I often extol the benefits of the technology was are participating in here called the Internet. The range of information, entertainment and personal expression available as a result of this technology is so vast as to be overwhelming. Yet every so often one chances upon a website so extraordinary it makes everything else on the Internet seem, well, just ordinary.
This was how I felt when I discovered TED Talks about a year ago. TED Talks bring together some of the greatest minds of our age to share their wisdom. Since I first stumbled on this site, I've watched many of the compelling videos found there. I've listened to Cosmologist Brian Greene discuss String Theory; the brilliant and eccentric computer scientist Clifford Stoll talk about pretty much everything, iconoclastic co-mapper of the human genome, Craig Venter, explain his desire to create synthetic life; comedian, atheist and ex-Saturday Night Live regular Julia Sweeney entertain with songwriter Jill Sobule in The Jill and Julia Show; Physicist and energy expert, Amory Lovins, propose a wonderfully simple way to withdraw from our addiction to oil; French Biochemist and Buddhist monk, Matthiew Ricard, explain why he's so, well, so fucking happy; and many, more from similarly intriguing, inspiring and entertaining people.
What TED Talks is to me then, is like a field of beautiful diamonds where hundreds of these sparkling gems are just lying around waiting to be picked up by anyone. Best of all, through the magic of the Internet, the number of diamonds never decreases. In fact, there are more and more diamonds all the time.
Another way to look at this website is as a modern day Library of Alexandria, where every book is small and concise, yet all the ideas expressed are able to be understood by anyone who takes a mere 18 minutes to immerse himself or herself in each book. Best of all, the books of this library are never out, missing, on-hold or lost.
This is from the TED website:
Perhaps the most interesting TED Talk I've watched was one by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who described in exquisite detail the morning she had a massive stroke and how she - ever the scientist - tried to both understand the fascinating experience she was having, as well as try to determine how to get help since she was quickly losing all knowledge of how the objects in her world functioned.TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 [2600 as of January, 2018] talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
Our mission: Spreading ideas.
We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. This site, launched April 2007, is an ever-evolving work in progress, and you're an important part of it.
So while she was bleeding into her own brain, she spent well over an hour trying to call her own office because she'd now lost the understanding of what the little squiggles on her own business card meant and about how to use the thing she knew she had to use to contact someone for help: her phone. She did know, however, that if she failed at these once-simple tasks, she would probably die.
Jill Bolte Taylor has been featured a number of times on Oprah's Soul Series webcasts. Oprah, of course, is "the source authority" for Self-Help, Human Development and New Age philosophies in our popular culture, and while some of the ideas promoted on her television show might want to make most scientists throw their televisions out the window, I am personally gratified that her show is popular enough to counter the unenlightened, nonspiritual, dogmatic, and generally selfish thrust of conventional religious culture in America today. Also, it wouldn't hurt some of those scientists to listen to Dr. Taylor talk about her own Self-discovery and open up to a few of these unscientific ideas themselves.
Dr. Taylor wrote about her experience in her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. In her TED Talk, she describes what happened to her this way:
On the morning of my stroke...I looked down at my arm, and I realized that I could no longer define the boundaries of my body.When I finished listening to this talk, I knew that I had to get her book. So I clicked over to Audible.com and downloaded the full book. As interesting as her 18-minute TED Talk is, the complete story of how this young woman lost total functioning of her left-brain and began to rebuild her life step-by-step is both gripping and powerful.
I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect is this energy...energy. And I'm asking myself, 'What is wrong with me? What is going on?'
And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left-hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent; just as if someone took a remote control and pressed the mute button. Total silence. And at first, I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind, but then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous...and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was. And it was beautiful there.
Then all of a sudden, my left-hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, 'Hey! We've got a problem, we've got a problem! We've gotta get some help! And I'm going, I've got a problem! I've got a problem!
So it's like, okay, I've got a problem. But then I immediately drifted right back out into the Consciousness. And I affectionately refer to this space as 'La La Land'.
