No.1 Brain Scientist: Your Brain Is Lying To You! Here's How I Discovered The Truth!

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Steven Bartlett: You've bought a present for me in this box and I feel nervous and excited.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So this is a human brain with a spinal cord.

Steven Bartlett: Such a masterpiece. But what people don't know is that we have four different structured parts of our brain that automatically shape how we think, feel and behave. But what if it's not unconscious? What if we could pick and choose point how we want to be in any moment on purpose. Like we can manifest our own mental health. And by the end of this conversation today, you're going to teach me how to do that.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Absolutely. You're going to so get it.

Steven Bartlett: Harvard neuroscientist, Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor has transformed how we understand the brain through her research and own traumatic experience. She's teaching the world how to unlock every part of their brain to regain control of their thoughts, emotions, and behavior.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: We have a problem. We are skewed as a society to the two parts of the left brain which focuses on me, the individual. How do I fit myself into a society? And trauma is living in there, as is cravings and addiction. And we need this. It protects us. We get in trouble when this is the only portion of our brain that we value because look at the world we currently live in.

Steven Bartlett: So is there a strategy for making sure that you don't act upon it?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, so many people are trying to get rid of their emotional reactivity, but the way to heal it is not to get rid of it. I mean, we're wired for this. Why do I want to just put myself in a little box and say, I don't want to have pain. I don't want to be mad. I want to be a robot. I don't want to be a robot. I want to be a whole human with a whole brain. Like, this is life. And it lasts this long and then it's gone. And it took me losing the left side of my brain for eight years to realize just how precious this thing is.

Steven Bartlett: So how do I control and protect my brain at all costs?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, there's a lot. So you ready?

Steven Bartlett: I want some hot stuff.

Steven Bartlett: Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. I see messages all the time. Secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're just getting started. So if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24 percent of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you.

Steven Bartlett: Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, what have you spent your professional career endeavoring to understand and why does it matter?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I am fascinated with how does our brain create our perception of reality and based on that information, what a wonder it is any two of us can communicate at all. I think I am fascinated by what we are as biological creatures and most of us are so consumed with everything outside of ourselves that we have missed the wonder of what we are as this biological conglomeration of cells. I think we're absolutely beautiful. You know, none of us came into this world with a roadmap about how to get it all right. And the roadmap is the brain cells. And when we understand the brain cells and what they do and how to work with them and how to keep them well, then we can manifest our own mental health.

Steven Bartlett: And do you think the average person understands the brain? Did you understand the brain before you started studying it?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, I understood it because I had a brother who would be diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. So I became fascinated by five or six about what are we and why is he the way he is? We are so different from one another. Our interpretation of our experiences are so different from one another. What are we? I just became a philosopher very young and fascinated with the biology and the anatomy of what we are.

Steven Bartlett: What do you think an understanding of the brain, the understanding that you're going to communicate to myself and my audience today, how do you think that can help me improve my life?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh my goodness. If I understand what part of me interacts with the external world and is smart and is good with details and is well organized, then I know how to use that part. And that's, we are skewed as a society to that left thinking portion of our brain. In fact, as far as traditional medicine is concerned, that thinking portion of our brain is the only portion that it's actually conscious. So then we live our lives literally with our left emotional tissue, our right emotional tissue, and our right thinking tissue, all as part of our unconscious brain. But what if it's not unconscious? What if we actually know what those groups of cells also do so that when I'm experiencing my pain from the past, I can actually call on the portion of my brain that knows how to self-soothe me so that I can lift myself out of my pain, learn from those experiences, and then live a more fulfilled life. It's the power to choose who and how we want to be in the world when we understand what our choices are.

Steven Bartlett: So is it possible to choose which part of your brain to use in a certain moment?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: You do it all the time. You're just probably not aware of it. Let's say you're going to have a business call and you got your stats and you got your data and you pick up the phone and you say, "Yes, this is Steve and blah, blah, blah." And you work into your details. And then let's say someone peeks in, let's say a little dog comes running in. You're going to have a couple of potential responses. One, you're going to smile, right? You just smiled. You just moved into, "Oh, I love my little fuzzy." Now you're a little gentler because now you've shifted into a different portion of your brain that is open to the present moment, and now you just got uplifted. So we have these four different anatomically, neuroanatomically structured parts of our brain, and we can pick and choose who and how we want to be in any moment when we know what our choices are. But we don't know what our choices are as our society because we are functioning skewed to that left-thinking portion of our brain, and everything else is running on automatic.

Steven Bartlett: And the left-thinking portion of the brain is the more logical.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Logical, rational, analytical, likes to control people, places, things. There's a me definition, ego center of "I exist. I am Jill Bolte-Taylor. This is my phone number. This is where I live." I know that this is where I begin and end, where my skin meets air, because a group of cells tells me where I begin and end. But you've probably had flow moments where you were doing your sports or you were making love or you were whatever you were doing. And you didn't begin and end here. You were vast and open and you were this big energy ball that you are. But the left hemisphere focuses on that little group of cells and those skill sets and the right and the wrong and the good and bad. And that portion of the brain defines the social norm. And we all have to fit ourselves in the social norm. But it's only a quarter of our brain.

