Famous Neuroscientist: Instantly Reduce Stress & Find Peace by Understanding These 4 Parts of Your Brain, with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

The Truth About How Your Brain Really Works You NEVER Knew! The Neuroscience Secret to Feeling Stress Free and Increasing Your Intuition! You’ve heard the myth: left brain = logic, right brain = emotions. BUT WHAT IF EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG? Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, renowned Harvard neuroanatomist and author of My Stroke of Insight and Whole Brain Living, is here to DESTROY this misconception and reveal how understanding the full power of your brain can TRANSFORM your life! Dr. Taylor shares her incredible insights after suffering a life-threatening brain hemorrhage & stroke, which not only led her to become the expert in how our brains shape our perception, emotions, and reality, but also changed her perception of life and death forever. Find out how the 4 different characters of the brain control your actions, thoughts, and relationships – and how you can take CONTROL over your emotions and mental state. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor also breaks down: - How trauma, pain, and even ruminating thoughts are all connected to your brain's wiring and how YOU can fix it - Why cruelty might just be a reflection of someone's inner trauma – and how to heal from it - The secret to unlocking more joy and awe in your life (your brain is wired for it!) - How meditation, gratitude, and physical awareness can bring you back to the present moment & into deeper harmony with yourself. - Tips on how to move past your emotional triggers, address cravings, and even tap into alternate energy frequencies to shift your mindset - Her take on psychedelics and their connection to the rise of schizophrenia This is an episode that will leave you questioning EVERYTHING you thought you knew about your brain, your emotions, and your life. TUNE IN to MBB today!! Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's Books: - Whole Brain Living: https://www.drjilltaylor.com/whole-brain-living/ - My Stroke of Insight: https://www.drjilltaylor.com/my-stroke-of-insight/ BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  To me, the gift of this stroke is that a neuroscientist, a neuroanatomist, who thinks in terms of circuitry, had an opportunity to shut down what was going on in the left hemisphere to the point where she could really discover what does it feel like to be completely without those skills of distraction from the present moment. I am watching my own brain experience a major hemorrhage. I'm literally watching circuits go offline one at a time to the point where I cannot walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. When people meditate, when people reach

• 0:48Speaker 00

  that space of transcendental goal, it's actually a quieting of the conversational personalities of the left hemisphere, designed to focus on detail, me, the individual, my relationship between me and the external world. When I lost that left hemisphere, what I gained was an uninterrupted or inhibited experience of the present moment. People are trying desperately to find this peace. They're trying to figure out, how do I get out of my fear, out of my anxiety, out of the pain of my past, the pain from my trauma, the fear of the unknown in the future? How do we get out of that and step into the part of ourselves that is peaceful?

• 1:42Mayim Bialik?

  Hey, I just found out something astounding. Approximately 63% of those of you listening to or watching Myimbialyx Breakdown are not subscribed. We know you're listening and we know you're watching because of all of the awesome comments you leave telling us how Myimbialyx Breakdown is helping you lead a happier and healthier life. We love that, but the best way to support our show is to subscribe. It's also the only way to get latest updates and to know when new episodes drop. So anywhere that you listen to podcasts and on YouTube, please subscribe, hit the bell icon so that you know when a new episode drops. Thank you so much, and on to the episode. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 2:17Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 2:18Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. Today's a great day because it's not often we get to speak to neuroscientists. And we have got the neuroscientist, I would say, of neuroscientists. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, who's also going to talk about the different parts of our brain and how understanding and integrating them can literally help you transform your life from what may have felt like stagnation, in trauma, in pain, in rumination, and how understanding these four distinct parts in a way that I have never heard described before

• 2:59Mayim Bialik?

  is actually a simple, very simple, accessible way to change your awareness of your human experience. My jaw's on the floor here.

• 3:12Jonathan Cohen?

  She talks about how to activate and deactivate circuitries in the brain, meaning that you can turn things on and off. And that can help you create different choices in your life because you're going to respond to the world differently. She describes that each one of us has a brain that is designed to create ecstatic experiences, that we're wired to create awe and joy and how these things can transform our lives when we truly experience them.

• 3:44Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of us have heard about right brain versus left brain. How about that's not the way to actually think about your brain? It's not like you have one side that's rational and another side that's emotional. Both sides have the capability to process information and emotion. You need all components of both sides of your hemisphere to create a whole experience. And what strikes me the most about this approach to understanding our well-being is that if you've ever felt torn between what you wish you could be feeling and experiencing and what your brain seems to want you to think and experience, if you have ever experienced that conflict, This approach helps you dissect that out and integrate it

• 4:28Mayim Bialik?

  so that you can stop fighting inside of your brain. That's mostly what I feel like my challenge is in life. It's not fighting with Jonathan, or people on the street, or my kids, although I do a lot of that, too. It's the conflict in my very own brain that will not allow me to experience joy when I want to. It will not allow me to access things in meditation that everybody else says they're having, right? If you are a person who has felt stuck, and like, maybe you are not your own worst enemy, but maybe you're in a prison that only you have the key to, I absolutely guarantee that you will feel differently about how to open up that prison after listening to Jill Bolte-Taylor. Break it down.

• 5:13Mayim Bialik?

  I have to say, I've known about you for a long time. You know, not only as a student of neuroscience. Your story really ricocheted through, I mean, the world. And your book introduced people to so many aspects of not only the unbelievable experience that you had and the tremendous amount of insight you had about that experience, but for many people, it was the first time they gained an understanding of the brain and nervous system, which people like me chose to study. But a lot of people were like, what is that? Why are you doing that? You're a nerd. You're so stupid.

• 5:58Mayim Bialik?

  And then your book came out, and everybody was like, oh, this is what you study?

• 6:04Speaker 00

  Thank you. Oh, I'm honored. And may I first say, fangirl, fangirl. And anything, good science, Big Bang, anything, you know? Brain, mystery, nerdy, yeah, nerd macro. So happy to be here. And yeah, no, it was quite a ride for everybody when that book, when that experience came out with the TED Talk. You were getting your doctorate right around when the TED Talk came out, because the TED Talk hit in '08.

• 6:34Mayim Bialik?

  There's so much I want to talk to you about. You know, obviously, you know, for people who who have not read My Stroke of Insight, A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, it is such a fantastic book. And and also, you know, Whole Brain Living, which we're also going to get into, The Anatomy of Choice, and the four characters that drive our life. You know, I didn't really know what to expect. You know, you said that you really never thought you'd write another book after My Stroke of Insight, unless you had something kind of new and novel to introduce. And indeed, what you're presenting is, I mean, the the best way I can describe it is it's

• 7:14Mayim Bialik?

  a combination of parts work, which we do in therapy, with not only practical neuroscience kind of structure, but the insight that comes from what you experienced. So I'm really excited to get into understanding what these four characters are, how so many things about how you describe these four different parts of your brain and your psyche can really be utilized to literally create a better understanding of yourself and change. But I really do think, before we get to that, it would really help our audience to have

• 7:53Mayim Bialik?

  a little bit of framework for what happened to you in in that December. Can you talk a little bit about sort of how we got here?

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Certainly. So first, I I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who is 18 months older than I, and he would eventually be diagnosed with a brain disorder schizophrenia. So as children, of course, we don't know that some that a brain is not normal. All we know is that my brother is very different from me in the way he interprets his experience, our experience, and then how he chooses to behave in response to it. So just to like, say, for example, we're playing kickball out in the front street, in the front yard, and the ball goes flying into the street, and mom is screaming like

• 8:48Speaker 00

  a lunatic at us, and he's interpreting her as being angry, and I'm interpreting her as being terrified. Well, that's a significant difference in perception of reality. And so I just noticed that he, we were very different. And so because of that, I became very focused on, well, what are the differences? Who is he? Who am I? Well, how can we be different? And biologically, this boy is the closest thing to me that exists in the universe. So I figure at some kind of biological level, the level of the brain, that's where we're going to find these differences.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  So I grow up to become a neuroanatomist. So I study the anatomy of the brain. How does stimulation come in? How is that processed? And so I was teaching and performing research at Harvard Medical School. I was 37 years old. I was in the prime of my life and I love the brain. I'm a gross anatomist. I love the body. Everything's cellular. And then I wake up one morning and I am watching my own brain experience a major hemorrhage in the left hemisphere. So I'm literally watching circuits go offline, one at a time, over the course of four hours

• 10:12Speaker 00

  to the point where I cannot walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. Well, obviously, I did get help. It had a happy ending. I had a major craniotomy. They removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball out of my left hemisphere. And it took eight years for, they sent me home and said, "We have no idea how much you're going to get back. We just have no idea." And so it took eight years for me to completely rebuild the cells of my left hemisphere and those circuits to regain those abilities based on what I had still retained in the right hemisphere.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  So that's how I wrote my stroke of insight, A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey.

• 10:59Jonathan Cohen?

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• 11:01Mayim Bialik?

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• 11:45Mayim Bialik?

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• 12:13Jonathan Cohen?

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• 12:18Mayim Bialik?

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• 13:00Mayim Bialik?

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• 13:45Mayim Bialik?

  Starting my day with this easy, health-focused task reminds me to continue to make healthy choices the rest of the day. For a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/breakdown and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/breakdown. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Myobiolex Breakdown sent you. Okay, I'm gonna, I, we need to just like, we need to hit pause here because that's an, it's an unbelievable, it's an unbelievable arc of a morning.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:24Mayim Bialik?

  But what is more, what is more unbelievable is, first of all, because of your insight and your really intellectual understanding of the brain, there was a certain amount of cognition that you were able to have. And what's really cool about the book is it takes you through everything that you just described. It takes section by section to introduce you to the part of the brain that is responsible for what you started having deficits in, right? I just want to read a little bit of a section. You, you, you were, basically, it felt like a migraine. You basically thought you were having like the worst migraine of your life. And you like tried to like get on the treadmill. Like you thought like, let's work out a little bit.

• 15:08Mayim Bialik?

  Like you're just trying to sort of work through it. And you decided to get into the tub, right? You thought like, let's get a bath. And you had already noticed that like your movements were weird, but you said, It seemed odd that I could sense the inner activities of my brain as it adjusted and readjusted all of the opposing muscle groups in my lower extremities to prevent me from falling over. And you said, "I was momentarily privy to a precise and experiential understanding of how hard the 50 trillion cells in my brain and body were working in perfect unison to maintain the flexibility and integrity of my physical form." And this sort of leads to what you ultimately discuss in this book,

• 15:53Mayim Bialik?

  which is that you basically got to perceive the thinking mind, you got to perceive the feeling mind, and there then was a place where you were able to consciously experience the gradual removal of the conscious experience. Can you talk about kind of the steps that went from sort of the practical of like, "Oh, I'm having trouble with my vision," or, "I'm a neuroanatomist. I know that like something's not right with my movement," to what you described as, "The harder I tried to concentrate, the more fleeting my ideas seemed to be." And you met a growing sense of peace. You said, "In place of the constant chatter

• 16:38Mayim Bialik?

  that had attached me to the details of my life, I felt enfolded by a blanket of tranquil euphoria." And you felt a oneness with the universe. Can you talk about sort of this specific progression that happened in your conscious awareness?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so first of all, imagine if this happened to you, because you have studied the brain. And I'm guessing that anytime you experience any kind of neurological weirdness, one, it catches your attention, and two, you would explore it and find it fascinating.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Right, because it is, it's fascinating. And so my, my consciousness did not move into fear circuitry that said, "Oh my God, I'm gonna die, I'm having a stroke, I need to get help." Instead, it moved into watching and mapping what's going on at the level of now deficit. So as I get up, the first thing I notice is the light is too bright. Well, this happens with migraine. I close the curtains. I'm thinking, "Okay, um, let's see if I can beat this thing and get some blood flowing."

