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A Blow to the Brain
Discover, Jan, 1999 by Jill Bolte Taylor
In my case, the hemorrhage occurred over a fold in the left hemisphere of my brain: the superior temporal gyrus. There are two major language centers in the left hemisphere: Broca's area, which is involved in speech production, and Wernicke's area, involved in language comprehension. The bleeding in my brain placed pressure on the nerve fibers running between these two language centers, blocking my ability to speak or understand spoken language. The most lasting injury occurred in a nearby region that allows for the performance of both simple and complex mathematical calculations.
Later in the afternoon, when I regained full consciousness, I was actually quite surprised to be alive. I thought I had completely surrendered to my death. Instead I was awake, and to my dismay I was completely mentally disabled. I had stepped outside the "normal" rhythm of our society, and I experienced the isolation and other facets of mental illness that I had spent much of my professional life describing to others.
My interest in the human brain began when I was very young. I wanted to know why one of my brothers--18 months older than I--interpreted experiences differently from the way I did. As a sister and later as a scientist, I wanted to understand why I could tailor my dreams to fit into a reality that allowed them to come true, and why my brother lived in a tormenting world of delusion. When I was 24, I entered a doctoral program in neuroanatomy. The next year, my brother was diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia.
It is truly a marvel of the human brain that we can interpret a vast array of sensations from the external world and create a perception of reality that we can then communicate and share with others. But people with schizophrenia experience a thought disorder in which their version of reality is unique to themselves. In my brother's mind, he is Prince Michael the White Horseman. He expects to be martyred and then resurrected in an androgynous form, when he will reign as the "bride of Christ" in Heaven. He spends hours every day writing what he genuinely believes to be "audibles" from God. Although medications help my brother function and be less confused, his delusional thinking and hallucinations persist.
Seven years after my brother's diagnosis, I received my Ph.D. and began working in brain research at Harvard Medical School. Eventually I specialized in the post-mortem investigation of the human brain, with a focus on the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. I wanted to help identify the underlying biological mechanisms for hallucination and delusion. However, because there is a long-term shortage of brain specimens donated by individuals with a psychiatric disorder, I began working as the brain bank's national spokesperson for the mentally ill. Billed as the Singin' Scientist, I travelled extensively, educating families of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill about the beauty, fragility, and resilience of the human brain, as well as the scientific value of brain donation for research. In these informal lectures, I presented beautiful slides of the brain and explained its function. And I often sang and played guitar.
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