In the first TED talk ever to go viral, Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor details the workings of her mind during a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain in 1996.
What she describes is inexplicable: When her left hemisphere, which governs that sense of us being separate and self-contained, begins to shut down, her right hemisphere takes over, and she experiences a kind of euphoria—a freeing of all the trappings of being a person with a history, thoughts, fears, relationships, baggage. She says her brain with its relentless inner chatter goes silent, as if she’s hit the mute button. What remains is total peace, an utter and delicious release.
In the shower, she looks at her arm and can’t tell where she ends and the wall begins; instead of her body here and the rest of the world there, she sees a swirling mass of atoms and energy, indistinguishable one from the other.
She starts to realize something is very, very wrong as her left hemisphere starts to send up flares (“We need help!”), and she tries to find a phone number and figure out how to use the phone, all the while drifting in and out of this dreamy, ecstatic state. She describes feeling large and uncontained, a flow of energy, a whale bounding through infinite waves. She can’t imagine she could fit all of that energy back into her tiny body, even if she tried.
Of course, she realizes in the ambulance that this may be it; she feels her spirit surrender and she says goodbye. When she wakes up hours later, she’s surprised to find that in fact she’s still alive. You don’t need to have a stroke, she says, to experience the peace and oneness she felt. The more we cultivate that right hemisphere, the part that sees us as one rather than separate, the more we can feel that bliss, that sheer and utter atomic connection.
It’s no wonder this video went viral. It’s not only a feat of incredible storytelling (I challenge you to watch it and not feel transformed in some way), it’s a powerful reminder that we do in fact have the capacity to change the way we experience the world and each other. That our loneliness, resentment, anxiety, may be a side effect of our overemphasis on left-hemisphere thinking, enforced by a culture that believes that for each of us to be worthy of love, we must be different, separate, better.
Let’s say, for example, you press your way onto a crowded subway at rush hour. You might think two competing thoughts, possibly at the same time: I am special and in a hurry, or I am one of a million and not special at all.
If you manage to secure a breath of space on that train, you’ll likely find yourself jammed up against an armpit with someone’s elbow in your back. Your face so close to a stranger’s that you can see every pore.
What you think next, though, could change everything—either that these people, this train, this world, is in your way, or that you are now, and always, part of an unbreakable embrace, breathing as one and bounding through an open and endless sea.
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