• 17:59Speaker 00

  So I get onto my cardio glider and I start the movement of my body, which is my morning routine. But as I'm doing that, I'm realizing that, that my hands look like claws, primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I'm observing my body in action, instead of simply being in my body. Well, this is circuitry inside of the brain, and this is what I was teaching at Harvard. So, so you know, for me, now I'm mapping, okay, I'm clearly having a problem. Which cells are having the problem? And I'm thinking, "Okay, well, this isn't helping me." So I get off this cardio glider and I'm walking across my living room,

• 18:39Speaker 00

  purposely having to speak to my legs, saying, "Forward, move forward, move forward." And so I'm pacing across this living room and I get into the shower and it was, everything kind of came to culmination in the shower. When I, as I'm lifting my leg, I'm literally hearing this conversation and negotiation between my, my, the, the different parts of the, the muscles. "You guys contract, you guys relax, and I'm gonna lose my balance." I mean, I'm literally hearing, it, it sounded like a workforce of, of little cells that all had to perform their functions.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  And now I'm privy to that level of conversation of my somatic balance and workmanship. So I'm, I'm not even at my emotions. I'm not even at my thinking. I'm just slowed hearing these grinding chains working in order to keep my body. And it was very low frequencies, which is fascinating, you know? I mean, it was fascinating. So I get into the shower and as I, as I turn on the water, I remember turning on the water and the volume, when the water hit the tub, it was like this big explosion of energy and sound. And I, I fell

• 20:08Speaker 00

  back and I'm propped up against the wall and I'm looking at my arm against the wall and just, there was no differentiation between those different things. It was just atoms and molecules in motion in relationship with one another. And that's when I really realized, I've got a really big, I've got a problem going on here. You know, at some point, it's like scientists have to stop being fascinated and go get some help.

• 20:39Mayim Bialik?

  First of all, even as a neuroscientist, I think I'd be freaking the fuck out. And I'm a person who like gets migraines and has a lot of neurological stuff. But so I, I think you have a presence of mind that most of us would not. But I wonder, if you can talk a little bit more, I mean, I'm also thinking like, do we all have a constant like army of voices in our brains that are like, do this, do that? I mean, that's fascinating to me. And I know on an electrochemical level, we do. I want you to talk about when you put your hand against, you know, the wall. Like, it sounds like you're tripping balls, but you're not, right? Like, you're not on drugs. This is not a hallucinogenic experience. And this is not a transcendental or schizophrenic experience. You are, you're getting a window

• 21:23Mayim Bialik?

  into an aspect of perception and consciousness. Talk a little bit more about this atom molecule situation. What did it actually look like when you felt like there was no difference between you and a wall?

• 21:36Speaker 00

  It looks like if you look outside of a window and you look into trees, and you look at the leaves on the trees and you got a little motion going on and you're not focusing on anything, you're just kind of having the wide peripheral experience. And different pieces are just kind of dancing a little bit in movement. And there's no real discernment of any detail. Instead, everything, the trees blend together as the forest. I mean, this is why we talk about, you know, the forest versus the trees. You know, are you looking at the trees or are you looking at the forest? Because this part of the brain, the part of the brain, that left hemisphere circuitry

• 22:19Speaker 00

  that was key at zooming in and differentiating detail and creating boundaries between things, that was now floating in a pool of blood. And in the absence of that, though, as it releases any kind of inhibition off of the big picture, all I had then was this blurred vision. But it was still a knowingness. There was still a level of consciousness, just different than when one focuses on detail. So my perception of self also evaporated. Me, the individual, skin is where I begin and end.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  And in the absence of that, I become a part of this big, what I describe as an energy ball. And I'm now this massive energy ball in relationship with all the energy all around me. And the sense of myself becomes literally as big as the universe because the group of cells in my left hemisphere that define me as Jill Bolte-Taylor, here's where I begin and end, here is my name, here are the details of my life. With that, in the absence, I become open and expansive. And so the morning of the stroke was this waffling between the left hemisphere being turned on and doing what it needed.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  To do to help me, the individual, interact with the external world so I could get rescued versus slipping off into this experience of oneness with all that is and and there's peace there and it was lovely and I liked it. So I felt no I there was not this awareness of of, okay, I gotta get back over to that other part of me. But it was like I'm I was good with whatever was. And fortunately, the left hemisphere managed to grab back on to my consciousness enough so that I could do what I needed to do to to get help.

• 24:27Jonathan Cohen?

  In many ways, what you're describing is a forced version of what a lot of the spiritual teachers explain is the process of coming outside of ourselves and feeling connected to something greater than just our physical experience.

• 24:50Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm struck that you were forced to have that. Did you have a sense of spiritual practice before? Were you very much studying the structure of the brain and things operated on a mechanical level? Or had you explored spirituality or religion? Did you meditate? What was your life like before to then go to what is almost a transcendental or enlightened state through this wild almost breakdown of your physical being?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  So I think that that what you just described is completely true. But I think that what happened for me was I don't attribute my consciousness of shifting out beyond the cellular structure of what I am.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  So I believe that when people meditate, when people reach that space of transcendental goal, whatever, wherever that is, it's actually a quieting of the conversational personalities of the left hemisphere that is focused, designed to focus on detail, me, the individual, my relationship between me and the external world. In the quietness of that, the inhibition is lifted from the right hemisphere consciousness and we experience the consciousness of what's going on in the right, in the right brain. So for me, when I lost that left hemisphere, I lost me, the individual. I lost the details of my life. I lost my past. I lost my future.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  I lost all linearity of time. But what I gained was an uninterrupted or inhibited experience of the present moment. And in the present moment, I don't know what my name is until that group of cells over there tells me what my name is. I don't define the boundaries of where I begin and end until a group of cells in my left parietal region defines the boundaries of where I begin and where I end. Wipe that out and everyone would have this experience based on the anatomy of our brain. So for me, I never went, before the stroke, I had been very athletic. I had been a late bloomer. My poor mother wondered

• 27:06Speaker 00

  if my left brain was ever going to turn on. She was a PhD in mathematics. My dad was a PhD in counseling psychology. Is Jill's left brain ever going to turn on? And it took anatomy in order for me to fall in love with a subject that I actually cared enough to study. And that was my second year of college. So by anybody's measure, I was technically a late bloomer. But I was musical. I was artistic. I was creative. I was very present based before. So when my left hemisphere had this stroke and it went offline, I didn't freak out so much because I already had, I think, a pretty healthy right brain. To fall back on. It was more my natural.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  And as far as a religious, I had rejected uh my father's Episcopalian ministry. That didn't work for me because I wasn't willing to say I was I was born a sinner. Because in my consciousness, I was born a beautiful little ball of life. And so I resonated much more with the the teachings of of Native American. Um, uh, so but there wasn't, you know, a practice going on. There was just a real relationship, connection to nature.

• 28:25Jonathan Cohen?

  One thing that struck me about what you said, and I want to ask if I'm interpreting this accurately, is that the consciousness in our right brain, structurally, anatomically, actually has this experience of, for a lack of a better word, enlightenment happening all the time for everyone. And that it's only through the dominance, or, you know, our being attuned or listening so much to the left brain that we are distracted from this thing that is available to us and and exists. You know, people think that it's this large journey to get there and it's this elusive thing.

• 29:05Jonathan Cohen?

  But what I heard you say is that actually it's right there and all and it's available and accessible.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Uh, I'm a firm believer that every ability we have, we have because we have brain cells that perform that function. And different groups of cells packaged together, resulting in very specific skill sets that actually manifest in the external world as personalities. And and, you know, I'm guessing that you have had moments in your life where you were so creative, so caught up in the moment, be it with art, be it with music, be it with nature, be it with whatever, that you were lost in the flow and, oh, my gosh, I can't believe three hours have passed, right? Well, where were you? You were in your head.

• 29:49Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan, lost in the flow? Three hours is a minimum amount of time he gets lost in the creative flow.

• 29:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Every day until mine says, what am I supposed to be doing next?

• 30:00Speaker 00

  There you go. So, so what you're doing, it's not just what are you doing? It's what are you not doing? And what you're not doing is organizing and categorizing and, and doing all those beautiful tools and applying those tools of the left brain. And if you can escape that part of your circuitry for a while, and you actually, this is to me, the beauty of Whole Brain Living. I wrote Whole Brain Living because people are trying desperately to find this peace inside of themselves. They're trying to figure out, how do I get out of my fear, out of my anxiety, out of the pain of my past, the pain from my trauma, the fear of the unknown in the future, the

• 30:44Speaker 00

  political, oh la la la la la, we're being buried, right? How do we get out of that and step into the part of ourselves that is peaceful? Well, most of us have some tool to do that, I think. We have, we play a musical instrument, or we, we do something that we play with the puppies, uh, we, we fuel ourselves in different ways. And, you know, it's brain circuitry. And when one part is excited, it is generally inhibiting the opposite cells that are doing something else. And then they release, and then those can action. And of course, we're dancing all over the place between this brain. And to me, the gift of this stroke is that a neuroscientist, a neuroanatomist, who thinks

• 31:28Speaker 00

  in terms of circuitry, had an opportunity to shut down what was going on in the left hemisphere, to the point where she could really discover, what does it feel like to be completely without those skills of distraction from the present moment? And to be able to then communicate what it feels like to be there, so that other people can say, oh, I can read this collection of, of, of assets and attributes and abilities. And as I allow myself to become more open and expansive...

• 32:11Speaker 00

  It inhibits then the part that is trying to become more narrow and more small and more detailed and more blah, blah, blah in the left hemisphere. And it's like, oh, I know that part of myself. Okay, if I know that part of myself, then I can, can I train myself, and I believe, of course, yes, I can, to do that, get there more quickly. I love meditation because it's a tool that we use to quiet the left brain, but if we don't know how to really jump into the right hemisphere, we're in this process of quieting the left brain, still listening to the left brain saying, am I there yet? Is this it? What's it gonna take? Oh, yeah, I forgot to pick up bananas in the morning. You know, all of that.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  So to me, the beauty of Whole Brain Living, the second book, is it introduces you to these four parts of yourself so that you can exercise them, feel what they feel like inside of your body to be that part of who you are, bring those parts of yourself into communication with one another, so that moment by moment, I can pick and choose who and how I want to be regardless of the external expectation.

