My guest this week is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, author of the new book, Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life (affiliate link). Jill has quite a story to tell, which you may have heard the beginning of in her bestselling book, My Stroke of Insight. In this conversation she describes how she recovered from a massive stroke, and is now able to share the powerful lessons she learned about the brain, human nature, and ultimately love. Topics we touched on included:

• The major hemorrhage Jill experienced in 1996 that led to her insights about the nature of our brain
• Witnessing the effects of the stroke as a brain scientist
• The experience of consciousness without language
• Language as a filtering down of our experience into distinct categories
• The difficulty in seeing out of our perspective as being the center of the universe
• Jill’s system that describes our four “characters,” based on brain anatomy and function
• The magnificent sensation of dropping judgments of the present
• Emotion and cognitive functions in both left and right brain hemispheres
• The association of mindful presence with the right hemisphere
• Our society’s skew toward left-hemisphere-dominant functions
• Parts of the brain that are responsible for our sense of meaning
• Finding a healthy balance among the four segments of our brain
• Having the ability to purposely choose which brain character we want to embody
• Doing a “Brain Huddle” to listen to all four of our brain characters
• Whether there’s a “higher self” that arbitrates among our various parts
• Our number one job: loving others
• Jill’s mission to communicate something beautiful to humanity
• Similarities between the changes Jill experienced and those that follow a near-death experience

Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, is a Harvard-trained and published neuroscientist.

In 1996 she experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain that caused her to lose the ability to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life.

Her memoir that documents her experience with stroke and her eight-year recovery, called My Stroke of Insight (affiliate link), spent 63 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and is still routinely the #1 book about stroke on Amazon (although it’s currently sitting at #2; her new book is #1).

Jill is a dynamic teacher and public speaker who loves educating all age groups, academic levels, as well as corporations about the beauty of our human brain and its ability to recover from trauma.

In 2008 she gave the first TED talk that ever went viral, which now has well over 27 million views. In the same year, Jill was chosen as one of Time magazine’s “100 most influential people in the world,” and was the premiere guest on Oprah Winfrey’s “Soul Series” webcast.

Find Jill online at her website and on Facebook.