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.