• 33:22Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, Jill, you win. Let's do it. Let's meet the characters. Let's do it. I have many other questions. I have many other things about the transcendental experience, but I cannot help it because you are fucking awesome. Let's go there. So the notion of, the notion of these four characters, which, you know, as someone who uses, or whose therapist uses parts work in the work that we do, this really, really resonated with me, and I kept seeing echoes of it, but you're coming from a very different, you know, kind of perspective. So just for, for people to know, this is, this is a fantastic book for you to have,

• 34:04Mayim Bialik?

  because what, what Jill does is she goes through these four different parts of you, two from the right hemisphere and two from the left hemisphere, and explains the very specific, different purpose that they serve anatomically and also not just physically.

• 34:20Mayim Bialik?

  Theologically, but psychologically. But the reason that I particularly love it is because it's using the structure of the brain as an explanation for the way you are, whereas a lot of times we're just told, "Your mom did this, your dad fucked you up, your sister was mean to you." There's actually, you know, the Buddhist notion is, the only thing wrong is your reaction to what is wrong, right? There's always going to be pain, suffering is optional. So you talk about this in particular when you witnessed a friend of yours die and you realized, "I have a choice. This can either be the most traumatic event or the most beautiful event."

• 35:05Mayim Bialik?

  And what you would argue, and what I'd like you to explain, is that that is all in our control. We have power, we have ownership. It's our, like, God-given, brain-given ability to be able to navigate emotional reactivity through understanding these four different characters in the brain. And what I love about the book is it talks about, "What do these parts of your brain look like in the world, at the beach? Like, if you took them out on an outing, what would they do? And it's a great way to understand them." So I'd like you to walk us through these four characters. Who are these four characters in your brain? What do they control?

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Most of us have been taught that the right hemisphere is emotional and the left hemisphere is thinking, and that's simply not correct. At an anatomical level, our emotional system is equally divided between our two hemispheres. And our thinking tissue is divided between our two hemispheres. So each hemisphere has thinking and emotional groups of cells, modules of cells. And an emotion is a very different thing than a cognitive thought. So we do end up with four distinctive modules of cells. So fundamentally, the right hemisphere, right here, right now, we are right here, right now beings.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  We are living creatures, we are living in the present moment. We don't live in the past, we don't live in the future, we live in the now, we pray in the now, we eat in the now, present moment, we have a life in the present moment. And the right hemisphere is a right here, right now machine. So my emotions that I'm having in the present moment are very experiential. What is the experience of the present moment? And that's what's going to be packaged inside of that right emotional tissue. What does it feel like to, to ju- jump into the lake? What does wet? How, how do I describe what is wet? Wet is wet. I feel wetness when I dive into the water.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  Um, uh, i- the present moment is information coming at me so I can be curious, I can be, put different pieces together, I can be innovative, I'm open to possibility. So that's the natural skill set of that emotional tissue of the right hemisphere. And then the thinking tissue is big and open and expansive. Again, I don't have boundaries in the present moment because I'm an energy being, having an energy relationship with, uh, everything's just a big, universal ball of energy and there's no boundaries. So in the present moment, I'm open to the possibilities of the present moment and I'm

• 37:52Speaker 00

  observing that, not in an experiential way, but I'm simply having the experience of it. And generally, there's this sense of awe and gratitude and openness. So that's what we all have, but a lot of us don't spend much time in the present moment because we have this miraculous group of cells in the left emotional tissue that has the ability to step out of the present moment. I mean, this is a miracle. If this isn't a neurological miracle, I don't know what is. These cells can step out of the present moment and step into memories from our past so that

• 38:34Speaker 00

  we can take the present moment information and compare it to our past experience and say, have I I've seen this before and doesn't feel safe and doesn't feel familiar. And it feels safe and familiar, then okay, I might want more of it. But if it doesn't feel safe or it looks different, then I'm going to move into alarm, alarm, alert, alert. That doesn't feel familiar, so can I trust it? And so we become more constricted and more narrow and more, more just push away that which we can have as a fear based on data coming in. And so we have this whole part of ourselves that is left emotional based on our past experience

• 39:19Speaker 00

  and based on the projection of potential fear into the unknown of the future. And then we have this thinking tissue, which is our rational thinking brain. And the rational thinking brain is this magnificent tool that we can use. It has an ego. It says, I am Jill Bolte-Taylor. I like red, white, and black colors. This is my phone number. This is my address. I love brains. I want to learn about details, details, more details about those details. So then I start taking information and I organize it and I categorize it and I relate me, the individual, to the external world in a rational way. So we end up with these four different groups of cells.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  And I don't, I give mine names and I call them left-thinking rational brain, character number one. Left-thinking tissue is the part that organizes, categorizes, takes me and relates me to the external world. It cares about details, details, more details about those details. It's good with mathematics. It organizes, it can recognize a symbol and place a meaning on that abstract symbol and create a bigger picture understanding through rational thinking. It likes to control people, places, and things. It controls time, so it can be punctual.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  It likes to be the boss. It knows that these glasses on my face are separate from me. How do I know that? I know that because I- Have cells in that part of my brain that defines the boundaries of where I begin and where I end. So I call my, that part of me Helen, Helen wheels, she gets it done. Um, I, you know, she, she has relationships with people. She has, has, you know, she worked, she goes to work. She's busy. Um, and my guess is, and you know, she cares about, I have order in my house and my Helen is strong enough that even my drawers have order. Right? So what about you guys? It sounds like, uh, Mayim, you've got a pretty good one.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  I'm wondering about JC.

• 41:27Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to put Mayim's left brain and Jill's left brain together and see who wins. Uh, Mayim is pretty strong. Her drawers are very organized. If they're not organized, they're being reorganized. Everything needs organizing.

• 41:44Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I wonder, I wonder Jill, if you could sort of, um, first of all, that was a, a really, really great explanation. I wonder if you can sort of concisely, you know, narrow them down.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 41:57Mayim Bialik?

  So if left brain thinking is this sort of like, you know, rational, organized, like the, the part of me that loves labels and lists and marking everything and categorizing. Okay. So that's left brain thinking. Talk to me about left brain emotion.

• 42:12Jonathan Cohen?

  I just wanted to say that while I'm teasing, it's very helpful to find the things in your house when they're organized.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  It is. Every house needs a character one. Otherwise we look like hoarders. Right? And, and so, okay, so, so the left emotion, I call this character number two. Character one is the left thinking rational part. Character two is the emotion of the left hemisphere. Now again, the left hemisphere has linearity across time. So this is the part of us that has autonomic nervous system, fight, flight, flee. I'm going to, to have reactivity to information coming in because this is designed to save my life. And it saves my life by looking at information that's already come. Men that I want to push away from or I want to advance toward.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  So this is a part of me that it's one of my little children inside of myself. It is often not very happy. It is also going to blame others. It's often going to be angry or it's going to be sad or it's going to be belligerent or it's going to go on the attack to push away. It wants, you know, it comes out loud often. It comes out quiet often, you know, depending on who we are and who we're in relationship with. But this is a part of us that most parts work. So, Mayim, you talked about parts work. I love parts work, but most of parts work focuses on all the pains of this little character two.

• 43:46Mayim Bialik?

  Character two is trauma, right? It's the one that's essentially categorizing the devastation of the emotional experience.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Yes, and having a reaction to it. Yeah, so that's little character two. It is, it may lash out. It may be mean. It may be cruel. It's really asking to be loved, but it doesn't know how to do it in a way that is safe. It doesn't know how to do it in a way that's healthy.

• 44:15Mayim Bialik?

  No, it doesn't.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Whenever I see anyone in pain, whenever I read anything negative, the negative comments on the anonymous internet, aren't they lovely? My heart goes straight to imagine the pain that that person was in in order to express that ugliness, even if it's anonymous into the world. So this really is the expression of our meanness or our ugliness or our internal trauma, our pain, that we don't know how to hold ourselves. And so we spew it and we can look scary. So we may not get our needs met by others, much less we're not self nurturing. We haven't reached that point.

• 45:00Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so we've spent enough time in the devastation of the left hemisphere. Let's move over to Jonathan's side of the fence, where nothing is organized, but everything is possible. Let's go to the right hemisphere.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  Exactly. Possibilities are endless. And may I say, we exist in the US, in Western world, skewed to the left. Our societal norm is based on this hierarchy defined by the left brain of everything. Where do I stand on that hierarchy? How rich am I? How big is my house? How big are my toys? How much power do I have over other people? Just this hierarchy, the function of the left hemisphere. And the thing about the value of the left hemisphere of always wanting more, is it always wants more. It's never satisfied. It might have a moment of celebration,

• 45:56Speaker 00

  but it's never satisfied, because there's always another rung to go up. And so there's this natural discontent that just keeps pushing, pushing, pushing for more, more, more. How much is more, more? Skew myself to the value of my external things that I have, instead of what I have internally. And then the right hemisphere becomes the consciousness of the internal world. And this is all what Carl Jung would, and many others would describe as part of our unconscious or subconscious brain. And so to science, the only part of our brain that is truly conscious is that character one left-thinking rational part of our brain,

• 46:40Speaker 00

  leaving three-quarters of our brain, the two emotional systems and the right-thinking tissue, as all a part of our subconscious or unconscious brain. So on the morning of my hemorrhage, I was technically perceived to be unconscious, because I could not communicate using the tools of language through that left rational-thinking brain. But I was completely conscious. I was just perceiving things that they...

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Weren't interested in knowing that I was perceiving. So, right hemisphere. The right hemisphere emotion. Information streams in through our sensory systems and then it heads for the cells of our emotional, both in the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. And so that's why we are so reactive. Information is coming in, we're having a response, a reactivity to it, and then the thinking tissue can have fibers going down in order to regulate, modulate what's going on. And so, everything that we're doing with trying to help teach children about emotional reactivity is because we can actually use the higher thinking tissue to purposely nurture

• 47:55Speaker 00

  and regulate what's going on emotionally. So, in character three is what I call the right emotional tissue, and it's in the present moment, and it's as big as the universe. And it's like fun, because it's, life in the present moment is very interesting. I'm a biological creature. I'm processing billions of bits of data all at the same time. It is a miracle. This life is a miracle, and there's an excitement to it, and it's like, yeah, and because everything's connected, I want to chum up with others and play with others. And we can be creative because we're not fit in the box of the left brain. So, we can be innovative, and we can be open to possibility, and we can just, just have

• 48:39Speaker 00

  this experiential existence in the present moment. I can do, I can do jazz in the present. I can create new music in the present. I can, I can, I can, I can, I can. There's just all these possibilities. And so, I call mine pigpen because, you know, the art space is not the cleanest spot in the house.

• 49:02Mayim Bialik?

