My Stroke of Insight
Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD has a unique perspective on being a stroke victim. She had one in her mid-thirties. She recovered. What made her situation unique was her training in neuroanatomy: it put her in a unique position to analyze what was happening to her brain. She tells her story in her book: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey
Why talk about such a book on a blog dedicated to thinking errors? For several reasons: the book tells us how much unconscious processing happens in our brains. It tells us we can change, in this case recover. It tells us we can chose which thoughts will linger, and which we can let go.
On the morning of December 10, 1996, things did not feel right. First there was a sharp pain behind her left eye. After getting up she started feeling detached from her body. Her coordination was uneasy, her balance impaired. It is not until her right arm dropped that Jill realized what was happening: she was having a stroke. By then her ability to remember a phone number, dial it and speak had been dramatically reduced. Things came in and out of focus. She managed to call work, where a colleague recognized the garbled sounds as her, in trouble. He organized a rescue.
The hemorrhage on the left side of her brain had wiped out her ability to read, speak, do things in sequence, and recognize the boundaries of her own body. All the sounds and sights that we normally navigate without noticing became painful to absorb. The experience was not totally negative: unencumbered by the left, rational brain, she felt a sense of peace, of being one with the universe, of time being immaterial. Did she really want to fight to go back to being a different person she did not remember? Jill decided she did.
A blood clot was surgically removed, and a slow recovery process began. At first, individual letters were just wiggles. They had no meaning, no associated sound, and piecing them into words had to be re-learned. Everything had to be re-learned: it is OK to cross a line on the cement sidewalk. The line between the sidewalk and a lawn requires more attention. Recovery took eight years. Patient support by family and friends was crucial.
Along the way, associations between words, their meaning and emotional content were re-learned. One advantage of having an essentially blank slate is that Jill had the opportunity to choose which feelings and behaviors she wanted to regain, and which she needed to recognize and set aside when they appeared. What drove her recovery was her awareness of her mind.
Few of us will ever have a blank slate to work with. Nonetheless, when we pay attention to our thoughts and recognize a thought pattern, we can learn to alter our response. When it comes to recognizing thinking errors, metacognition (thinking about our thinking) is often the first step. Next, we need tools to change our response to do better.
This may not seem to be easy but it is worth trying, and it is within reach. To illustrate I will use a quote from John Otterness at UCLA: “Felipe showed up in my Kindergarten class one day and said, “I went home last night and I started thinking. Then I started thinking about thinking. And then I started thinking about thinking about thinking. Then I got tired and went to bed.” Felipe was well on the way to metacognition!”