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.

My Stroke of Insight

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.

I'm afraid this is going to be a lengthy one, even by Ornoth standards. It's a good example of how one inoccuous comment can trigger a whole series of discussion topics.

Inna and I have been very close for four years now. During that time, we've become more intimately familiar, and more open and forthright, with one another than with anyone either of us has known before. I think it goes without saying that our relationship is something I treasure immensely.

Certainly there's an investment in education there: we've taken the time to really get to know one another deeply and intuitively, which only comes through long months of shared experiences. Contrary to popular myth, that kind of understanding cannot happen overnight, or in a matter of weeks. But the investment of time certainly isn't the most important reason to value a relationship.

Instead, there's a special joy in sharing your life with someone who really knows you, and who interacts with you at a level of depth and real understanding and intuition that simply can't be approached without that investment. For someone to take the time to know me so well is priceless to me, for that is the baseline for genuine appreciation and understanding.

At the same time, offering that intimacy of understanding opens one up to unparalelled criticism. To let someone know you that well is also to let them see your worst and most feared faults, even the ones you choose not to acknowledge, and hide from yourself.

A couple days ago, on the way home from a dinner, I was walking across the Harvard Bridge, accompanied by Inna and two of her friends, when I made the apparently understated comment "This isn't bad".

All that night, Inna had been hounding me to express an opinion about the evening. It is, of course, one of her triggers, because she is excessively concerned with how others perceive the events she chooses to take responsibility for. In addition, her emotional state is influenced to a large degree by how demonstratively happy the people around her are. In a phrase, she is more affected by how the people around her enjoy an event than by the event itself. All this results in people's reactions being an emotional trigger for her.

On the other hand, I am extremely conservative in demonstrating my emotions and enjoyment of any given event. It's just the way I am (I'll get into the reasons for that in a moment). But you can see already how this combination of personality traits will result in Inna feeling insecure, and me feeling pressured or criticized.

Inna reacted to my comment by indicating that "This isn't bad" is "the highest praise possible from Orny", and going on to attack me for being so stingy with my emotions. I went on to defend myself, and the evening ended quite unsatisfactorily, with each of us feeling hurt and angry for expecting something different from one another. Nothing that won't get settled, it's just that I needed to relate that bit in order to proceed from here.

In the rest of this entry, I discuss why I am so reserved. It's a lot of self-analysis and some of it I admit will sound quite adolescent. It's naturally something I typically try to rise above, but at the same time, it's also still something that continues to influence my behavior.

So why am I so reserved? It would be easy to cite the familiar axiom that it's easier (or safer) to be negative than to be positive. In the past, that has certainly been a factor in my tempering my reactions, even recently. I think that I've made great progress on this one recently, thanks partly to Inna, and partly to my increased participation in the creative community. I'm learning, gradually, how to be more supportive and less judgemental, at least when the circumstances require it.

But there's much more to it than that. There are ultimately two big reasons why I'm not more demonstrative: first, I lack the ability to feel, express, and act on my emotions, and second, I fear what might come out if I tried.

I'm unable to feel, express, and act on my emotions? Isn't that the easiest thing in the world? Well, to many people it must be, but I've never been ruled by my emotions; I've always kept them under smotheringly tight control, to the point where today I have great difficulty even identifying when I have emotions, much less what they might be. I know that's probably counterintuitive to most people, but trust me on this one; I know of what I speak.

The root of most of my insecurities surely lies in my reaction of our family moving to an unfamiliar town when I was nine years old. I think it's typical that most children will react to such a traumatic event either by becoming extremely extroverted (in order to attract new friends), or by becoming extremely introverted (out of fear). I fell into the latter category, and never had a large number of friends until late in high school (see below). My family reinforced the value of intellect over emotions, and my life goal became to live forever, so that I could learn everything there was to know and know how the world would turn out. And after all, what use are emotions when you're alone?

When I began find myself attracted to women, my introversion and insecurity kept me from actually pursuing relationships. They of course seemed extraneous to my life's goals, but with no outlet, the unreleased sexual tension of adolescence worked inside me, turning me into a very hateful, judgemental racist: a very dangerous hooligan, but without the disregard for traditional values that would have enabled me to do real harm.

The stage was set for my first real romance, which took place during my final year of high school. Jean was, of course, everything I was not, but most especially she was positive, in touch with her emotions, and impulsive. My entire life turned around in one moment that took place in my parents' back yard. On a warm, lush spring day, I watched as Jean actually laughed and skipped down a set of rock stairs into the grass beneath a maple tree. I (quietly, of course) stood there dumbstruck, watching her suffused with joy to overflowing: an emotion I never let myself feel, expressed in a way that I could never express. That was my revelation, and I made a very conscious, deliberate decision to be more impulsive (ironic, eh?).

At that time, I was one of the principals in the New England Tolkien Society, a group of young fans of the author who wrote "the Hobbit" and "the Lord of the Rings". The group had one or two camping trips each year where everyone got dressed up in medieval garb and pretended to be hobbits or elves or whatnot. This was to be the testing ground for my new impulsiveness.

At NETS gatherings, I stopped caring what people thought of me, and actually pushed myself to become an extrovert. I started acting before thinking, incorporating random acts of silliness and flirtation into my behavior. Amazingly to me, I became quite popular, even with the girls. I had successfully been able to "flip the switch" from cold, hateful intellectual to outgoing, silly, and impulsive extrovert.