  Character three, you describe as someone who is so excited to get to the beach that they forgot to bring the sunscreen. That's this part of your right brain.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's excitement. It's in the present.

• 49:15Jonathan Cohen?

  I never forget the sunscreen because I burn very easily.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Well, you might not have the right flip flops. You might not, you don't care if your shirt matches your shorts. You, you might have forgotten your shorts, you know, I mean, the excitement of this part of who we are. Because it's really great. And then so, so that's little character three and little character three knows no limits. So little character three, because we, that's emotion two, so it never matures. Right? That's one of the things about limbic tissue, the emotional tissue, it never matures. So let's say all of a sudden, uh, uh, uh, you know, my neighbor's got a swimming pool and it's like three o'clock in the morning. And we've been like up being excited up until this point in time. And it's like, come on, let's sneak over into the neighbors and let's jump into the pool.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  And, uh, yeah, that sounds like a great idea if you're not looking at your left hemisphere saying, well, we got rules and laws and regulations. And so we go and we do that. And then, you know, the alarms go off and we land ourselves in jail. So you have to be really careful about this part of who we are, because it doesn't think about consequences. And, you know, when we stop and we think about our teenagers, oh my gosh, what's happening in the teenage brain? Bring me back for another whole conversation on the teenage brain, because people need to understand what's going on during that period of neurological development or not going on. So anyway, so character three, it's open to the possibility, it's creative, it uses everything in any way that it wants.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  And then the right thinking tissue, it's simply right here, right now, in awe that I exist at all. And oh my gosh, I'm literally big as the universe. I'm, I'm, I'm not, I, I am life.

• 51:02Mayim Bialik?

  This is character four, right?

• 51:04Speaker 00

  This is character four, the wonder that I exist at all. And, uh, and, and I mean, it's just, I live in a sense of gratitude that wow, I'm here. I'm, I am alive, having voice. I have, I have manual dexterity. I have mobility. I, I mean, oh my gosh. And, and when you Live in that sense of wonder and awe, that seems to be where most people will meditate and meditate and meditate to achieve that one moment of glimpse of, oh, my God, there is no separation between what I am and what everything is and in that space is this incredible sense of love and peacefulness.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  And when I experienced the stroke and it wiped out characters one and two of me, the individual, and I had no energy left in my body, so three, character three was silent. All I had was that state of feeling as though I was a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. And it was beautiful there. And in that consciousness, recognizing, but I'm not dead. I am in this space, but I am not dead, which means I'm wired for this. And if I could somehow figure out how to get enough of my neurons connected

• 52:29Speaker 00

  so I could have me, the individual, I could regain language and I could communicate this message of awe and wonder to the rest of humanity, then, oh, my gosh, first, might it be easier for people to access, access that part of who they are, but also bring a sense of peacefulness to our own lives?

• 52:53Mayim Bialik?

  I think I get credit for only interrupting twice as you went through all four characters. I just want to acknowledge, it was really hard for me, but I did it and I really appreciated your explanation.

• 53:06Mayim Bialik?

  As you were talking, I opened your book, My Stroke of Insight, to literally page 67, where I had dog-eared and flagged, "The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. Finer than the finest of pleasures we can experience as physical beings, this absence of physical boundary was one of glorious bliss." I'm going to skip a little bit. My escape into bliss was a, I'm gonna cry. My escape into bliss was a magnificent alternative to the daunting sense of mourning and devastation I felt

• 53:49Mayim Bialik?

  every time I was coaxed back into some type of interaction with the percolating world outside of me. So you've done two things here. You've both described what we seek as humans in terms of a transcendental experience, experience with something greater than ourselves, understanding ourselves as more than the the the vase that we are, you know, poured into in this existence. But you also are describing what many people who suffer from depression and addiction describe. And what it is, is that this world feels too painful.

• 54:32Mayim Bialik?

  I need something to make it less so. And people do often experience this sort of freedom, right? Which comes at a very high price if you're using drugs, alcohol, food, sex, even work. It comes at a very high price to our physiology and our psychology and our psyche. But I wonder if you can speak to that because the way you described the bitter sweetness of this experience where you realized you were getting to experience a shift in perception that made you unattached to material things, to what you looked like, to how much you weighed, to how much money you're making,

• 55:16Mayim Bialik?

  to who loves you, to whatever trauma you came from. Can you talk a little bit about how this character can be, you know, emphasized for us in our waking life so that we don't feel devastated by the matrix that many of us feel devastated to exist in?

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Yes, beautifully put. So from when, I'm a true believer that when

• 55:46Speaker 00

  When people study their own four characters, and they get to know, and I don't mean just study it, I mean feel it. I mean, you go for a walk in nature, and you allow yourself to expand. And that's why Whole Brain Living got written. How do I communicate this in a way that people can train themselves to know these four parts of who they are? So that I'm not just analyzing these four parts of who I am, but I actually know what it feels like to embody them. Because, you know, little Pigpen, she comes out, even in this kind of a conversation, and she's bouncing, and she's going, and she may be drawn on the intellect and the details of my left hemisphere,

• 56:31Speaker 00

  but I am so in the present, right here, right now. What does it actually feel like for people to be in the present moment? Because in order to be in the present moment, I must be willing to put my pain from the past and set it aside. And if I'm so attached to that trauma, that that's my only story, then it's like, well, all my energy is going into just that character two part of my brain. So if I'm in my pain, when I'm in my pain, I can still step into the glory of my character four that says, every experience I have, whether I would define it as positive or negative, or good or bad, left brain is making that definition,

• 57:16Speaker 00

  I am capable, because I am alive, of feeling miserable. And I always say to my friends, I don't mind if you're miserable, as long as you remember to enjoy it. Because you're capable of being miserable. But when you're being miserable, consider, where is your mind? What thoughts are you thinking that take you back into the trauma? And then what does it feel like when I'm in my pain, and I'm in my trauma, or I'm in my anger, and I'm fighting with you? And then the telephone rings. And all of a All of a sudden, the ring brings me into the present moment.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  Phone, gotta go to the phone, because you know, it's my phone. So, I, hello? And all of a sudden, I have allowed myself to shift out of that part of who I am, into a different part of who I am. And the thing is, we are doing this all the time. We are always bouncing between these different pieces of who we are. And what Whole Brain Living does is it helps us figure out how to pay attention to when I'm in which of these characters, so that I can actually really become familiar with that part of who I am. So, you know, step one is gonna be awareness. Am I willing, willingness number one,

• 58:43Speaker 00

  to become aware of when am I being which part of who I am? Now, say for example, that I have a friend who's very structured and organized, and oh my God, anytime I ever want anything done, I'm gonna call that person, because they got a really strong character one. And we have a character one, character one relationship, and we get a lot of stuff done. That is not the person I'm gonna call when I'm in pain. When I'm in pain, I'm gonna call somebody who is either gonna be in pain with me, and you know, misery loves miserable company, or I'm gonna call somebody who's gonna say, sweetie, I got ya. What's going on? And they're gonna be in their character four, and they're gonna provide love for me.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  And that's who, that, for me, that was my mother.

• 59:29Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, we have this, I can't, go, girl, go. I can't handle this. This, I, I, no, I wanna, I wanna pause here. Because I just flashed to a very good friend of mine, who I often have a very emotional, spiritual relationship with. It's a lot of our friendship. And she recently made a career shift where she needs help with categorizing and organizing. And I got to step into, I mean, that's my favorite role. Like, give me a clipboard and I'm yours all day. And she couldn't believe that I wanted to be helpful. And I said, no, no, it's like literally not even a problem. It's not a tax on me.

• 1:00:14Mayim Bialik?

  I don't feel stressed about it. This is like the most enjoyable thing is for me to fix something that has no impact on me, but to help you categorize, right? But I was, what it made me think of is when you pair up with someone as a romantic partner, what we do is we say to that person, hi, you have to understand, character one, two, three, and four, and you need to know which character, one, two, three, or four, I need you to be without me saying it, so that I can decide that I'm happy with you. You're the person for me. And when I call Jonathan and I have a problem and he makes a joke or points out how everything's gonna be okay,

• 1:00:58Mayim Bialik?

  I would like to sever his little chicken neck with my fingernail, right? Because I'm expecting the character that I want to echo my pain instead of where is he meeting me? What's his experience? How can I learn from that? So it just occurred to me that not just in friendships, but in relationships, this is a very good explanation of what is actually wrong in your relationship.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, you got it exactly. In any relationship, if there's four of me and there's four of you, there's eight in every relationship. And so maybe, you know, in the beginning, in the beginning, we don't usually show our little unhappy character two, right? We're, we, we show our character ones. They may get along. We play, we play together as character threes. They get along. We might share something spiritual. Great if we do. Some people can't find that spot. Great if we do. But boy, when two character twos come up against one another, there will never be a resolution. And this is why when we fight with people, if I'm I'm in my two and you're in your two.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  We will never have a resolution. Someone has to step out of the two and say, "Okay, in this moment, I'm gonna let you be your little unhappy self, and I'm gonna love you in spite of yourself using my character four, and then I'm not doing the dance with you anymore." So you're either going to shift out of your character two into your one, so we can talk about it and have a rational conversation, or we're gonna go play together as little character threes, or we're gonna hug and kiss and just be peaceful together as character fours.

• 1:02:43Mayim Bialik?

  Jesus, if he doesn't ask me to play every day.

• 1:02:49Jonathan Cohen?

  You spoke about how, you know, we have to get out of the feeling threatened, having our emotional baggage come in so that we can access this more joyous, present side of ourselves. However, most people don't realize that they're filtering it this way, right? They see a present situation that in some deep part of their brain reminds them of something scary or that there's a resource constriction or an emotional withholding or some sort of emotional threat. And what's happening is that it's being, activating some deep unresolved issue, but they think it's in the present. So they don't realize that the threat is coming from the past.

• 1:03:32Jonathan Cohen?

