Someone among my dharma friends recommended we read and discuss Dr.
Jill Bolte
Taylor’s “My
Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal
Journey”. She’s both a neuroscientist and a stroke
victim: a stroke victim who recovered much of her cognitive ability, and
thus can provide a singular perspective on the experience. She describes
watching her linear, logical, linguistic left brain shut down, which
left her with a powerful sense of peace and oneness with the
universe.
I guess the first thing to relate is the context from which I
approached this book. You see, I have a history with stroke…
While a few folks know that I have a brother who is fifteen years
older than I am, almost no one knows that I once had a sister who was
thirteen years older. When I was nine, she was 21, recently married, and
raising an infant. While sleeping one night she suffered a stroke that
left her in a coma, on a respirator, and my parents were forced to make
the decision to terminate her life support. Although I was young at the
time, that event established my relationship with death, and with
stroke. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her
husband to live through that nightmare.
During my adolescence, as my maternal grandmother aged, she too
suffered a stroke, which left her seemingly lucid but without any
ability to communicate. You could see her frustration as she tried to
speak and the only thing that would come out was an undifferentiated
string of “Buh buh buh buh”. This, too, became one of my
nightmares: being fully lucid, but unable to communicate, being helpless
to express my needs.
Also during my teen years, I was employed carting meals up to the
various floors of the regional hospital, including intensive care and
the psych ward. There I was regularly exposed to patients’ cries
of agony as well as the endless mumbling of damaged patients reminiscent
of my grandmother.
With that as personal history, my emotional associations with stroke
are of strong fear, guilt, violation, outrage, and appalled-ness. You
might imagine the strength of my reluctance to read a book about
stroke— especially one that glorifies the experience—and
talk about it with friends. But after considerable encouragement by my
friends, I read it nonetheless.
I should point out that I have two strongly-held opinions that
interfere with my ability to accept the author’s commentary
unquestioned. The first is that I am naturally skeptical of
anyone’s stories about near-death experiences; there’s just
too many incentives to fabricate lurid details and no way to verify
their stories. Second, I am naturally skeptical of anyone’s claims
of achieving some euphoric, Nirvanic mental state; again, for the same
reasons: there’s too much temptation to create a
compelling—if slightly unrealistic—story, which cannot be
questioned. Taylor describes that the massive injury to her brain
immediately brought her to “glorious bliss” and “sweet
tranquility”, “finer than the finest of pleasures we can
experience as physical beings”, like “a great white whale
gliding through a sea of silent euphoria”; I find that far too
hyperbolic a story to take purely on faith.
As I read the book, I was naturally disappointed that the author
never talked about the fear, pain, and danger that is associated with
stroke. She reports that her first thought upon realizing what was
happening to her was, “Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! Wow,
this is so cool!” As a brain scientist, she should have been
acutely aware of the danger, especially once she successfully diagnosed
it. She consistently portrayed it as the most positive thing that had
ever happened to her, and rarely mentioned the mortal danger and
crippling permanent debilitation that most stroke patients suffer.
The one thing she said that did resonate with me was the division of
the mind into two cooperating but somewhat independent regions—the
traditional intellectual left brain versus intuitive right brain schism—and how it can be perceived as multiple personality disorder.
“It appears that many of us struggle regularly with polar opposite
characters holding court inside our heads. In fact, just about everyone
I speak with is keenly aware that they have conflicting parts of their
personality.” During high school and college, I went so far as to
perceive myself as having two distinct personalities: a cold, rational
person with one name, and an impulsive, emotional person with
another.
Yet Dr. Taylor goes on to villify the left brain and glorify the
right with statements like, “Without my left brain […] my
consciousness ventured unfettered into the peaceful bliss of my divine
right mind”, actually (and to me, unbelievably) celebrating the
freedom that came with her loss of cognitive ability. I find her
characterization of logic as “fettering” and
“inhibiting” versus the right brain’s
“peacefulness”, “bliss”,
“miraculousness”, and “divinity” appalling, both
from the standpoint of denigrating the importance of man’s
capacities of logic and rationality, as well as praising
life-threatening brain damage. But I’ll speak more about that
later.
Such was my response to “My Stroke of Insight” at an
emotional level. Now let’s transition to my intellectual
evaluation of the book.
Since I was reading this for my sangha’s local dharma friends,
I’ll first talk about the parallels I see between the
author’s experience and my understanding of the dhamma.
I guess the obvious place to start is the Buddhist concept of
“silencing the discursive mind”, which is the quite literal
physiological fact of Dr. Taylor’s injury. She describes losing
all sense of any “internal dialogue” as well as the ability
to judge, decide, and interpret. This is something akin to the state
Buddhists attempt to reach during meditation, with the obvious
difference that they are not trying to permanently disable the ability
to think; just to realize that thinking is not the primary road to
happiness. In Buddhism, thought is a tool: not the only nor necessarily
the best tool, but neither is it to be abandoned as wholly useless.
She also talks about losing her preoccupation with productivity and
constantly doing things, instead simply “being” and
experiencing the present moment. “On this special day, I learned
the meaning of simply ’being’.” This is also something
Buddhists intentionally cultivate, although again not as a permanent
state.
