

A Stroke Leads A Brain Scientist To A New Spirituality - wyw
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/fashion/25brain.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

======
anigbrowl
A speculative work which may shed some light on this phenomenon is Julian
Jaynes' _The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind_
\- [http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-
Bicamer...](http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-
Mind/dp/0618057072) and well-summarized at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)> \- although the
abstract does not even come close to the experience of reading Jaynes' book.

I am disappointed at the dismissive comments; perhaps those skimming he
article failed to note Taylor's comment that 'religion is a story the left
brain tells the right brain', and that she is capable enough to teach
neuroanatomy at Indiana University's medical school - if she is not up to or
interested in performing as much academic research, she has hardly become an
anti-scientist.

It's quite possible to be a good materialist and still enjoy a spiritual
dimension to life without evoking immaterial agencies or phenomena to do so;
the different cerebration that seems to take place in the subordinate (usually
right) hemisphere doesn't indicate less 'processing power' or 'buggy
software'; it just processes incoming information differently, and the idea
that there is nothing worthwhile to be learned this way is arguably foolish.

Indeed, there's a faulty syllogism at work here: Scatterbrained mystics make
unscientific claims about the right brain. Taylor makes positive reports of
improved mental state, following a temporary, documented inhibition of her
left hemisphere. Therefore, Taylor is a scatterbrained mystic whose claims are
unscientific.

I don't see Taylor making any claims about immaterial causes or phenomena,
either in this article or on her website, any more than the literature of Zen
does, or any of the serious research into psychotropic drugs.

------
gdp
I can't help but feel rather put off by the reporting in the article, if not
by the entire subject matter.

Mostly because it seems to imply that those of us with two fully-functional
hemispheres are somehow deeply unhappy people, incapable of peaceful quiet.

Also, she appears to have made some reasonably large leaps in terms of what
damage to one hemisphere has done to her personality and behaviour. A lot of
those traits are whole-brain processes. It seems rather reductionist to
suggest that the left hemisphere is some sort of ball-and-chain holding us all
away from enlightenment and bliss.

And really, if the goal is to convince us to relinquish the control that our
left hemispheres have over us, then why frame in neo-spiritualist terms that
are so utterly unappealing to most left-hemisphere-dominant people?

~~~
anigbrowl
Consider that if you were trained from youth in mystical or magical ways of
thinking, you'd likely be pretty unreceptive to reductionist arguments and
glorification of the scientific method - at least, that's been my experience
with hippies, astrologers and such folk. For a variety of reasons, a lot of
these people seem deficient to me in terms of left-hemisphere functioning,
although I am only an amateur psychologist and this is based purely on
anecdotal observations. On the other hand, such people are quite functional is
most regards, even though you and I would regard their thinking patterns as
somewhat maladaptive.

I find Dr Taylor's views and attitude easy to appreciate, since I've had
similar experiences and turning points, though not through such dramatic
circumstances. I believe she makes excellent points, worth hearing - but I
don't feel like any less of a materialist or believer in the utility of logic
and scientific method.

~~~
electromagnetic
Your opinions seem quite prejudiced and insulting. Hippies and Astrologers,
just like any Scientist is left-hemisphere dominant if they're right handed,
it doesn't change and you cannot do anything that affects it (aside from maybe
a stroke).

Astrologers believe in something you don't, and it's very ignorant to say
they're deficient in basic mental processes. I'm sure many hippies are, but
that's called drug abuse. Scientists can be equally as misled as any
astrologer to facts, just read up on the amazing work done by many of our
cold-fusion scientists who ignore fundamental scientific concepts like the
conservation of mass and energy. Personally, I think astrologers are a lot
smarter than any cold-fusion/free energy scientist out there, and those
scientists somehow got their hands onto Ph.D's.

