My Stroke of Insight
by Jill Bolte Taylor.
Viking, 2008,
$24.95 cloth.
We had it coming, I suppose; it’s in the air but you don’t immediately recognize it: neurosophy. I would describe it as a slightly unhinged way of pontificating around neurological damage, assuredly the most upsetting type of damage we can encounter as humans. In order to soften the neurological blow, the neurosophist drags neurological concepts into a context that has nothing to do with neurology. You might say that in this activity neurons are taken to church, where they have no business.
I shall come back to the churchy part later.
Part of what Jill Bolte Taylor does in her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey might be called neurosophy. She describes what she went through when she was struck by a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. (You can listen to her vivid description of the event on YouTube under her name.) Her book reads as both a thrilling and a frightening report of a visit to a region where, alas, quite a few people stray, only not many live to tell the tale with the vivacity Taylor brings to the subject. She is a neuroanatomist, and halfway through her ordeal she realizes: This is a unique chance-I’m a brain scientist and I am right in the middle of an actual stroke!
Part of her left hemisphere fades out, and she describes what happens to her while only her right hemisphere is functioning. In an introductory chapter she explains the differences between our two hemispheres: roughly speaking, the left stands for analysis, the right for synthesis. Left counts the minutes. Right lives in the endlessness of time. When left breaks down, analysis ceases and the deep inner peace which is contained in the right hemisphere opens itself up to the individual, while the left side looks askance at “deep,” “inner,” and “peace.” The right side gathers, connects, and leads to a panorama. When the right dominates, you feel at one with the world. The left sorts, conceptualizes, distinguishes. It is worth pointing out that neuroscientists only partially agree with this neat distinction. What they do agree about is the fact that in eighty-five percent of people, language is situated in the left hemisphere, and in the remaining fifteen percent, in the right.
Here is part of her description of what it means to be abandoned to the type of experience your right hemisphere gives rise to:
I’m no authority, but I think the Buddhists would say I entered the mode of existence they call Nirvana. In the absence of my left hemisphere’s analytical judgment, I was completely entranced by the feelings of tranquility, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience.
Her left side was not entirely dead during this episode, because she did realize that this was also an absurd experience, and that it was a sign of very serious neurological trouble. There is an inherent and possibly even inevitable confusion underlying her description. While blissfully afloat in that ocean on the right, she remembers all her desperate writhing on the dry land of the left side. You might be tempted to say that there is a symmetrical distribution of her scientific interest in both her hemispheres, with a touch of grouchiness added on the left and a bit of poetry thrown in on the right side.
As it happens, I encounter in my work as a geriatrician quite a few people who have been abandoned by parts of their left hemisphere, and they do not strike me, themselves, or their loved ones as infinitely relieved fellow citizens who are somehow afloat in some Buddhistic Nirvana they were eased into when their left hemisphere gave up. On the contrary, they are not infrequently to be pitied as grossly damaged individuals, who are not floating at all but stumbling, if not actually crawling, due to their severely wrecked brains.
Taylor realizes that no two brains are alike and that it is impossible to generalize on the basis of her own case. Nevertheless, she uses concepts such as “hemisphere” and “neurons” in a most confusing manner, to give an admittedly fascinating but at the same time contradictory account of her inner experience. Neurons and hemispheres have, in a sense, nothing to do with experience. If you want to confirm this, then try to feel which one of your hemispheres is helping you to read this. You can feel your toes or your hands or your back in precisely the way in which you cannot feel your hemispheres. Introspectively they are out of reach, and that goes for the entire bunch of neurons contained within them.
From a certain sensation you can derive the position of your toe. But from that sensation you cannot conclude anything about your brain. And vice versa. In fact this is the Achilles’ heel of all neuroscience. From any particular brain state you cannot with certainty derive a mind state. You’ll have to ask the experiencer. When you see specific neurons firing in a brain scan, you cannot with certainty conclude: now she feels her toes wriggling.
This is an uncomfortable fact which Taylor forgets all about when she says, “Lucky me, a neuroanatomist right in the middle of a stroke!”
What do you think of my case, next to hers? Today fate has offered me a much more exciting opportunity than was meted out to Taylor. Both my hemispheres are working at full throttle and I’m at the very center of it all! Boy, am I gonna watch the proceedings!
