Ornoth

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.