I'm right-hemisphere dominant, I'm extremely logical, sceptical and I have a
high IQ. I scored amazingly in math and science, I'm completely non-religious
to the point that I find atheists disturbingly religious in their activities,
and I've also worked as a writer. Your brain works the way it works, the way
your genes and life have designed it to work. I'm somehow right-hemisphere
dominant and out-perform nearly every left-hemisphere dominant people I know
at tasks they're supposed to be good at. That's the irony of life.

I find Dr Taylor's views to be psycho crackpot work and I give them less
credence than my horoscope. She's claiming a lack of left-hemisphere dominance
is good, which I'm sorry but personally I really like writing (as anyone can
tell from my comments, including this one) and losing the left-hemisphere kind
of ruins that whole fun, also talking.

She apparently had a stroke, probably lost very minor functioning in her brain
and had a religious experience, just like thousands of other people do every
year when they have a heart attack, stroke, cancer, hit by a car, girlfriend
kicked them in the crotch . . . okay I added the last one, but religious
experiences don't necessarily come in the same form. She likely wasn't very
religious, so when she had hers she didn't attribute it to god.

The whole process of near-death usually helps people not worry about the
mundane problems, like your boss being a jerk. At least for a few months.

------
yannis
I never had a stroke or been to a doctor for the last 28 years! However, I had
a molar removed under anaesthesia and I never experienced the bliss that I
felt when I woke up. I guess something in the drugs must have triggered it.
When you disconnect the brain from the 'sensors' or when is 'shutting down'
all these mysterious effects are experienced. I had an uncle that had a Near
Death Experience, he had no reason to lie to anyone about it. He described
everything that happened in the morgue (they took him there). I took the
trouble to go and speak to some of the medics and they confirmed what
happened.

Ever since Carl Sagan proposed that people with NDE are perhaps re-
experiencing their birth, I am more awed with neuro-science. The highly
logical hacker in me is always looking for a physical explanation where either
my left or right brain remains open and agnostic!

The beauty of the article is that it comes from a person in the field, but so
was Teller and he was duped by Uri Geller.

~~~
smhinsey
I had some medical problems when I was growing up that caused me to black out
often enough that I became pretty familiar with the sensations of the process.
What you are describing sounds similar to what I would call a sense of
euphoria I would experience when I first came back to consciousness.

I never got any sort of satisfactory explanation for what exactly was going
on, but it almost seems to be some sort of neurochemical boot up process
related to consciousness.

~~~
yannis
The other mystery with all this is that none of these people remember talking
to anyone, it seems that the language faculty keeps suppressing some processes
in the brain, it is almost as if it is an abstract layer on top of the
underlying 'compilers'. Aboriginal people always talk about the 'dream world'
which I theorize was a pre-language sort of memory.

Try this experiment. Try to think of driving to the store buy some food, come
back home cook it and have dinner. Can you do that without language just
images?

~~~
smhinsey
I recall that waking up happened in stages.

The first stage was full on dreamworld. The majority of it was nonsense I
forgot immediately, but I do have scattered memories of very intricate and
bizarre almost Proustian sorts of scenes playing out in my mind involving
whoever was around at the time. Like sleeping dreams the amount of elapsed
time in the dream did not seem to be bounded by external time.

The second phase begins as you wake up from that dream and consists of
auditory & visual 'hallucinations.' I scare-quote that because it's probably
not the most precise characterization. The best way I can describe the sound
is as the sound of crashing waves at the ocean, but they quickly go from very
loud to to sort of a dull ringing that almost seems to physically hurt your
ears. (I associate this with high blood pressure for some reason, but I don't
think that's valid, particularly in this case.) The visuals consist of an
almost cinematic gradual fade-in from black.

The third and final stage is where things become more familiar. This generally
kicks in a minute or so after you regain consciousness. This is where you are
aware of your surroundings but very muddled. If you're in a medical situation,
people will be talking to you but it will just seem like gibberish. This fades
pretty quickly back into a sort-of normalcy that you gradually adapt to.
Sometimes this would be accompanied by nausea, and at this point you are still
susceptible to re-starting the process if you aren't careful.

I am not sure I could really do it in practice, but as a thought experiment, I
don't have a huge problem with visualizing that sequence without language, but
then again, I am a symbolic/visual person in terms of my learning and thought
process.

