My Stroke of Insight

Customer Reviews

• 3 out of 5
  
  
  by Lena from Boulder, CO | Sep 17, 2008
  

  Jill Bolte Tayor was a 37-year old neuroanatomist when she experienced a massive stroke that severely damaged the left hemisphere of her brain. My Stroke of Insight is her account of what happened that day, her subsequent 8-year recovery, and how these events changed her life for the better.
  
  The most interesting part of the book for me was Bolte Taylor’s discussion of what happened to her on that morning in 1996. With her scientific background, Bolte Taylor was in a unique position to observe the progressive breakdown of her own functioning as the blood from her burst AVM spread throughout her brain. As new areas were affected, different functions were lost, and reading about her experience is a strange kind of real-world brain anatomy lesson.
  
  A significant portion of this book is devoted to the process of Bolte Taylor’s recovery. She realized early on that the attitude and pacing of her caregivers made a big difference in how willing and able she was to respond, and she speaks in detail about what she, personally, found was most effective in helping her heal. There is some useful information in this section for those involved in stroke victim care.
  
  What has catapulted this book onto the bestseller list, however, is the spiritual message underlying Bolte Taylor’s experience. When the language processing areas of her brain shut down, Bolte Taylor found herself bathed in a kind of peace and bliss that was previously unknown to her. With the section of her brain that controls physical boundaries offline, she felt fluid, open, and one with everything around her.
  
  Bolte Taylor considers these experiences to be the result of her right brain suddenly being given the chance to run the show while her left brain was incapacitated. She speaks quite a bit about how she made a conscious decision during her recovery to retain access to these states and to keep these pathways open as she brought her left brain back online. In the latter section of the book, she offers a list of techniques she feels anyone can use to help open up pathways to the expanded capacities of their own right brains.
  
  I learned a number of interesting things while reading this book, and there is no question that Bolte Taylor’s story is a very inspiring one. Ultimately, however, I was disappointed by a number of things about this book. To start, it would have benefited from better editing. Some sections are highly repetitive, I was confused about certain aspects of her level of functioning and recovery, and the flow of the narrative was very uneven. Hers is a great story, and good editing would have made that even more obvious.
  
  My main criticism of this book, however there is a very sloppy blending of hard, scientific information about the brain with Bolte Taylor’s anecdotal experience and personal theories about what happened to her. It was not always obvious which was which, and I suspect many readers will be confused and assume her personal theories are more scientifically grounded than they actually are.
  
  Though Bolte Taylor does not specifically mention religion in the book, her numerous allusions to prayer, visualization, energy, and oneness make it clear that she subscribes to a certain kind of belief system that her experiences are filtered through. While this is to be expected, her inability to see the contradictions in her beliefs was frustrating to me. For example, she speaks about how, after the stroke, she floated in a place of bliss, at one with everything. Yet just a few paragraphs earlier, she refers to a harried, inexperienced medical student as an “energy vampire.” She does not address why her feelings of being at one with and connected to everything did not extend to this person. In addition, she is critical of how the judgmental function of the left brain keeps us shut down from the more expanded perspective of the right brain, yet doesn’t seem to notice her own preference for right-brain dominated experiences seems, well, kind of judgmental.
  
  I’ve had personal experiences of peace and bliss that are similar to what Bolte Taylor describes, so I can certainly understand her preference for them. I also think she gives some good advice to help people find those states themselves without having to have a stroke to get there. But I think this book would have been much more valuable had Bolte Taylor used her scientifically trained left-brain to more clearly separate her anecdotal experience and beliefs what science actually tells us about our fascinating brains.
  

  
  
   17 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 2 out of 5
  
  
  by Janet from Athens, GA | Jun 27, 2008
  

  I closed this book today with such a sense of relief. This is, in essence, a self help book marked by the author's inflated (with due reason, I know) sense of self and a few interesting tidbits about brain chemistry.
  
  Let's get a few things straight:
  1. I love reading about the brain.
  2. I was really, really wanting to love this book.
  3. I, like the author, believe that--in most cases--happiness and peacefulness can be choices for every person and that our brain can become wired to react more positively to the world.
  
  What I didn't like was the author's tone/attitude, her need to italicize the word "one" whenever she used it (as in, "I was _one_ with the universe," a sentiment repeated seventy-six times each chapter), and the way she skimmed over information about the brain as if she were approaching third graders.
  