This is silly. Neuroanatomy and neurophysiology were not born out of this type of introspection. Following the onset of paralysis in your right arm, no amount of looking inward could ever suggest to you the idea of neuronal connections in the left cerebral hemisphere. Compare Taylor’s case with that of the virologist who during a bout of flu says, “Just my luck, now I can meet the influenza virus at very close quarters.” You do not experience a virus. In a similar vein, we do not experience molecules. There are all sorts of epistemological roads down which one has to travel in order to arrive at molecules, and introspection is not one of them.
Taylor’s book is unintentionally quite a treat because she writes without any philosophical prudishness and boldly introduces a number of confusions into our brain-talk. Thus she repeatedly describes her brain as some sort of perceptual aid, as if the soul puts on the brain the way we put on our glasses. The soul is then regarded as a something “behind” the brain, a something that with the aid of the brain is capable of prodding around in the world and making sense of it. In a startling passage, she decides to rid herself of certain neurocircuits which she finds emotionally painful:
When my brain runs loops that feel harshly judgmental, counter-productive, or out of control, I wait 90 seconds for the emotional/physiological response to dissipate and then I speak to my brain as though it is a group of children. I say with sincerity, “I appreciate your ability to think these thoughts and feel these emotions, but I am really not interested in thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions anymore. Please stop bringing this stuff up.”
Essentially I am consciously asking my brain to stop hooking into specific thought patterns.
Those ninety seconds allowed for the dissipation of the response suggest that, as a neuroanatomist, she utilizes her minute knowledge of the brain and is therefore capable of maneuvering around her cerebral anatomy in the exceedingly cautious manner in which you would move around within some delicately fragile electronic device. And yet the whole idea of talking to your brain is nonsense. Saying “You cannot talk to your brain” is like saying “You cannot baptize a tax-return.” It’s a philosophical “cannot” and it has nothing to do with deaf brains or stubbornly atheist tax-returns.
If you are wondering how Taylor managed to find words for what happened to her on that fateful morning of her stroke, the answer is given by the author herself:
Post-stroke year two was spent reconstructing, as best as I could recall, the morning of the stroke. I worked with a Gestalt therapist who helped me verbalize my right hemisphere experience of that morning.
Oh dear. I don’t want to be cynical but I cannot help expressing my reservations about the kind of experience Gestalt therapists have succeeded in dredging up from the human memory in the recent past. I believe they came up with highly disputable cases of incest, among other things. Taylor prides herself on being a neuro-anatomist, i.e. a person who sees more than a lay person would in the middle of a stroke. It is inexplicable how a Gestalt therapist could hand her the words for what she went through.
Finally the churchy side. Why would anyone want to take neurons into her arms and talk to them? Are neurons more deserving than the pancreas or a duodenal ulcer? Or the gallbladder, which can be pretty obnoxious in its own little way? There is a reason for thinking that neurons are more interesting to talk to than bladders or ulcers. Neurological damage affects not so much the way I walk but the way I am me. It is much more devastating to lose all thoughts about your children than to lose your leg. Neurosophy is a way of trying to overcome the unbearable incomprehension we are faced with in brain damage. It is, ultimately, a way of propitiating fate.
As was to be feared, Taylor wants to go global on this issue of brain-handling:
I find that my right hemisphere consciousness is eager for us to take that next giant leap for mankind and step to the right so we can evolve this planet into the peaceful and loving place we yearn for it to be. [Taylor’s emphasis]
Taylor begins her book as a moving account of a harrowing experience. She writes convincingly about the acute stages of cerebral hemorrhage. I was impressed by the courage and perseverance she has shown in the eight years since her stroke, during which she has gradually found herself again. As such, her book makes you stop and wonder about the fate of stroke victims.
Her shaky epistemology would not matter so much, were it not for the fact that she uses it as a launching pad from which she veers off into the higher spheres of destiny-control and even world improvement. Her book is ultimately a denial of the horror that lies embedded in the fact that we are our brains.
Bert Keizer is a doctor and philosopher who works with geriatric patients in Amsterdam. The author of Dancing with Mister D, he is currently at work on a philosophically tinged account of neurosurgery.