~~~
yannis
You can do that? I have tried very hard and can do part of it but always some
word creeps in, even if is saying thank you to the teller.

~~~
smhinsey
Well, in general I make it a point to be as polite as possible in situations
like that because it is not in my nature to be very outgoing and talkative. I
tend to be shy with people I don't know well. From the perspective of purely
my own personality, getting by with a smile and a nod doesn't present much of
a problem to me and is really the default state.

------
mattyb
Her TED talk:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html)

~~~
lutorm
Thanks for that link. I saw her book when I was browsing the bookstore, it
looked interesting but I never picked it up.

~~~
jacobolus
Her book is short and clear, and a quick read. I wish it went a bit deeper
into the science, but it did a decent job, for being targeted at a lay
audience.

------
jacquesm
I don't want to knock on the lady, I'm really glad that she has survived. But
when you decouple your 'input' and you become disconnected you are very close
to dreaming.

That does not mean that there is any relevance to your 'untethered'
experience. Similar things happen to people that are subjected to sensory
deprivation, such as being immersed in tanks with salt water for extended
periods.

It usually does not take very long before hallucinations begin.

~~~
srid
<http://actualfreedom.com.au/library/topics/dissociation.htm>

"""All the mystics advise dissociation (wherein painful reality is transformed
into a bad dream) as being the most effective means to deal with all the wars
and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and
sadness and loneliness and grief and depression and suicides and the such-
like. Just as a traumatised victim of an horrific and terrifying event makes
the experience unreal in order to cope with the ordeal, all the Gurus and the
God-Men, the Masters and the Messiahs, the Avatars and the Saviours and the
Saints and the Sages have desperately done precisely this thing (during what
is sometimes called ‘the dark night of the soul’). Mystics have been
transmogrifying the real world ‘reality’ into an unreal ‘True Reality’ via the
epiphenomenal imaginative/intuitive facility born of the psyche (which is
formed by the instinctual passions genetically endowed by blind nature for
survival purposes) for millennia."""

------
cesare
I can already imagine the kind of comments that this article (and even more
her TED talk) will trigger here.

Which will, ironically, prove her point.

EDIT: What I mean is that we are (myself included) mostly left brain people.
Otherwise we probably wouldn't be here.

It's hard for us to relate to this kind of experiences. It's easier to dismiss
them and go back to our own so very important projects and our endless
elucubrations.

------
oz
Will we now accept that 'spirituality' is a construct of matter?

~~~
Herring
Science doesn't dictate anything to spirituality. Nobody ever decided to pray
after reading studies about prayer reducing illnesses.

~~~
sown
You mean how _it doesn't_ reduce illness in a real way?

~~~
Herring
yeah, ambiguous phrasing..

------
chrischen
>Her message, that people can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life
by sidestepping their left brain, has resonated widely.

We already have a method of sidestepping the left hemisphere: religion. But in
all seriousness, I think she's right. You can achieve this so called _nirvana_
without resorting to religion, which is an invention by us to satisfy our
spiritual needs. Also I think the stroke damaged her left side enough to _open
her mind_ to this point. So I _do not_ think she is delusional, just more open
minded. Too much logic and reasoning results in more narrow minded thinking,
but too little results in more unrealistic thinking. She happened to hit the
perfect balance after the stroke.

------
TweedHeads
We lost a scientist, and gained a delusional spiritualist.

What a trade...

------
grandalf
stroke == brain defect

~~~
jawngee
Stroke is not a brain defect.

Ischemic stroke is caused by a blood clot that could come from as far south as
your legs. Hemorrhagic stroke is caused by a burst blood vessel that blocks
blood getting to your brain. In both cases, stroke is the lack of oxygen to
your brain.

It is largely caused by cardiovascular disease.

~~~
grandalf
uh, yeah, but the result is dead brain tissue :)

