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April 4, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Want to know the secret of life? Your guru’s in Bloomington

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Terre Haute and Indiana are rich in accomplished native sons and daughters, but for deep and practical wisdom, no Hoosier or Hautean luminary can top neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor.

If we had any sense, we would install this woman in her own Delphi Oracle-like shrine down in Monroe County where she teaches and conducts brain research at Indiana University. The lines of truth-seekers and acolytes would be backed up along every highway leading into Bloomington.

Then again, if Dr. Taylor, a 1977 Terre Haute South graduate, were confined to dispensing truth and wisdom 24/7, when would Jodie Foster get the opportunity to hang around her and prepare to play her in an upcoming bio-pic about Taylor’s extraordinary life?

Twelve years ago, smart money would have bet against Taylor having a life, let alone a spectacular one.

As my colleague Mark Bennett has detailed several times here in the Trib-Star, Taylor — still in her 30s and doing research at Harvard — suffered a catastrophic stroke that essentially wiped out the left hemisphere of her brain. The left brain is the know-it-all, the side that registers “big oak tree, bursting with green leaves” when the right brain registers (sort of), “Mmmmm, pretty.”

Taylor’s mother, G.G. Taylor, spent months in Boston tending to “the infant” inside Taylor’s grown body, nurturing and helping her to heal so she could work on regaining what she had lost.

In “My Stroke of Insight,” a book Taylor self-published in 2006, she described the nearly decade-long road back to full function. That recovery was a kind of perfect storm of factors. Take away G.G.’s fierce maternal instincts and academic rigor, for example, or Jill’s stunned but prodigious scientific knowledge of the human brain, and “the infant” might never have progressed.

Luck and timing helped introduce the rest of the world to the illumination Taylor experienced during her rehabilitation. In 2008, her book was reborn in an edition published by Viking. Not surprising, it became a New York Times best-seller. The thoughtful, intelligent and immensely talented Foster was drawn to the story and now is determined to bring Taylor to the screen.

The Jodi-as-Jill information emerged Friday on WFIU-FM’s “Noon Edition” with Bob Zaltsberg and Mary Catherine Carmichael. Taylor told the hosts that a respected screenwriter has signed on to the project and a director has just committed. Taylor said she could not yet reveal his name but, chuckling, she added, “he’s really famous.”

Even without the feature film morsel, Taylor’s hour on the radio would have flown by as she served up her customary banquet of exquisite food for thought. Whatever the subject, from the economic recession to the interconnectedness of all life on Earth and beyond, Taylor’s observations were brilliant and exhilarating.

Whatever “it” is, she gets — and it all centers on the blueprint of a “balanced brain” that complements and aids our status as a “biology-based species.”

Take, for instance, Taylor’s “90-second rule” regarding anger.

One of her many discoveries as she reacquainted herself with cognitive thinking and worked to reconstitute her left brain was the demystification of anger. Studying the “circuitry” of anger, Taylor found that it takes fewer than 90 seconds to perceive anger stimulus, feel the unpleasant rush of the “physiological dump” of chemicals and electricity that is released into our system, then be completely flushed of that dump.

Everything after 90 seconds is choice.

“Anger really is just a group of cells,” Taylor said on WFIU. If we stay mad after a minute and a half, it’s because we are voluntarily feeding the emotion with our left brain.

Taylor’s simple, genius advice is “stop and look at your watch.” By using the left brain to observe the tick, tick, tick of seconds “instead of engaging” in the anger process as it runs, we can ensure that the involuntary circuit will complete itself and dissipate.

Of course, that also would mean owning our responsibility for prolonged anger and giving up lame excuses like, “I couldn’t help myself, I was just so mad.”

We also would have to grow up if we decided to apply Taylor’s balanced brain formula to our national economic recovery, as she suggested to Carmichael on “Noon Edition.” As Taylor sees it, long before the U.S. financial sector began to implode, we as a society had allowed our left brain skills — the “do, do, do” force behind our endeavors — to rule the roost.

The left brain feedback we got was, “I want more money, I want more money, I want more money,” and it shouted down the right brain’s desire to shut out the noise, let up on the work level, relax, regenerate and just be.

In all of nature, Taylor said, there is “a push and then a pause.” For us, the push comes from the left brain, the pause from the right. Without a balance of push and pause, we grow out of touch with our whole biological selves — and we pass that imbalance on to our environment.

One of the positives that should come from being forced to adjust to powerful economic shifts, said Taylor, would be to ask ourselves, “What is really important?” This assessment would require examination of “our relationship with our family, with nature, with our neighbors, with our community, with recycling” and a host of elements that make up our existence.

Before Taylor totally recovered from her stroke, she reached a state in which she was tempted to stay. It is a right-brain state of bliss, of being acutely in the present. Practitioners of Eastern religions work their entire lives to occasionally inhabit that state; some Christian mystics discovered it in communion with God.

“It was a state of Nirvana …” Taylor explained. “I didn’t know where I began and the world ended. I was as big as the universe.”

But scientist that she is, faithful to the balanced biological species that we are, Taylor pressed on to retrieve the busy, noisy, bossy, organizational, do-do-do left hemisphere of her brain.

Lucky us. If she had stayed in her right-hemisphere Shangri-La, instead of opting to just visit it more often, she never would have written, “My Stroke of Insight.” She never would have shared all she learned, and the rest of us would be much the poorer.

Religious or secular, we Americans are always in search of a hero-guru among us who will light the way. Terre Haute, Indiana’s Jill Bolte Taylor, with her better-than-before left brain and her lovingly detached Zen right brain, is a natural for that role. Jodie Foster and that famous director need only tell her story.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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