Jill Bolte Taylor

For other uses, see Jill Taylor (disambiguation).

Jill Bolte Taylor
Bolte Taylor at TED, 2008
Born	(1959-05-04) May 4, 1959 Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.
Residence	Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Terre Haute South Vigo High School, B.A. Indiana University, Ph.D. Indiana State University, Postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School (Depts of Psychiatry and Neuroscience)
Known for	Work in neuroanatomy
Website DrJillTaylor.com

External video
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"A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain...", Jill Bolte Taylor, TED Talk

Jill Bolte Taylor (/ˈbɒlti/; born May 4, 1959) is an American neuroanatomist, author, and inspirational public speaker. Her personal experience with a massive stroke, experienced in 1996 at the age of 37, and her subsequent eight-year recovery, influenced her work as a scientist and speaker. It is the subject of her 2006 book My Stroke of Insight, A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. She gave the first TED talk that ever went viral on the Internet, after which her book became a NY Times bestseller and was published in 30 languages.

Bolte Taylor's training is in the postmortem investigation of the human brain as it relates to schizophrenia and the severe mental illnesses. For her book and public outreach related to strokes, in May 2008 she was named to Time Magazine's 2008 Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. "My Stroke of Insight" received the top "Books for a Better Life" Book Award in the Science category from the New York City Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society on February 23, 2009 in New York City.

Bolte Taylor founded the nonprofit Jill Bolte Taylor Brains, Inc., she is affiliated with the Indiana University School of Medicine, and she is the national spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center.

Stroke

On December 10, 1996, Bolte Taylor woke up to discover that she was experiencing a stroke. The cause proved to be bleeding from an abnormal congenital connection between an artery and a vein in the left hemisphere of her brain, an arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Three weeks later, on December 27, 1996, she underwent major brain surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to remove a golf ball-sized clot that was placing pressure on the language centers in the left hemisphere of her brain.

My Stroke of Insight

Following her experience with stroke, in 2006 Bolte Taylor came out with the initial edition of her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, about her recovery from the stroke and the insights she has gained into the workings of her brain because of it.

Bolte Taylor's February 2008 TED Conference talk about her memory of the stroke became an Internet sensation, resulting in widespread attention and interest around the world. It became the second most viewed TED talk of all time. The next edition of the book quickly emerged as a best-seller.

After Bolte Taylor's representative, transmedia agent and attorney Ellen Stiefler, conducted an auction for worldwide publishing rights to "My Stroke of Insight," Penguin won the book. and it was published in hardcover in May 2008, debuting near the top of the New York Times Non-fiction Hardcover Bestseller list. "My Stroke of Insight" spent seventeen weeks on the New York Times Bestseller Lists, reaching number 4. My Stroke of Insight also is available in paperback, large print, audio book, and for some tablets.

My Stroke of Insight is available in over 30 languages.

Subsequently, Bolte Taylor appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on October 21, 2008. In her later commencement address at Duke University on May 10, 2009, Oprah Winfrey quoted Bolte Taylor's assertion that, "You are responsible for the energy that you bring" in encouraging the students to assume this same responsibility in their future lives. Bolte Taylor was the first guest featured on Oprah's Soul Series webcast on Oprah.com and Satellite radio show.

Ballet

Cedar Lake Ballet Company made a ballet about My Stroke of Insight called "Orbo Novo." Deborah Jowitt from the Village Voice writes: "The piece's title, Orbo Novo, is drawn from a 1493 reference to North America by Spanish historian Pietro Martire d'Anghiera. The "new world" that Cherkaoui is exploring, however, is current theories about the brain, and the text that the seventeen dancers speak during the first moments of the 75-minute work comes from My Stroke of Insight, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's uncanny recollection of her stroke. The choreography is based on the ramifications of a single resonant idea: the duality between rationality (the left brain) and instinctive, sensual responses (the right brain); between control and the lack of it; between balance and instability, solitude and society." A review in Los Angeles Times said: "Thus were the dancers speaking Bolte Taylor's words ('My spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria'), while they physically embodied brain waves and misfiring synapses, with a nod, perhaps, to the double helix: rubbery splayed limbs; über-arched backs; ever-rippling torsos." Lauren Roberts of the Daily Brun wrote: ""'Orbo Novo' is a humorous and insightful take on [Bolte Taylor's] story," said dancer Jubal Battisti. "It has a lot to do with the hemispheres of the brain switching between left and right and what that reveals.""

External links

• Official website
• Jill Bolte Taylor at TED
• Jill Bolte Taylor on Oprah's Soul Series
• NPR radio interview
• In a Single Stroke: The Metamorphosis of Jill Bolte Taylor. O, The Oprah Magazine, October 2002
• Interview for the podcast Love + Radio