The Radium Girls and One Who Survived

An ad of the time showed a wrist watch glowing in the dark. Beneath the picture were the words "Made possible by the magic of radium." Another showed a lovely woman, with the add offering various bottles of radium as cosmetics to enhance beauty.

Her Stroke Caused A Mystical Experience

At 7:00 am on December 10, 1996 Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist, awoke to a sharp pain behind her left eye. She didn't know a blood vessel had broken in her brain.  Squinting into the early morning light, she was irritated as her eye throbbed. Thinking of how to relieve the pain, she decided to exercise on an exercise machine which she rowed. That would take care of things, she thought.  Some aerobics were needed to get the heart pumping and the pain would disappear.  But it didn't work.  She saw her arms and hands moving forward and backward but they no longer seemed a part of her.  Of her experience on the machine, she wrote, "Feeling detached from normal reality, I felt as though I was observing myself in motion, as in the playback of a memory, as if my conscious mind was suspended somewhere between my normal reality and some esoteric space. I was sure I was awake, yet, I felt as if I was trapped inside the perception of a meditation that I could neither stop nor escape. Dazed, I felt the frequency of shooting pangs escalate inside my brain, and I realized that this exercise regime was probably not a good idea."

She got off the machine and in the bathroom climbed into the shower. Things got worse. She had no idea her brain was bleeding as her thoughts shut down and peace enveloped her.  Later, she would speak about her  experience, how, as she put it, her "consciousness soared into an all-knowingness, a 'being at one' with the universe."  She moved into a different way of seeing, one without three-dimensions, in which she melted into space.


She wrote a best-selling book about her experience titled My Stroke of Insight.

Are Your Life Story, Your Free Will, and Your Self Convenient Fabrications?

Suppose that because of epilepsy you have had the connection severed between your two brain hemispheres so that one side does not communicate with the other. In an experiment, somebody shows you a card that says "Walk." So you walk. When asked why you did it, you say, "To get a drink of water." In fact you only did it because you saw the card. You made up the explanation after the fact. This couldn't happen to you, right? Wrong.

V.S. Ramachandran: Brain Temporal Lobes and Mystical Experience

Neuroscientist Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran works in behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics and is professor in the Department of Psychology and the Graduate Program in Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego. He has published books with popular appeal, including Phantoms in the Brain (1998), A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness (2004) and The Tell-Tale Brain (2010). In these videos he presents a young man who experiences recurrent mystical experiences and feels intense beauty in these moments. Ramachandran hypothesizes a reason for the experiences, although tracing them to the physical does not prove the cause as physical and the experience as deluded. One can also observe that people without the young man's condition have had similar experiences and that a door opened into a greater reality that few ever glimpse.

Part One
Part Two