  So how do we move out of that space if we look around us and we've projected the past into the present? And we really think, "Hey, that person is gonna hurt me, or that person is saying mean things, and I don't wanna interact with them," and makes us retreat.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  I think that what we are now doing here in this conversation is we are learning to differentiate the different parts of who we are. But you're right. If I don't recognize that I am different and I have different parts and that I can actually practice and get to know those parts of who I am, then I cannot differentiate and all I have is this soup of an experience of life. And that's where a lot of people are. And we have been trying to train children for over a decade in how to take some recognition of when we are feeling emotionally reactive and triggered

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  and what parts of the anatomy of the brain are actually involved with that and how, some tools that we can use in order to step away from feeling emotionally triggered so that we can calm ourselves down and get back into a different part of who we are, essentially. And those tools, I mean, nothing thrills me more than hearing a little three-year-old saying, "My amygdala is not happy." And then they take themselves into the corner and they give themselves time out. Because time out is essentially, you know, when you think about whether it's a physical reflex

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  or an emotional reflex, things run pretty much in 90-second loops. So if emotionally I'm triggered and now I'm ready to go, I can actually watch my watch, which takes me out of just running the circuit of emotion, but now I'm observing it with a different part of my brain. I'm feeling it erupt in my body. I'm feeling my physiological response to my emotional trigger. And then I can actually watch it dissipate from me and I can be calm and now I can come back to a rational conversation. So, you know, count to 10 or take a walk or, you know, all these things that we do automatically,

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  we're doing them in order to allow this physiological response of 90 seconds. To run its course and dissipate out of us so that we can run a different circuit by choice. So I, I think it all becomes education. I mean, if we only had hands, and this is all we know, a hand is a hand, and we don't know about the fingers, we cannot differentiate finger use, then we still have a hand, like a brain, we can use it, we can push things around, we can grab things, we can use it in a certain way. But as soon as our brain says, we have these individual fingers that can do different things, now I have manual dexterity to a level far, far beyond just having a hand.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  And the same thing is true for the brain. When we can understand and differentiate different parts of our brain, and then learn to bring them into communication with one another, where I am now negotiating between the different parts of who I am, then I don't experience conflict because all four parts of my brain have, have participated in the conversation. And this is how I truly believe we can all live a peaceful life. But that is, I believe, the evolution of who we are as humanity. And right now, without the differentiation, we're doing exactly what you're saying.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  We are just running the thing, we are having experiences, we are having emotions, we are having judgments, we are having all this experience, but there, we're not creating any order out of it, and so we feel like we're not in control, we feel like we don't have free will, we feel like we're, we're, you know, life is a struggle, because we can get caught up in that part of our brain that believes life is a struggle, and I have all this evidence to support that life is a struggle, so of course I'm, I'm in my trauma, because my trauma is real, and of course, trauma is real, but trauma is information. It's not meant to be a lifestyle.

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  It's meant to be information, so that I can look at the trauma, compare it to in the present moment, I am safe, I had this bad Experience in the past, I can now look at that and learn and grow from that. So that as new experiences happen, I can guard myself away from more of what I had before. But overall, that now is information for me to exist again back in the present moment. So I truly believe we are destined for whole brain living is the ultimate goal.

• 1:08:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Amazing. You have eight pointers that we're gonna get to and we're gonna get more specific. I'm play and I'm a full believer. I wanna be clear about where my next question is coming from. Um, because I believe that in this process and at the same time, I feel slightly overwhelmed for the people I know who are out and really struggling and having a really hard time separating themselves from the reactivity, right? I hear about training children and I'm like, great, a hundred percent. New generation needs psychoeducational information, physical embodiment, understanding how the structures of the brain work and how that impacts their perceptions and their feelings. Amazing. Wouldn't it be?

• 1:09:33Jonathan Cohen?

  Like what a difference we could make in the world if the next generation of human beings has that education?

• 1:09:41Jonathan Cohen?

  And for the jet like, what do we do with all the people in their thirties and forties and fifties? Who don't have any of this, who have this very ingrained way of being, who have a much harder time separating their reactivity from reality? Meaning their perception of what's happening from maybe a higher vantage point. They're doing meditation, they're working out, they're trying to be mindful and yet still it's a very long slog. Are there anything other modalities that you're like, okay, here's the shortcut? For example, hypothetically, well, you really need a lot more fish oil because that helps promote healthy

• 1:10:24Jonathan Cohen?

  brain living in order to maximize the resilience of the right hemisphere? Or is there trans crane magnetic stimulation that helps quiet the left side and increase the right side? Now, I know some of this is not necessarily accessible to every person, but I'm just wondering what else is possible for the people who are in the middle and have not had that education to start with?

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  Ma'am, would you do me a favor and hold that book up? I'm serious. You're saying, "Give me tools." Here you have a brain scientist at Harvard, who experienced a major hemorrhage in the left hemisphere, lost all the pain from the past, lost all knowledge of individuation and individual and self, and lived for eight years in the consciousness of the alternative. And then used that consciousness to rebuild the skill sets of that left hemisphere to be able to communicate in an easy-to-learn format, but it's a practice, just like everything is a practice,

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  to know what are you missing? Well, what are you missing? And it's not just, "What do you have?" It's, "What is getting in the way of your having something other than what you're having? What are your options?" So, yeah, there are all kinds of things that we can do. But if you want an easy, in my opinion, understanding, understand who you are. What is the tool? If you're not happy with the part of your brain you're running, "What are my choices? And can I identify?" And this book can help you identify, what are those choices? And then once you recognize those choices,

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  then you can start realizing, you know, when the boys call me up and I go and play basketball and I'm shooting hoops and I lose track of time and then I get in trouble for coming home late because I've just been lost in time, oh, I can purposely understand and embrace and embody that part of who I am. So in an instant, if I'm feeling like, "Oh, my God, I've got to make a dreadful phone call." Right? And it's like, "Okay, well, what are my choices? How do I do that?" Well, I can step into that in the present moment, loving, open possibilities, part of who I am, but it's a practice. It's no more of a practice than meditation. People will meditate for 20 years and maybe have a glimpse twice.

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  And I'm saying, okay, well, wouldn't it be easier if you're gonna meditate and you actually know what that means? What that means is that I'm trying to shut down my character one, language center. I'm gonna use a mantra, or a prayer, or I'm gonna use something to preoccupy the language center, so I'm not all about the external world and all the details and all the pain. And I'm gonna bring my mind into the present moment, and I'm gonna notice that as soon as I realize, oh my God, there's a deer over there, and I'm, oh, oh my gosh, there's, it's got spots on it, it's a baby. In that instant, what just happened to the circuitry of all my trauma and all my pain?

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  It shifted, it lifted, how did it do that? It did it because I actually came into the character three part of who I am. And when I pray, if I pray, whatever the circumstance, when I bring myself into a sense of awe and wonder, my pain is a memory somewhere beyond that moment. So when I know what my choices are, then I can engage in those choices. Now, sure, you can do all these other things, some cause trauma to the brain, some do not, some are, you know, interesting, but why not just go to the root of the issue and get to know who's who inside of you? Who's who?

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  Who are your options? And then take responsibility. Now, nothing is more delicious than my circuitry of pain and anger. Nothing is more delicious than when I get on a rant and I am just

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  and I don't wanna give it up, because it's delicious. But it's just a circuitry I'm running inside of my brain.

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  And it is no more delicious than when I'm categorizing and organizing a brand-new space and creating order and making it pretty and making it the way I want it to be. And it's no more delicious than when I get on my paddleboard with my dogs and we are out there playing. And then, all of a sudden, one of the dogs goes nuts and we all end up in the lake. And it is no more delicious than when I am simply sitting in that space of total, "Oh, my gosh, I'm alive." And when I know those choices and I know how to embody those choices, to me, that's personal power and it's personal freedom.

• 1:15:41Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, that is an unbelievable, unbelievable explanation, not just of your book, but of an entire way of being that most of us really, really are craving. I want to get practical. In Whole Brain Living, you have eight things that you recommend. And, you know, obviously, I don't believe that you can incorporate these without kind of understanding these other aspects more deeply. But I do want you to highlight, let's pick a couple. I mean, the first one, what do you recommend when you first wake up and when you go to sleep?

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  In those moments, I recommend bringing yourself into the present moment in a sense of gratitude and awareness of the body. To me, all of this boils down to awareness. Can I be aware? Can I? Am I willing to try to be aware? When I lay down at night, let's say, my character one might still be busy. It might still be running that to-do list of, "Oh, my gosh, what's my schedule going to be tomorrow?" No, I don't want to have character one when I lay down in the morning and at bed to go tonight because I want it all to go quiet. So to bring myself into my present moment,

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  to bring myself into the awe of, "Oh, my gosh, I have bladder." And because I have bladder capacity, I'm probably not gonna have to get up very much tonight because I have bladder capacity. And I thank my cells. I have a beautiful, ongoing relationship with these beautiful cells. Because the consciousness of my 50 trillion stemmed from the consciousness of one single cell. And that one single cell held the molecular genius to transform itself by multiplying and dividing, and multiplying, dividing, so that every cell in my body, except for like 100,000 red blood cells,

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  all have that same DNA consciousness of wonder of all that I am. And I have a relationship with my cells. And I do that through my character four consciousness. Because in that gratitude, and this is also, I'm a true believer in how we heal, and how we heal ourselves. My character one might get me to the doctor's office, or might get me to take my pills on time. But my character two might, you know, be in fear of my illness. And my character three might, might be whatever it is, because it's spastic and whatever it is usually.

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  But it's my character four, in that love of knowing, these beautiful cells and I have this magnificent relationship. And how can I use my mind and my emotions to work with those cells in order to give them what they need during the rest of the eight to 10 hours that we're gonna be in silence together?

• 1:18:46Mayim Bialik?

  Number four is to tune in randomly throughout the day. So what are your favorite ways to tune in to try and have this calibration continue throughout the day? Because a lot of people, like, will start their day with a meditation, and unbelievably, it actually does start to change if you give that a week. Like, it really does sort of start to shift things and change your mood. Like, it's a very, very simple, free thing that you can do. But what are we doing throughout the day wrong? And how do we do it right to try and regulate this?

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  Well, I'm not gonna say we do it wrong. I think that it's gonna go back to the awareness. And the reason why, if I wake up in the morning and I do a meditation, or I wake up and I just say, "Oh, my God, I'm alive." And as I'm alive, I wiggle my little toes. And it's like, "Oh, my God, I got little toes." And it's like, "Whee, I got little toes." And then I wiggle my little fingers. And it's like, "Oh, my God, I got manual dexterity." And I sleep with a couple of dogs. And it's like, "Oh, my God, they're just so beautiful." And it's just love fest in the morning. And it's, you know, just a sense of awe and wonder. And the more I practice that, see, I just became that. I didn't just say that to you. I went there and I felt that.

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  Because I know how to go there and how to feel that. It's a real part of who I am. So throughout the day, paying attention to... I mean, I know when Helen comes on, because I'm not a primary character one when I live on my boat out in the middle of gorgeous, you know, cove and nature and beauty and God. I'm more of a character three out here. So in order for me to become a one, I've gotta get on the schedule. I gotta get on the computer. I gotta know what time it is. I gotta put on clothes. I gotta bathe and make sure I got clean hair. I mean, when I know these different parts and they negotiate with one another.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  And it's like, "Okay, I'm willing to let Helen come online and clean me up and get me at my computer on time so I can have a conversation online with somebody." But that's not what I'm usually doing, right? So, but I trust Helen. And so Helen is gonna put it on my calendar. She's gonna put it on my wall. She's gonna give me an alarm on my phone just to alert me to that so that I can like actually show up in the world and be somewhere when I'm supposed to be there and do that. So, so it's, it's as I... This is, this is one of the beauties of knowing your four different characters. Is when you know your four different characters, when they're in negotiation with one another and you have... They all give you...