The problem was that I was still living at home, where that kind of behavior would never have been acceptable. So in order to rationalize my different behaviors, I borrowed from schizophrenia, describing myself as two separate people. David, the name I used up until college, was the master of intellect and self-control; Ornoth, or Orny, which I'd used as a name in Tolkien fandom and other medieval recreationist events, was the flirtatious, uninhibited fool. That was the situation when I graduated high school.

Throughout college and into my marriage, I went through several phases when one or the other of these two "personalities" were dominant. Any given phase would last about nine months, but within those larger phases, I might switch back and forth (intentionally or not) for a period of days or hours. Friends who knew me well said that they could see in my eyes when I made the discrete transition from one to the other.

But as my language indicates, these two halves were never integrated, and my intellectual half never learned how to demonstrate, or even see, my own emotions. Two decades later, Inna wisely told me that this division was contrived and that perpetuating it from adolescence was unhealthy, so I tried to set it aside. Unfortunately, for the most part that meant losing touch with my emotions, though I shouldn't lay the responsibility for that wholly on Inna. After all, my ex-wife's parting shot was to give me a Mister Spock tee shirt, effectively saying that my coldness and rationality were the equivalent of the Vulcan's banishment of all emotion. And while working for Sapient, I twice took the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, perhaps the most famous personality test in the world, and never scored so much as a single point on the "emotions" scale.

One thing I pride myself on is expressing myself accurately in written form, after I've had a chance to digest things and determine how I feel about them. But I am wholly inarticulate, unable to detect or describe my emotions in "real-time", as events occur. This was particularly well demonstrated when Inna and I spent a week on Cape Cod two years ago. At the time, Inna had no idea that I was enjoying the trip. To be entirely truthful, I don't believe I knew it, myself. But after coming back to Boston, I realized how much I treasured those memories, and how much I'd enjoy repeating them, and only then was I able to show Inna how much they meant to me. Of course, to her, who trusts emotions far more than words spoken after the fact, this sounded insincere.

So for more than a quarter century I've practiced a uniquely successful method of denying my emotions, to the point where today I find myself questioning whether I have the capacity for emotions at all, and if I did, how I could possibly recognize them in myself, much less allow myself to publicly demonstrate them and act upon them. There are, of course, both advantages and disadvantages to this way of life, but I think it would be nice (and healthy) if I had the capacity to choose whether to demonstrate my emotions or not, rather than having no choice at all because I cannot even register them.

And then there's the other question: if I demonstrated them, what might come out? As I mentioned above, I was a pretty angry kid in high school, and there is still some residue from that. I was hateful, racist, reactionary, and, more than anything else, judgemental. Those were the emotions that were most natural to me then; would they resurface? Of course, I've thankfully evolved out of most of those. I've put aside most of my racism and hatefulness and prejudices, and I've tried to be more supportive and less quick to judge.

But one thing remains with me: I'm really not fond of people at all. I can't say that I truly hate people anymore, which is good, but my tolerance and patience with them is extremely low. As my relationship with Inna proves, there are people out there whose friendship has immense potential for me, once it reaches a certain level of depth. I think my problem is that as an introvert, it just doesn't seem worth the effort to make that investment. Most people either aren't compatible with me (through no fault of their own, of course), or simply don't desire the depth of friendship which would make the investment of time and energy worthwhile. Most people operate at a very shallow level, and that bores me to tears. I need a few good friends who know me very well, who are intelligent and articulate, with broad interests which include some of my own, but also include other, new things that would help me grow.

But establishing those kinds of friendships takes time, during which you have to slog through all the common, surfacey stuff before genuine depth comes through meaningful shared experiences. And putting that time and effort into a surfacey friendship that might never "pay off" is what I, as an introvert, shy away from. And that's why I am so alone, though I live in the very heart of the city.

So my fear is that if I really allowed my emotions to show, my general impatience and intolerance of people would drive people away.

With such an attitude, one could reasonably ask why I need people in my life at all. For the most part, indeed, I have concluded that I don't. But there are certain reasons, most of which are either very practical or mundane.

First, being alone is dangerous. What happens if I have a heart attack or cannot live unassisted? That's a problem, but it's hardly a great basis for friendship!

I'm physically attracted to people. This is the one thing that I find most frustrating, this unquenchable desire. There's so much turmoil that I wouldn't have to face if I could just rid myself of my sexual desires. I've tried; that's just not going to happen...

People are necessary for my entertainment and growth. Even living a purely selfish life for my own amusement, I need what other people create. I need live music, interesting artwork, architecture, graffiti, fashion, literature, dining, modern technological innovation, and all kinds of shared activities. I need intellectual challenge, and people who can bring me new experiences and ideas. That's why I live in the middle of Boston, and why I can't just pack up and live in isolation up in northern Maine, even though that has its attractions.

Of course, none of these are terribly lofty reasons for interacting with people. The one thing that I really need from people, that I could never possibly deny, that makes everything worthwhile, is exactly what I described between Inna and I at the beginning of this entry: understanding.

What I need, more than anything else, is for someone to know me. Not just in a surface sense, but to really know everything about me, fully and deeply, and understand who I am, what I've seen, and where I want to go. Someone to share my pains with, to appreciate my fiction, to understand why I think DargonZine is an honorable life's work, to know what polyamory means to me as well as my negative opinions of marriage, to share the spiritual appreciation I feel of nature, to understand my philosophy and why I live the way I do, to know when to push me and when it's best to leave me alone, and to occasionally surprise me when they understand me even better than I know myself. And I want to be able to know them as thoroughly as they know me, and know the new experiences and ideas that they can bring me.

And, of course, I want them to understand the difficulty I have with feeling, expressing, and acting upon my own emotions, and help me to overcome it, rather than condemn me for this area of weakness.

Frequent topics