Analysis Of Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke Of Insight

Jill Bolte Taylor’s bestseller, My Stroke of Insight, is a polished literary work that can be easily read by a large audience. You don’t need to have the knowledge of a brain scientist to follow along; in fact, the second and third chapter has a summarized introduction to simple science of our bodies and our brain including hemispheric asymmetries. Readers are able to flow through Taylor’s exploration of new sensations from heavy reliance on her right hemisphere. This amalgamation of all little details of Jill’s life pre-stroke all the way through her eight year in recovery
In 1996 and at age 37, Taylor had a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere that had debilitating effects on her perception, movement, coordination, thought processes that she describes as “inconsistent, fragmented, and interrupted by an intermittent silence” and language (Taylor, 2008, p. 40). Her orientation association area, Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas and motor and sensory cortexes were compromised while she drifted through transient thoughts of how to get help, how to use the phone, and not knowing where her physical body boundaries starts and ends. At one moment of clarity, she was able to remember her work phone digits but at that point, she was simply drawing what she saw in her mind. Taylor stated, “a “2” was no longer a “2” but rather a squiggle that looked like a “2”. Fortunately, the “2” on the phone pad looked just like the “2” in my mind’s eye” (Taylor, 2008, p.55). The blood pooling in the left hemisphere left her unable to recognize numbers or words on a business card! Generally, there are many symptoms of a stroke, some are telltale and others are more ambiguous. …show more content…
One of the most reliable tasks to be done to localize the problem is to examine the speech and language abilities of the victim. On the day of the stroke, Taylor kept mentally rehearsing, “This is Jill, I need help” but when she finally called her colleague for help, she could not decipher his speech (claiming it sounded like a golden retriever) and when she spoke, she was shocked to find she could not speak intelligibly (Taylor, 2008, p. 56). Certain language tasks are specifically correlated to areas in the brain, allowing stroke localization when brain imaging cannot be done or is incomplete. Research by Oliveira and Damasceno indicates four tests were able to “predict the presence of left hemisphere lesions: word and sentence repetition, naming, and ideomotor praxis”, however counting from 1 to 20 and comprehension tasks were also more impaired in left hemispheric injuries though not statistically significant (Oliveira & Damasceno, 2011). …show more content…
Comparably, there was an example of Taylor trying to name the President of the United States post-stroke and it was an exhausting task for her to process the question; she had to focus on each sound, lip-read, search for word meanings, then apply it at a whole sentence level. She knew her “language with linear processing was out” and by the time she had the concept or picture of what a president was, her “brain could not get from “President” and “United States” to “Bill Clinton”” (Taylor, 2008, p. 79). Semantic knowledge aids us in processing words and stimulation. For a stroke patient in recovery without the ability to think linearly, Taylor had to relearn many things and their function. For instance, when offered a fork, Taylor creatively