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  Permission to go be what you really are. So if I'm gonna go play and I'm gonna paddleboard, I know that character one is gonna bring my butt in two hours so that at least if I end up in the lake, I got time for my hair to dry. Right? I mean, it's the little things in life, but that's what character one cares about. And because I have said to character one, I will come in two hours ahead from the lake, from play, even if I have to have an alarm on my phone that you're gonna put on there so I can remind myself, then Helen leaves me alone and I get to go and play. I'm not gnawing, oh, my gosh, is it the right time? Oh, my gosh, did I do this? Oh, my gosh, do I have to worry about that? Oh, my gosh, there's none of that going on.

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  Because I have negotiated with the different parts of who I am so they all get their needs met when they get their needs met. And it's it's like living with a really healthy team inside of my head instead of, oh, well, I need more, oh, I need this, or no, I wanna go be that. It's like, you know, character four is going, you girls, you just need to like, figure it out together, but could we do it in a more peaceful way? So, um, yeah, I mean, it's just this ongoing conversation and willingness. There's nothing worse than wanting to go play as a character three with character one gnawing on you. Right? Saying, no, you can't do that. No, that's a waste of time. No, that's not good.

• 1:22:52Mayim Bialik?

  That's like my whole life, Jill. Jill, that you've literally, you've described my whole life. And what I'm getting from this conversation is the the conflict in so many of our brains is that we do not have distinction between these parts because we do not have awareness of these parts. So even in all the parts work I've done and all the trauma work that I've done, right, I'm still approaching it like, this is my, um, this is my kind of corporal, like, this is my existence, and I got all these things going on, and I have, oh, I'm such a busy mom, and I am divorced, and this is hard, and I have a job, and we're all these things. But what you're talking about is, I think, what a lot of us

• 1:23:36Mayim Bialik?

  Experience, which is that when we try to enjoy ourselves, when we try to relax, when we try to pray and get in touch with something bigger than ourselves, there is still a part of us that does not seem to know its place. It doesn't need to know, "You're not needed right now. Thank you. Take a seat." And if something happens where I need to, you know, compile an emergency kit for my car, you will be the first to know because you're the one to do that job. But this kind of competition, and it's not bad. We don't want, as my therapist says, we don't want to exile these parts.

• 1:24:18Mayim Bialik?

  We want to integrate them appropriately so they stop interfering when we're trying to have sex and all we can think about is, "What did I not get at the market? And when is this gonna be over so I can vacuum?" Just an example.

• 1:24:35Speaker 00

  That's, you just summed it all up. Right. You just summed it all up. And when character one and character two are so, "Hold on to me, hold on to my identity, hold on to the schedule, because that's how I value myself. And the more I do, then the more value I have." So what, going and paddle boarding? This girl lives on a boat for six months? What a waste of time. What is she doing out there? Well, because I allow myself to play when I play, when I come in, I work my butt off because now it's time for that. And there's this balance that happens.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  And in the balance becomes this healthiness. And it's like, and I love them all. You're absolutely right. My pain from my past, how many people have said to me, "Jill, I just want to lobotomize that part out of me." And it's like, no, no, you don't. Because it is in the richness of those deep emotions that life is so beautiful. There is nothing more beautiful than being. Being overtaken by the envelopment of grief and let it take you to the floor and feel in every cell of your body.

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  And oh my God, I can feel this because I loved and now I don't have a place for that love to go. And so it just erupts in my whole soul. And then that wave passes. And when I allow myself to have these waves, then it, the time between them, there's, you know, I love grief. I think grief is one of the most beautiful, wonderful, horrible things that I'm capable of feeling, but it's so magnificent. You know, I, but the thing about it is that those of us who know how to grieve and allow the wave of grief to, to take us over,

• 1:26:42Speaker 00

  then it's a long time before the wave of grief comes back. It's when we stop it and say, no, I'm not going to feel that. No, that hurts. No, I don't like it. No, I don't want to grieve. That it just keeps banging up, up against us saying, you know, I'm a pipe and I have to flow and, and as long as you don't let me, if you're not going to feel it, it's just going to keep coming up. And that's how we heal ourselves. We allow ourselves to feel that depth. And then it, it releases us to learn from that experience and say, wow, you know, that's the beauty of being alive. Is it all good? No, I'm not jumping on the happiness bandwagon.

• 1:27:26Speaker 00

  I think happiness is important, but I think it's a part of who we are. It's circuitry inside of our brain. And that I learn from these other tools just as much as I do from my joy.

• 1:27:39Mayim Bialik?

  It's so, that's so unbelievable. I, I'm going to ask a really inappropriate, but hopefully humorous question.

• 1:27:47Mayim Bialik?

  What is Jill Bolte Taylor like when she does drugs? Have you done drugs? Have you had psychedelic experiences? Because I feel like I can't even imagine. I mean, I would imagine that you don't feel a need for that. The way that like, let's say, I used to crave Coca-Cola, which is really bad for me. I it's not good for my body, maybe for some people. Like, I was so grateful when I stopped craving Coca-Cola. Right? Like, that left me. And I wonder if because of your experience, you don't crave that kind of escape that people want? Or like, let me take a drug that for eight hours lets me not be

• 1:28:28Mayim Bialik?

  in that part of my brain that holds pain and ego and superego. Right? I want to escape that. What have you had those experiences? Or do you simply not need them? Because you are in kind of a suspended state, not of fantasy, but of awareness.

• 1:28:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, you know, I had a friend come and visit me last week. And she said to me, Jill, you you do not pollute yourself. And I said, that's a great way of putting it. I don't pollute myself. I'm very careful about what I put in my body. It's not so that I can say, oh, I have clean living. It's I don't have any desire for alcohol. I don't like the way I like reality. I know how to step into my character three in an instant and go have a blast. Whatever my circumstance, I know how to do that. So I do that. I, you know, I so I don't do drugs. I but my drug is nature.

• 1:29:33Speaker 00

  I need I go jump on a paddleboard. I feel a yearning to go jump on a paddleboard and be on glassy water and paddle. I mean, that is, you know, that's my thing. I know the the coke addiction. I had that years ago. There's something about coke. Right, but it was so bad for my gut, it was, I just felt like, you know, and then I didn't like the way I felt in my head, um, and so then it was like, well, maybe half a Coke, right?

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  And it's gotta be a fresh Coke, it can't be in a two-liter bottle because that just doesn't taste right, you know, so, so, you know, I mean, it's commensurism, right, it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was like, um, so, so craving is also a part of character too. It's inside of the insular cortex, and when that gets wiped out in people, they actually lose their craving and they lose addiction. And, um, uh, you know, people may stop smoking, they may stop whatever, but it's like, so now when I have any kind of craving, if I have a craving, um, I actually look at the craving and I think to myself, I'm having a craving,

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  I'm having a craving, isn't this exciting, I'm having a craving. But then it disappears, right? And it's like, okay, but I had a craving, it was really, I had a craving. And, um, and then, uh, it'll come by again, and it's like, oh, I'm having a craving. And I think about, when I'm craving, my craving happens in my, in my belly. I mean, I feel it in my belly, and it's like, okay, that's where my craving is, and it isn't, and I'm a neuroanatomist, I'm a gross anatomist, so I'm actually visualizing what's happening in my nervous system in order for me to have a craving. And then it's like, oh, my God, I'm capable of craving, how wonderful is that? Most of us are not comfortable in the discomfort

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  of craving. I'm great in the discomfort. I'm great in the discomfort of a bee bite, bee sting, I'm great in the discomfort of whatever, because it is what it is. And when I accept what is is, that doesn't mean when I get stung by a bee, I'm not taking a bee line directly to my aloe plant in order to take, get rid of the pain, but it's like, wow, I am capable of having this pain. Pain is information.

• 1:32:08Speaker 00

  And again, character two is information, not a lifestyle. And many of us make it a lifestyle. And when it becomes a lifestyle, we succumb to it and we live to the mercy of it instead of simply recognizing this is information.

• 1:32:29Mayim Bialik?

  I have one more question that you talk about a bit in My Stroke of Insight. And I feel like part of it is, you know, kind of intuitive from the journey you take us on, you know, really in both of these books. A lot of people fear, if not death, then prolonged deterioration. But let's just say, like, death, dying. You know, many people who have psychedelic experiences have this ego death, which, as you describe it, ego death does not have to be scary. It can actually be quite beautiful.

• 1:33:07Mayim Bialik?

  But I wonder if you can talk about what you understand about death and dying. And, you know, you mentioned that you pull angel cards, or in the past, you have pulled angel cards. You know, that's something that some of us do behind closed doors because we don't want to tell people about it, right? I'm curious, talk to us a little bit about your understanding of what comes next, your relationship to it, and how your stroke and this sort of way of seeing your brain and your body has changed your perception of death.

• 1:33:42Speaker 00

  So I'm, I was so, this is how I kind of describe what happened to me. When I had the stroke, left hemisphere shut down, character three shut down, character four was all I had. And I kind of visualize it like I was literally so enormous in space as a consciousness that I thought I would never be able to squeeze my, the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body. I really, that was my perception. And so that would be the process of recovery is how do I get this body back to 100% functional,

• 1:34:26Speaker 00

  to the point where I had been before. And it was a pretty good body before. And because of that, it was probably going to live for another 20 or 30 years because I was so healthy when the stroke happened. I know that sounds weird, but it was a congenital malformation that blew. It was very unexpected. So, um, my relationship with death, I'm, uh, I do this, this, this visualization and, and sometimes I do it with others and sometimes I just do it with me, but I call it going, going to the gutter, going to the gutter. And to me, I visualize that I was just in a horrendous car accident and I've been thrown out of the car. And I'm laying in the gutter.

• 1:35:10Speaker 00

  And I'm, uh, I'm overwhelmed with this sense of knowing that probably within the next few minutes, I'm going to die. And to me, what that means is the left hemisphere is gone. It's, you know, I'm right here, right now. I feel my blood. I feel the weakness in my body too. I cannot move. And I just know I can feel this consciousness of me shifting away from these 50 trillion beautiful cells

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  into this, just this release into whatever that is. And I'm at peace with that. I'm at peace with, you know, the concept of, of every day is a good day to die. Star Trek. Um, I, I'm, I am of that, that, because it's not about what more I have or what I lose from the future. It's what I have had during this period of time, this, this wealth of time called my life.

• 1:36:32Speaker 00

  And to be exist in a state of gratitude for what I have had this wow, just wow, I have been alive over all this time and that was it and and now I can I can evaporate away. Now, what happens out there once I'm out, I don't have a, I don't have a, an idea, I really don't. But what I do know, what I, what I, my experience was, was in the absence of the left hemisphere, in the absence of the boundaries, that I return back to an energy force literally as big as the universe. So I believe I fold back into that all-knowing.

• 1:37:16Speaker 00

  There is a different level of consciousness in that all-knowing. To all-know is very different than to need to have language to take a big concept. Like, let's say we're watching the sunset and as the sun is setting and the sun is molding into the water. Now, I can describe that, I can write about it, I can take a picture of it, but I can feel it and feeling it, there are no words to describe accurately that feeling. And for me, that's the same thing of life and then the dissipation of life.