One excerpt that I found particularly interesting was the following:
“Sensory information streams in through our sensory systems and is
immediately processed through our limbic system. By the time a message
reaches our cerebral cortex for higher thinking, we have already placed
a ’feeling’ upon how we view that stimulation—is this
pain is or this pleasure?” This is almost a word-for-word
transcription of the Buddhist concept of Dependent Origination, which
states that when a sense object, a sense organ, and sense consciousness
come together, there is something we call contact. Contact is a
precondition for the arising of feeling (vedana), which says that every
contact automatically creates a “feeling tone” that is
either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This feeling tone then
predisposes the conscious mind toward greed, hatred, or delusion: the
Three Poisons.
Another almost word-for-word cognate between Dr. Taylor and Buddhism
is this statement: “To experience pain may not be a choice, but to
suffer is a cognitive decision”. This is encapsulated in the
famous Buddhist parable of the two arrows: the first arrow represents
some unavoidable initial pain, either physical or emotional; the second
arrow is the mental anguish and suffering that we create as a result of
filtering that initial pain through our stories and unexamined
programming, which harms us as much or more than the actual offense. As
she says, “It’s important we realize that we are capable of
feeling physical pain without hooking into the emotional loop of
suffering.”
Taylor, in talking about brain plasticity, specifically calls out
that unexamined programming and unknowingly describes the Buddhist
approach to “practice” in several spots. In one place, she
says:
Along with thinking in language, our left hemisphere thinks in
patterned responses to incoming stimulation. it establishes neurological
circuits that run relatively automatically to sensory information. These
circuits allow us to process large volumes of information without having
to spend much time focusing on the individual bits of data. From a
neurological standpoint, every time a circuit of neurons is stimulated,
it takes less external stimulation for that particular circuit to
run.
So our behavior is largely a complex map of well-worn ruts. This
brings up the obvious inference that we can change our thought
patterns—our very neurological programming—if we do the work
necessary to lay down new patterns. This is the very basis of both
Buddhist practice and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: “I consciously
make choices that directly impact my circuitry.”
In fact, she even goes so far as to agree with the Buddha that paying
attention to the body and the present moment are the best ways of
interrupting our solidly-ingrained patterned behavior.
Kamma even gets into the act, with Taylor emphasizing that we are all
radically responsible for our own emotions, and the importance of
recognizing and acknowledging one’s difficult emotions, rather
than mistakenly strengthening them through denial, avoidance, or
actively trying to make them go away.
The list continues, with the importance of compassion (“If I
had to pick one output (action) word for my right mind, I would have to
choose ’compassion’.”); sending energy to others,
which is very similar to the Buddhist concept of lovingkindness (metta);
and the importance of associating with like-minded friends.
There’s one concept that is specific to Mahayana Buddhism that
Taylor touches upon, and it’s one that irks me in both contexts:
the Bodhisattva
ideal of “coming back to life after death to work for the benefit
of other beings”. Taylor makes this exact claim with respect to
her stroke and recovery, and I frankly find it tasteless and awfully
self-aggrandizing.
With so many parallels, you might well think that Dr. Taylor is a
bedside Buddhist. However, there are some differences worth noting, and
I think they’re considerable.
The first is her assertion that brain cells do not regenerate. There
is a longstanding argument about this in the field, but Taylor takes the
position that unlike all other cells in the body, the brain is a static,
unchanging set of cells, rather than one which gradually repairs and
replaces itself over a surprisingly short period of time, like the rest
of our bodies. As she says, “The majority of the neurons in your
brain today are as old as you are. The longevity of the neurons
partially accounts for why we feel pretty much the same on the inside at
the age of 10 as we do at age 30 or 77. The cells in our brain are the
same”. I found this to be an incredibly important fact, because
Buddhists have long claimed that there is no element of one’s body
that doesn’t change, and this is the basis for much of the
Buddhist deconstruction of
self and identity. On one hand, this seems to
blow a huge, gaping hole right down the center of Buddhist philosophy;
however, on the other hand, recent research has shown that the brain is
in fact capable of limited regeneration, although it is a slow and
infrequent occurrence.
Finally, I must close by again taking issue with Dr. Taylor’s
assertion that losing the majority of our mental capacity is a good
route toward happiness. She glorifies the process whereby she lost the
ability to make sense of sight, sound, smell, language, temperature,
vibration, to differentiate one object from another, to follow motion,
to control one’s limbs, to even think. For me, this is not Nibbana; this is severe
delusion of the worst kind; whereas Dr. Taylor describes the
catastrophic failure of her brain thus: “The richness of this
moment, right here, right now, captivates your perception. Everything,
including the life force you are, radiates pure energy. With childlike
curiosity, your heart soars in peace and your mind explores new ways of
swimming in a sea of euphoria.” And most damning in my opinion,
she goes so far as to say, “I wish there were a safe way to to
induce this awareness in people. It might prove to be
enlightening.”
Well thanks, Jill. I’m glad it was good for you, but I think
I’ll pass on that offer. You may call it enlightenment; I call it
severe brain damage. It is self-impairment far beyond the effects of
marijuana, cocaine, or LSD. I will be guided by Buddhism’s fifth
precept: “Abandoning the use of intoxicants that cloud the mind,
the disciple of the noble ones abstains from taking intoxicants.”
Cutting your brain in two and throwing one half away makes one something
less than fully human, and thinking that such radical self-mutilation is
a reliable path to lasting happiness is not the Middle Way; it is
delusion of the highest order.
As always, YMMV. I’m just sharing my own personal reactions,
which will of course have been influenced by both my own personal
history as well as my predisposition as an overwhelmingly left-brained
person.