  Maybe I'll have more to stay about this book once I have a book club meeting about it in a couple of weeks. Or else I'll just put it out of my head forever and sell my copy online.
  
  Here's what I wrote a few days ago:
  
  I'm halfway through and the woman is driving me batty. Batty, I say...
  
  I hope to change my mind, especially since I brought this up as a book club suggestion and now at least five other people are reading it because of me!
  
  

  
  
   7 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 2 out of 5
  
  
  by Cindy from Ortonville, MI | Jun 29, 2008
  

  This book wasn't what I was expecting. I expected to read a memoir of sorts. Maybe a before and after or even a during the process what was happening. And JBT does write "lightly" about those things. But mainly she is writing a self-help book that seeks to influence the rest of us to embrace the right side of our brains. As a brain scientist, she has a stroke then discovers she is one with the universe. Her brain and her cells are beautiful! Oh how lovely the world and everyone in it! The information in this book could have been stopped at phamplet size. Instead we have to read chapter after chapter of 4th grade happy talk. I can imagine most people aren't as masochistic as I and will quit mid-book on this one . . .

  
  
   7 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 4 out of 5
  
  
  by Happyreader from Chicago, IL | May 25, 2008
  

  For me, the most fascinating part of this book is the description of the actual stroke and the immediate aftermath. To have suffered such a traumatic brain injury and live to tell about it in such detail is amazing. Doubly amazing for verbalizing what a brain is like when it goes non-verbal.
  
  One funny detail during the stroke is that, while she's rapidly losing the ability to conceptualize numbers and language, somehow part of her brain still knew she needed HMO approval prior to using emergency services -- and found the HMO card and called her HMO doctor without really knowing what a doctor or numbers really were. Fear of medical bills is apparently deeply entrenched in our neural circuitry. Which is also the only reason I can think of to explain her medical collegue not calling for an ambulance after she contacted him. Oh, the brain cells that were lost simply because he drove over rather than letting paramedics quickly deal with the situation.
  
  But that's just my left brain talking. While I loved the perspective of what it's like to be temporarily without your left hemisphere, by the end of the book, I felt she was overly left-brain negative. Once the narrative is no longer propelled forward by illness and recovery, the language becomes too cutesy puppies, rainbows, and ponies, pseudo-spiritual for my taste. Lovely message but true spirituality balances the good with real issues, rather than pleasant platitudes.
  
  Five stars for the fascinating insight into strokes and brain function minus one star for the overly cutesy writing towards the end.

  
  
   5 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 2 out of 5
  
  
  by Natalie from Houston, TX | Nov 29, 2008
  

  I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. I wanted this book to be several other books than the one it actually was. I found it alternately fascinating and incredibly irritating.
  
  Taylor is a brain scientist who had a stroke and recovered enough to write about it. The chance to learn about what that experience was like seemed compelling enough to me to start reading the book. When her left brain went offline due to the stroke, she experienced only living in her right brain --what she describes as a blissful nirvana. She's spent years getting her left brain back, and as a result has a unique perspective on the relationship of the two halves.
  
  I stuck with the book because I'm sympathetic to at much of what she was saying -- that if you can turn down the volume on the ego's chatter to attain a sense of calm, your life is better off. It's just that most of us approach that goal through meditation, yoga, spiritual practice, or philosophy. Her writing resolutely avoids any such discussion. So it was kind of like reading a book about God written by an autistic person -- it seemed incredibly flat, devoid of emotion, even when she was talking about feelings.
  
  I suspect that this book is the result of divided intentions about its goals and audience -- perhaps between the author and her editor, or between the author's two brain halves, I don't know. It's one part pop-science, 1 part survival memoir, 1 part oddly cold narcissism, and 1 part new age metaphysics. The audiences for these things are really different, and to successfully blend them would take a much more compelling writing style than Taylor's. It's unfortunate that a book that should be the demonstration of her recovery kept making me wonder whether she was expressing herself so badly because of her brain injury.
  
  There are grains of interesting stuff in here, and it's a quick read. It's definitely been on my mind for the past few days, despite my irritation with it. I've heard from friends that audio interviews with Taylor are very warm and charming, which is the exact opposite of my impression from reading the book. Maybe that would be a better place to start if you're curious.

  
  
   7 people found this review helpful
  
  

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