• 1:38:00Speaker 00

  So, so, you know, I, I live a life that is, um, filled with gratitude for every moment I have. Um, and, and it's something that pulls me home to the heart of who I am as that enormous consciousness that I had shifted into, looking at my body going, oh, my God, there's no way I'm ever going to squeeze myself back inside of that thing. So, um, uh, so that's what, what it's like for me.

• 1:38:28Mayim Bialik?

  And can you touch a little bit on where kind of the mystical, you know, comes in for you? Or where, you know, talk about what angel cards are for people who don't know and what it brings you, especially as a scientist, to let yourself tap into that. Kind of creative possibility of inspiration.

• 1:38:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so, you know, let's talk about the word "science." You know, the thing about being a scientist, I went to my boss when I was at Harvard and I said, "I'm an artist in my heart, and I have chosen science to make a living. So, give me all of the projects where you want them to be aesthetically pleasing." And she listened to me, and she did. And so, my experience with science was absolutely beautiful. As we discovered, we were the first people to show three neurotransmitters in the same piece of tissue. It was, but it was a process of experimentation and unfolding. But in that process of experimenting and unfolding,

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  that literally took nine months to 12 months to discover the exact recipe that would allow us to do that, the thing about science is the scientific method. And by "method," "method" is a linear process. And in order to satisfy the scientific method, it has to be reproducible, which again is going to be jumping through these different steps in order to come up with the same product. Well, that's great for a part of the physical world that we can actually use measurement on. But what about the part of the world that doesn't have that level of measurement? What about the part of the world where we are all connected? Finally, quantum physics is actually beginning

• 1:40:16Speaker 00

  to dance with concepts that make sense to how the right brain organizes information. So, to be a scientist in this world, to me, to be a really good scientist, means to remain curious, not "stick me in a box and make me just jump through the hoops." I value that tool. I think it's really important to understand that. But we're at a time in our society where we want to understand the bigger picture that is not defined by a method. And so, for me, an angel card is an energetic energy. So in a group, I have a little box of angel cards. I have them right over there.

• 1:40:58Speaker 00

  They're spread out in a little bowl. I use my left hand because that's connected to my right hemisphere. So if I can draw on the bigger picture of all possibility and I'll just hum and say, you know, what gift is there for me today? And I will draw a card and let's say it's kindness. And what that does is I then allow that part of my right hemisphere to hook into kindness. What is the energy behind kindness? When I advance in my life as a kind person, that's a very different Jill Bolte Taylor than somebody who advances with judgment. And so it helps me open myself up to the possibilities inside of that circuitry.

• 1:41:42Speaker 00

  I might get love, but my favorite angel card to draw is the one that is empty. And I call it the void because in the void was where I existed as when I had that stroke. And in that void is all of it and the magnificence of all of it. And anything is possible and whatever it is, it's fantastic simply because it is. And oh my God, I'm alive to have that experience. So I use it as a tool. Let's say I'm going to make a tough call where I'm going to disappoint somebody. And it's like, so I might draw an angel card that can then help me tune into a vibration that, yeah, that's going to be how I carry myself in that phone call.

• 1:42:27Speaker 00

  And it just brings me again into a level of differentiation and awareness of the power that I have to choose moment by moment who and how I want to be.

• 1:42:38Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm really struck by a scientist and I love your definition of science and the limits of it. Talk about.

• 1:42:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Vibration and energy of something like of happiness. And, you know, we've talked in the past and Mime and I really recently had a conversation where I was describing the notion of tuning into something like a radio frequency. That, you know, states all around us exist. And it's not like happiness needs to be created. It's like, oh, we are have antenna and we can tune in to frequencies that exist all the time. And what are we tuning into? And then amplifying through our physical bodies through our that then resonate to our emotions and our behavior.

• 1:43:32Speaker 00

  You know, when you look at the brain and you look at brain waves, you know, alpha wave is a very different vibration than a delta wave. And they have different impacts on the brain. And then the beta wave comes in like a march. And, and it, it, we, we march in the vibe. Alpha is the big picture. The delta is, hmm, boy, I'm on my way to sleeping. You know, that we are these energy beings. Cells are molecules moved by energy. So put together 50 trillion of them and you got a whole bunch of molecules and you got a whole bunch of energy. And what is consciousness? I mean, isn't that the conversation? What is consciousness? And then how can I tap into the different consciousness energies?

• 1:44:17Speaker 00

  And, you know, when I'm in my joy, I'm in a whole different energy than when I'm in my grief or when I'm in my let's go organize. When you look at us as sensory, sensory beings, what are we? We are, there's a drum and pound on the drum and there are these little ear ossicles and then they move fluid. And then there are these hair follicles that are being stroked by this membrane, which is then transmuting that into a neurological circuit that goes into the brain. It's all frequency. So, um, so, yeah, you know, I think it's the, we are in an age, when I was in school in the eighties and the nineties.

• 1:44:59Speaker 00

  There were two subjects we were not allowed to talk about in public. I mean, we could do it around the, you know, the neuroscience. You're giggling, you know, it's the same thing. One was consciousness. And I think every neuroscientist goes into study of neuroscience because we're fascinated by consciousness. But, boy, are we going to write papers on that? Well, Deepak Chopra might, but you've got to be Deepak Chopra to do that, right? And I know you've had a conversation with Deepak. And then the other one was energy. And the only energy we could talk about was the energy created by the mitochondria, you know, which is the powerhouse of the cell.

• 1:45:38Speaker 00

  But there is another energetic that we are now opening, becoming more open to the reality of what we are, that the scientific method is trying to figure out, well, how do we measure any of that? How do we manage that? And there are some brilliant scientists like Andrew Newberg. And if you haven't chatted with Andrew, you might want to do that. And, you know, he wrote a great book, among many, called Why God Won't Go Away. And he ran this beautiful study where he took a bunch of monks and a bunch of Franciscan nuns and said, you know, "Go pray or go mantra, and when you find God, pull on this string, and then we'll start taking some spec pictures of your brain, and we'll find God in the brain."

• 1:46:22Speaker 00

  And what they found instead was that the left hemisphere circuitry becomes more quiet. And as that becomes more quiet, the right hemisphere then has this, the inhibition is removed, and we have this experience of the bigger picture connection to God. So, you know, we are, we do have some magnificent scientists who are trying to cross that border of, "Oh, there is science and there is spirituality, and they are opposites." And it's like, no. Open science, good science, is going to say, "Well, simply because we can't explain it doesn't mean it's not real." And for people who are going to talk about it, you know, I think a lot of it boils down to language.

• 1:47:05Speaker 00

  When I had my stroke, I went back to the science, to the language. Language of science. I went back to the language of the brain. But boy, there's a whole lot of what people would call enlightenment or spirituality. That's not my language, but that's what they resonate with because that's their language. Um, so, so I think, you know, I think that language is so important in how we talk about these things. And that, you know, we're in more agreement than we're in disagreement when we actually boil it down. Now, no, I can't say that about all scientists.

• 1:47:39Jonathan Cohen?

  One more push in this direction, which may be getting too far, but I, you know, I love the way you're describing, uh, the approach to these unknowable scientific, or how science is approaching some of these more esoteric or unknowable, uh, parts of mysticism. Um, so that there's two parts to this, which are related, but, but not, uh, but different. First is the notion of like energy healing or miraculous healing that has been described or, or can happen through the changing of, you know, either hands-on work or emotional release where people are able to, you know,

• 1:48:21Jonathan Cohen?

  release stored emotion and then have physical, you know, drastic physical change. And the other is this idea that all knowledge in the universe exists in what has been described as the Akashic Records. And it goes to this notion that we can all access this and, you know, both, um, past and present exist at all times. And so, and why they're related is that, you know, it starts to get into an idea, both of things beyond ourselves, but also that these are accessible. It's not simply quieting my part of me and, and becoming more joyful. There's literally information that exists and there's ways of navigating and building

• 1:49:03Jonathan Cohen?

  a skill set outside of our five senses that can bring health, healing, happiness, insight, um, and information.

• 1:49:11Speaker 00

  I think it really is the parts. I think that the left brain is so attached to its linear thinking. Linear thinking, you cannot linear think your way into answering that question that you just asked me. I mean, your linear answer is going to be very different from the actual experience of knowing that. And the thing about the way that character four thinks is it doesn't think logically. It doesn't need to. It doesn't reason. It simply knows. So what you're describing is if character four is the part of us that simply knows everything. I mean, you want a miracle for a physiological recovery. No one expected Jill Bolte-Taylor to recover her brain.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  No one. And the expectation for who I would be, my mother's only expectation was that I would be able to live independently without her. That's how far gone. I could not walk, talk, read, write, recall any of my life. I was completely missing. Jill Bolte-Taylor died that day. And if I did not regain any of those left brain circuits, I would be existing in a whole different level that would be defined as disabled, vegetative, and everything else, even though I knew I had consciousness. So no one expected me to be able to recover. How did I recover? I listened. I got calm.

• 1:50:41Speaker 00

  I got quiet. I knew what I had missed because I had been it before and everyone else was modeling it. But I didn't have language. I didn't know what a word was. I didn't know what an S was. And my mother would say, "This is an S and it sounds like s." And I looked at my mother and I thought, "You are nuts. That is a squiggle and it doesn't make any sound." And it made no sense to me whatsoever. So how did I use what I had? I used this consciousness of awareness and belief that if I listened to myself and I gave them what they needed, and most of the time they wanted sleep.

• 1:51:25Speaker 00

  And then when I wasn't sleeping, they wanted nutrition. And then, once I had been fed and I had been taken to the bathroom, my mother would stick something in my hands and try to teach me something that I thought was a horrible concept. Why on earth would people read? I thought it was ridiculous. Numbers, forget it. Didn't know what one was for four years. So it was a long, slow, 24/7 job of giving myself what it needed for eight years to get to the point where I could talk to you and you would think I was a normal human being. Alright, so how did I do that?

• 1:52:07Speaker 00

  I listened, but I didn't listen using my left hemisphere. I listened by listening to the whole of what I am and used that knowledge to give it what it needed in order to regain health. Now, I'm a believer that we are capable of healing our wounds. I'm an example of doing that. And I do it on a pretty regular basis because I beat myself up a lot. And, and so I know how to do that for me. Can I teach that to other people? Yeah, but there are a lot of other people who do it and they don't need me. But I believe that when you allow the energy to flow through all the healthy cells

• 1:52:52Speaker 00

  and that we get, end up with a wound, well, there's going to be a disruption of the wound, of the space. But how do we get the energy to flow back through so that that neighborhood can function again the way that it's supposed to function? Because it's a neighborhood that used to be a neighborhood. And if now cells are gone, or muscles are gone, or bones are gone, or trauma is there, whatever it is, how do we bring, can we consciously flow that energy through us? And I'm one of those people who every morning I get out on my paddleboard with my dogs and I'm watching the sun shine on the water, these beautiful sparkles. And I pull that energy from those sparkles.