But it was beautiful there.
Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to your external world. So here I am in this space and any stress related to my job is gone. And I felt lighter in my body.
And imagine all the relationships in my external world and any stressers related to any of those, they were gone. And I felt a sense of peacefulness.
And imagine what it would be like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage. Ohhhhhhhh! I felt...euphoria!
One of the most touching episodes in the book is how Jill's mother flew to Boston to be with her immediately after her stroke. Jill didn't recognize this woman from Adam...or Eve, but somehow her mother just instinctively knew what her damaged child needed at that most vulnerable moment. So she simply climbed into the hospital bed with her and held her just as she did when Jill was an infant - just holding and rocking and loving her.
Thus began a long, painful and arduous road back to full functioning that would take eight years for Jill to become the person she was before her stroke. As I've already mentioned, every step of the way involved relearning everything that she had once known.
Jill's left-brain, the hemisphere that represents who we are in our physical world and how we adapt and react to it was gone. This half of her brain which processes past and future in its familiar linear fashion had simply been erased. Fortunately, it hadn't been physically destroyed. The neurons were intact and fired normally. It's just that all her prior programming had been wiped clean from her brain's "hard drive".
The most intriguing result of her stroke was that this brain scientist was able to independently view her mental existence from both compartments of her brain - called the bicameral brain - which normally work so marvelously together to create the complete human beings we are. It was as if Jill Bolte Taylor, this wonderful communicator and brilliant brain scientist, was given the task by God - or Spirit - to bring to humanity a remarkable insight about who we all really are; an insight that it took someone with her unique perspective and understanding of the brain to grok.
It is in her description of the mystical Oneness of her life in La La Land, however, that I became most intrigued and fascinated.
This is the state that has been the focus of much of my journey. It is a state that generally arrives in a person's life as a result of great psychic pain and suffering - or through years of dedication to a discipline like meditation. Or it is possible to achieve this state very quickly using psychedelic substances like DMT, Psilocybin ('magic mushrooms'), LSD or other hallucinogenic agents. Once one arrives in this state, it appears that it is extremely difficult to remove oneself from; such is its all-encompassing peace and beauty.
Nevertheless, Dr. Taylor's personal and scientific explanation of a biological cause of the mystical experience, i.e., the shutting off of the chatter from the left-brain, gives rise to more questions about the phenomenon of this experience than it answers. I will explore Mysticism in a future post, but back to Jill Bolte Taylor as she tells of her own mystical experience:
So a little while later, I'm riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to Mass. General Hospital and I curl up into a little fetal ball...and just like a balloon with the last bit of air going...whooosh...right out of the balloon, I felt my energy lift...and just felt my spirit surrender.I highly recommend reading or listening to Dr. Taylor's book, My Stroke of Insight. Her TED Talk below is a brief introduction to this brain scientist's incredible experience. It is both entertaining and very moving. Her telling of it is like watching performance art.
And in that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life...or that this was perhaps my moment of transition.
When I awoke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life.
My mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise and I just wanted to escape because I could not identify the position of my body in space,
I felt enormous and expansive like a genie just liberated from her bottle and my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.
Nirvana! I found Nirvana!
Then I remember thinking, there is no way I could ever squeeze the enormousness of myself back into this tiny little body. But then I realized, I'm still alive. I'm still alive and that I've found Nirvana! And if I found nirvana and I am still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana!
And then I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be. What a stroke of insight this could be to to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.
It took me eight years to completely recover.
So who are we?
We are the life force power of the Universe - with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose moment by moment who and how we want to be in the world.
Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where I am...the life force power of the Universe. I am the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form...at one with all that is.
Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow...separate from you.
I am Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist.
These are the we inside of me.
Which would you choose?
Which do you choose?
And when?
I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.
And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.
The book expands on this talk by relating how difficult it was to relearn everything about the world again, from how to move her body, how to take her first steps and then walk and finally about her arduous process of learning to read and understand language again; the use of which is the primary function of the left-hemisphere.