stroke of Insight" highest marks!
You can get the book for just $16.47 with free shipping from Amazon!
I agree that Bolte Taylor's simplifications are disturbing. For instance, the right hemisphere has (maybe limited) linguistic competence. As she points out, both hemispheres are connected (corpus callosum and other pathways) and work interactively. As for parrallel/serial processing, this dichotomy maybe interpreted in various ways. Isn't she talking about global perception (like a flash in iconic store) vs logical analysis ? Is perception processing ? It is also disturbing politically to oppose reason and perception (or nirvana) when the «master of the world» says God told him to invade Iraq. It's probably not her goal but a lot of people would willingly abandon «serial processing».
But an important question is unanswered: what is the significance of her experience? Who was experiencing this trip? Can it be dismissed easily ? Isn't death the ultimate subjective experience? If it's a confabulation she invented coming back to life, how come she experienced it as a full length experience? Time doesn't exist in quantum physics. What is the nature of time in this ultimate subjective experience (in dreams)? Susan Blackmore'd rebuttal of nde is not completely satisfactory. She describes someone witnessing, and remembering afterwards, decay of consciousness. Who is this witness then?
The New York Times Sunday Newspaper on May 25 had a great two page article on Jill Bolte Taylor and her book, "MY STROKE OF INSIGHT". Her book is a must read and this NY Times article – called "A Superhighway to bliss" is worth checking out too.
I read "My Stroke of Insight" in one sitting – I couldn't put it down. I laughed. I cried. It was a fantastic book (I heard it's a NYTimes Bestseller and I can see why!), but I also think it will be the start of a new, transformative Movement! No one wants to have a stroke as Jill Bolte Taylor did, but her experience can teach us all how to live better lives. Her TED.com speech was one of the most incredibly moving, stimulating, wonderful videos I've ever seen. Her Oprah Soul Series interviews were fascinating. They should make a movie of her life so everyone sees it. This is the Real Deal and gives me hope for humanity.
I'm starting to suspect that we are being subjected to an organized campaign to sell Bolte Taylor's book.
Buy it and find out what all the hype is about!
(message paid for by Oprah Enterprises)
Bolte Taylor continues to wow people with her apocryphal account of her stroke.
Thank you for being one of the few to question Jill Bolte Taylor's story!
I used to be a sucker for her kind of book/story, but got burned one too many times by the flowery promises put forth by new agers. Her story was way too glib. I didn't buy it. Maybe little bits of it here and there, but that's all.
And what was up with the schizophrenic brother? Why bring him up in the telling of the story? Was he supposed to have undergone a miraculous transformation too, in tandem with his sister?
The whole thing is uber fishy to me.
I just watched the video tonight. My Mother had a stroke last week, and I desperately am wanting to know what she's going through. Jill's accounts of "Beautiful Nirvana" doesn't come close to describing the sheer terror and confusion that I see my mother going through today. What I see on my mothers face is more like WHY IS IT THAT I CAN'T SAY WHAT I WANT TO, AND WHY CAN'T I REMEMBER MY HUSBANDS NAME? WHY CAN'T I REMEMBER MY OWN NAME? I watched my mother break down into tears this afternoon when after a physical therapy session, I saw frustration in her face. I asked her if things weren't happening fast enough for her. She said very clearly "I don't understand." She cried on my shoulder until she fell asleep in my arms. What's frustrating for me is that she can't tell me what she's going through. I don't know for sure if by stating "I don't understand." she meant that she didn't understand why it was taking so long for her to get better, or that she didn't understand what I said.
Doesn't sound like nirvana to me. I gotta say that I was disappointed in her presentation, but I do understand that not all people go through things the same way. Perhaps one day my mother will describe what happened to her this way. Perhaps it's the brains way of taking a very traumatic situation and making it bearable.
Perhaps I should quit venting and just shut up…
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.
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 😉
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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'."
You may find it interesting to read Buddhism-influenced
review of My Stroke of Insight by Dr Jill Bolte Taylor
http://sensit.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/my-stroke-…
Even basic facts about the brain seem to be beyond Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: The brain cannot sense itself! That's already a problem for such a so-called expert on the brain. Individuals who can sense their own brains would have a low probability of surviving and reproducing in the past [and even now], because of sensory overload.
Spinning a story is easy. Doing science is tough.
Cathy: Yet somehow Bolte-Taylor's story continues to have legs, and many many advocates. It's all surreal to me.
Thanks for your post on this book/video. I am almost finished reading it, but can't seem to muster the drive to keep reading! I was so excited about reading it, until I got into it. As someone who has 20 years of experience in working with people with brain injuries, I have to agree with your skepticism. There was another blog that I read about this book that suggested that JBT is confabulating – which is not purposeful lying – it is making sense of your world and filling in the gaps where your memory fails you. What I would love to know is how her colleagues at Harvard feel about the book and publicity? You see, I have never in 20 years met anyone who has had a stroke or other brain injury who reports that they remember anything about the incident. I have had people who can recount some experiences of being in hospital and having doctors treat them like they are stupid because they can't talk, and how very frustrating it is. But nobody has reported remembering the experience of having a stroke, unless it was minor enough to only affect an arm and no other functions – "my arm just went limp" – but when it comes to people who have had their language or other cognitive processes affected, not one can recount it. There are some other things that I find VERY suspect – like going home with a bleeding brain and having your mother nurse you to health to be ready for a craniotomy??? What doctor would risk that malpractice suit?!!
All that being said, I do think there are some tremendously important messages. I just wish they were packaged in a way that medical students and other health care professional students/practitioners would be able to "buy it" and benefit from the story. People do need the space and time to recover and rediscover themselves and figure out whether they are the same person they were before their brain injury. People do need to be treated like people and not cattle in a processing facility. And people who cannot process language do need to be treated with respect, like the intelligent adults that they are. If readers just get those messages from this book, then I guess it's worth it that she wrote it. After all, brain injury is more common in Canada than MS, HIV, Parkinson's, and spinal cord injuries COMBINED! We need more attention to brain injury, and if this book brings that attention, then I guess I'm glad she wrote it!
Baffled professional: I too wonder what Bolte Taylor's colleagues think. Their silence is an indictment of her inaccurate story-telling, I suspect.
Idealawg has gathered the comments of numerous others who are skeptical of Jill Bolte-Taylor's account of her stoke. http://westallen.typepad.com/idealawg/2008/04/som…