• 1:53:35Speaker 00

  Because I know that's what I am. That's all I am, is one big sparkly energy ball with physicality. So I take that energy every day, every morning and every night at sunset, and I flow that energy through my body to bring me health. Well, why wouldn't I do that? Now, people can say, oh, this girl, she is nut, but she's a healthy nut.

• 1:54:03Mayim Bialik?

  Jill, I can't tell you how unbelievable it is to speak to you. For me, as a neuroscientist who kind of, you know, learned about you so early in my neuroscience career, and for us as, you know, mental health, well-being, you know, science and spirituality intersection people, I mean, you're kind of like, you're it for us. You're like the whole freaking Sunday, and also it's gluten-free and vegan. Like, you're just perfect for us to get to talk to. So, thank you. I did want to mention one more thing from my stroke of insight that struck me very deeply that I want to mention to people and that I'd like to end

• 1:54:42Mayim Bialik?

  with. Jonathan's brother was thrown from a car when he was 17. Jonathan was 14. And his brother landed on the front left of his head, and the family was told, as you can imagine, that he would likely never walk, recognize people, do anything. He was a very athletic, very vibrant, you know, teenager. It obviously wrecks an entire family, and as you talk about with your mom, like, the entire family is impacted by this kind of thing. And Jonathan was very young when this happened. So what he watched was, as he describes it, the person that he knew as his brother died, and another person came back, and they

• 1:55:23Mayim Bialik?

  didn't know who that person would be. And what happened was his brother was in a coma, as you can imagine, and they did surgery on, you know, his front temporal lobe, you know, that sort of junction, and

• 1:55:37Mayim Bialik?

  You know, the beautiful story is his brother skis, his brother reads, his brother laughs, his brother is part of our lives, albeit in a different way than he would have been. But there's something that you include as an appendix in my stroke of insight, which is the 40 things that you needed most. And one of the most kind of devastating, and also in your terminology, beautiful parts of this book, was your description of what it was like to be a person receiving care in a medical facility after what was deemed, you know, an unrecoverable, right, stroke by many people's understanding. And in addition, what you responded to, that certain nurses treated you like an object

• 1:56:22Mayim Bialik?

  and certain people didn't seem to even hold out hope that there was someone in there, and how much it meant to you when one doctor in particular, and you weren't even able to speak at this point, but you remembered that she touched your toe as she left the room. And you, the part of you that was still alive, conscious, aware, and able to access information, knew, this is a safe person? Someone is going to protect me. And I don't only bring this up as we close to think about what happens if, God forbid, what Jonathan's family experienced happens, and you start to wonder, what's in there? Who's in there? Are they ever coming back?

• 1:57:06Mayim Bialik?

  How are we teaching them to read and speak and walk? But also, when I think of people who are in pain, and how many of us have autoimmune conditions or trauma, and we go to doctor after doctor, after specialist, after therapist, and well-meaning people on the street tell us what we should do. And it's kind of like those things in this appendix, I kind of want to like print them up and just have them out, right? Because like, these are the things I need. I needed to be treated with dignity. I need to be told I'm going to recover, that there's a part of me that is whole and sacred and beautiful and born from light that cannot be hurt by all of the things that character one and two are cataloging, right? So I wanted to end with that, and I wanted to just give you a minute

• 1:57:51Mayim Bialik?

  to give us any sort of reflections based on what you needed and what you think we all need as we recover from whatever challenges ail us.

• 1:58:02Speaker 00

  You know, I, I love that, that you've gone there. Um, number one, love me for who I am now. Love me for who I am now. Because we don't know if that person I used to be, or how I used to be, is ever coming back. And that cannot be the goal. The goal has to be, I love me for who I am now. And when you come to me, look at what I can do, not what I cannot do. Focus on my abilities and help me grow what I can do. Don't focus on my disabilities because I, there, I can't do those.

• 1:58:47Speaker 00

  So, you know, everything when it comes to recovery is, is we're not gonna run until we can walk, until we can crawl, until we have balance, until, until, until, right? We have to go every step of the way. And if you, you know, one of the things people would always say to me was, squeeze my hand, squeeze my hand. And I would literally look at people. I don't know what a squeeze is, and I don't know what a hand is. And I'm gonna disappoint these people. And because I'm gonna feel that, I'm gonna feel their disappointment. It's like, oh, my God, is she even in there? And all I can do is look at these people and say, I'm, I'm feeling abandoned. I'm feeling abandoned.

• 1:59:31Speaker 00

  If all your focus is on what I cannot do, or you're questioning the value of me as a living being, it's like, I need your love. I don't need you to, to question me. I need you to love me. Because it is in your love that I gain energy, that I can refuel, and I can then attain something, maybe. And, and so what I needed was I just needed people to love me. Uh, I wanna go out on the subject of, um, how I feel about the storm of psychedelics that is, uh, moving into and across, uh, our human brain.

• 2:00:13Speaker 00

  I understand the value of the psychedelic. Because essentially, in my language, it blasts us out of our characters 1 and 2 into the character 4, right-thinking tissue, and gives us the big expansive, open perspective. And then it's pretty hard, after you've had that experience, to go back into the little me, the little I am, all my pain, all the pain from my past that was 20 years ago, because now I have something to compare it to. So I do recognize the value. However, the brain's natural response to psychedelics is neurogenesis,

• 2:00:58Speaker 00

  creation of new cells, and neuroplasticity, which is the brain's natural response to trauma. So regardless of what we're doing, we are creating cellular trauma when we are using psychedelics. Now, I, as a neuroanatomist, care deeply about the health and the well-being of the brain cells. To me, every ability we have is because we have brain cells that perform that function. And it's one thing to go in and say, "Okay, I'm gonna have this experience, and then I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna be all better." Well, all you have to do is look at the research that is going on and the research that has been done,

• 2:01:39Speaker 00

  and look at the inclusionary and the exclusion criteria for participating in one of these studies. And you'll recognize that, you know, 85, 90% of the population is not gonna qualify for one of these studies. And why is that? It is because these psychedelics can be damaging to those individuals. So say, for example, my brother is one of these individuals who, smoking the weed of, you know, the 70s and the 80s, turned on, and actually, he, and psilocybin, so mushrooms, turned on his

• 2:02:22Speaker 00

  His hallucinating circuitry. Well, his brain never got the memo to turn off. So my brother ended up with a lifetime of schizophrenia because he dabbled with these drugs when he was a teenager. There is currently epidemic levels of schizophrenia in response to the new marijuana that is being going on. And then psychedelics is only going to make those numbers worse. Now, I, you know, it's the fad. It's the newest thing. And all I can say is just know, if you're thinking about doing this, then be very, very careful about what you're doing. And, um, and I am so motivated

• 2:03:07Speaker 00

  that I'm actually working on, um, creating a workbook for people who, if you insist on taking that psychedelic journey, get to know your four characters. And what I have learned is that the people who have got to know their four characters first, when they end up in their hallucination, they're looking at all four parts of themselves and having a huddle, conversation in order to help themselves find peace. And then they come back and then they don't need to do a second dose or a 10th dose or 20th dose. So that's, I just wanted to, to express my concern about this is physiological anatomical trauma at the level of the cells.

• 2:03:52Speaker 00

  And these cells are so precious and we don't know who's going to respond positively and who's going to respond negatively. But the researchers know so much that they have a huge list of criteria that say, no, we did not include them in this because we didn't want to hurt them.

• 2:04:11Mayim Bialik?

  I really appreciate you clarifying that. And, you know, also it, it's, it's really significant to me that the message that you're giving is not, no one should do drugs, you should just be high on life. Because it's not that simple either. But what you're talking about is what any good therapist who is licensed to take people On, for example, psilocybin or ket- even ketamine journeys, which we don't have to get into ketamine because I know it's a whole different category and different neurotransmitters. But, but what's important is that, you know, many people sort of do these things recreationally. And in many cases, it's fine, or, you know, we don't see these kind of adverse things. But when, when we live in a place like LA or, you know, places like that,

• 2:04:55Mayim Bialik?

  where everybody's like selling psilocybin for you to like have a journey and let's all get together and see what happens. That's a very different experience than, you know, we had Rick Doblin on. When he talks about the, the clinical situation in which you prepare someone to expand consciousness, you prepare someone with an interest, not in having an exciting, fun, trippy experience, but in integrating these parts that you're talking about. And in addition, there's a post-integration process that occurs when you come back from that journey. And I don't mean to steal everybody's like fun and take away your gummy chocolates or whatever you're eating your mushrooms in, delicious.

• 2:05:38Mayim Bialik?

  But the fact is, what we're talking about here is if we're all trying to navigate these four characters, are there other ways to get there? Are there more facilitative ways to get there so that we're not kind of throwing a grenade and hoping it destroys what we don't want and keep what we do?

• 2:05:56Speaker 00

  Beautiful. Yeah, exactly.

• 2:05:59Jonathan Cohen?

  Jill, does ketamine work differently? I was kind of trying to watch your face and I kind of saw a little bit of like a head sort of not so sure that it doesn't also cause damage. What's, what are your thoughts?

• 2:06:11Speaker 00

  Well, ketamine's an anesthetic. I mean, I used to do a surgery and the anesthesia was ketamine. I mean, ketamine is, is a different animal, if you will. It's going to have a different impact in the brain. And ketamine is actually very, very differently used and abused because it does have a different impact and, and that's. Another whole, whole thing. So yes, they're very different from one another. Um, but again, you know, back to, to my craving or, you know, I, I choose to not pollute myself.

• 2:06:54Speaker 00

  And I choose to not pollute myself because I, I know how to find my joy in the absence of pollution. So I do that. And I believe we all have the capacity to train ourselves to do that. And I find myself to be absolutely precious because I know what it's like to not have them functioning. And my relationship with other people, my relationship with animals, my relationship with life, my relationship with myself, my relationship with nature, my relationship with the bigger picture, call that whatever you want to call that. Uh, I, it's, it's precious to me. And, um, I feel like I have one human life and I want to live my one human life

• 2:07:39Speaker 00

  in its most purest form so I can have this experience as best as I can. And, you know, I, I'm a believer that we are not near evolution. We are, we are in the process of evolving. And part of that is, is differentiating the different parts of ourselves. And for some reason, we exist in a society that is addicted to polluting itself. And I, I'm, you know, I'm just not one of those. And all I can say is there are, are easier, healthier ways, I think, of finding what people are looking for. You just have to be open minded to those possibilities of differentiating your own selves.

• 2:08:23Mayim Bialik?

  Jill Bolte Taylor, it is really, it's, this has been an incredible conversation. We're so grateful, we're so grateful that you had such insight and that you have opened your life up to the tens of millions of people who have seen your TED Talk, who have read your books, and the, the current book that we talked about today that I highly recommend people get, Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life. Such a pleasure to talk to you from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

• 2:08:52Speaker 00

  Thank you.