Steven Bartlett: Is it making us unhappy the way that we use our brain currently?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, we're out of balance. We're completely out of balance because we're at the balance of the value of that left brain. What's going on in the right brain? The right brain is right here, right now. We spend so much of our time. So fundamental differences between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. And I know this only because I lost my left hemisphere and that's all I had for eight years. I had to use what I had currently going on in my right hemisphere after I lost those cells of the left hemisphere in order to rebuild the skill sets of the left brain so that I could become completely functional again. Are we unhappy? Well, that's not a happy part of the brain. When you're being analytical and organized and structured, you probably got that frown right there. It's a different expression. Then as soon as I said, a little puppy comes in, all of a sudden your face happens. What happens is you're shifting into a different part of your brain. And that's what we do. We're running it on automatic. So if we are running our brain on automatic, imagine how much better we might do if we were actually picking and choosing who and how we wanted to be on purpose.

Steven Bartlett: And you're telling me that's possible.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Absolutely. And by the end of this conversation today, you're going to teach me how to do that.

Steven Bartlett: Absolutely. You're going to so get it. And once you see you, you will no longer ever not see you. And then you're going to see these four characters inside of yourself. And now you're going to be looking at your partner, who you speak about often. And you're going to be going, I recognize all four parts of her too. But what that means is that any relationship that we have, there's eight of us. There's eight of us. Eight very specific personalities in every relationship. So I have four very predictable character profiles, as do you. It's the way the anatomy of the brain is built.

Steven Bartlett: You've bought a present for me in this box. I did. What is in that box?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: This is a very special brain with a spinal cord.

Steven Bartlett: This is a real brain?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: This is a real brain with a spinal cord.

Steven Bartlett: A real spinal cord. Oh, God. And do you own this brain?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I did this dissection. And yes, this brain was specifically donated to me for educational purposes.

Steven Bartlett: How old was the person? What was?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: In their 40s.

Steven Bartlett: Do you know how they passed away?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Brain cancer.

Steven Bartlett: And can you see the brain cancer?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: You cannot. Not until I cut this open. And I've had this brain for over a decade and I haven't cut it open. It is very rare to have a dissection which is actually brain and spinal cord. Usually you dissect the brain and we learn about the brain, but I wanted to have the brain and spinal cord because that's the central nervous system. And it's a spectacular dissection.

Steven Bartlett: I feel nervous and excited.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Excited's good.

Steven Bartlett: I'm excited.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Because you're right here right now going, "Oh my gosh, something new." It's exciting. Right here right now is an exciting time. Are you ready?

Steven Bartlett: I am ready.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay. Should I put my gloves?

Steven Bartlett: I encourage you to do so.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay. So this is a real human brain and right now it is hydrated in rubbing alcohol, so that's what this is. So you don't have to be afraid of that. So this is a real human brain and spinal cord. And I think what I'll do is I'll just move this over here out of the way.

Steven Bartlett: Okay. So this is a human brain. What's that skin on the top of it?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: With a spinal cord.

Steven Bartlett: This thing here?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: We'll get there.

Steven Bartlett: Oh.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So you've heard about meningitis.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: It's layers that support between the bone and the brain tissue and it protects it. So this is called, there are three layers called the meninges. So when you've heard of meningitis. So this is the dura mater. It's very tough and you'll feel that. It's like a really tough lettuce. And this is essentially strapping the brain into the cranial vault and holding it into position because you don't want this thing flopping around and having wounding an injury.

Steven Bartlett: So it straps it into here?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, it straps it in certain spots, yes. And generally, often when you do a dissection, you actually have to put a screwdriver in there to peel the dura off the bone. So it straps it into positions, kind of like a bra for the brain.

Steven Bartlett: Okay. Okay. So this is the dura.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: And then what I'm touching now is called the arachnoid. And that's the second layer of the meninges. And what you're looking at in there is blood inside of the blood vessels. So one of the things about why the brain is so fragile is the blood vessels are transparently thin. So the pressurized system of what's going on inside of the cranial vault has to be highly regulated. And it's actually the pressure of the cranial vault versus the pressure in the thorax of the chest and the pressure of the abdomen, it's a system. And they all work together in order to keep everything well-regulated. Homeostasis, a state where the cells are happy. And so the third layer is like right here. And you can see this layer is peeled away, the arachnoid. And under here, I'm now touching pia. And pia is the external layer of the brain cells themselves, the brain tissue. So this is a beautiful brain, and it would be positioned in my head like this. So front of the brain, back of the brain, coming down, hanging down as the spinal cord. And then as you look at the spinal cord, this is called the cauda equina. And these are the nerves that are actually going to go down into your lower extremity. So all the information that's going to go down into your lower extremity to control your body is controlled. And the sensory information is coming in through those nerve fibers.

Steven Bartlett: Looks like a bunch of wires.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: It does. Well, you know, we are quite a well-designed machine in its own way. The difference is we are organic. We are biological. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that we make as a society is we think ourselves as a machine. Push it, push it, push it, push it, push it. Well, you can do that with a computer. You plug it in and it stays on until you turn it off or it blows up. We have to go to sleep.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah, have a good time with that. [Laughs] Yes, it's okay. You won't hurt it.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Wow.

Steven Bartlett: We hope. Gosh. Beautiful. Our design, such a masterpiece. We are this massive conglomeration of 50 trillion molecular geniuses making up our form. Beautiful. It's so crazy that every single person listening right now has one of these.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah.

Steven Bartlett: Processing my voice as you're hearing my voice.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: That's right.

Steven Bartlett: And it is this, for anyone that has never felt a brain before, which I imagine is most of you, it is like this very, very soft but dense sort of tofu-y, how would you describe the feeling?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Pork roast.

Steven Bartlett: Pork roast. It's very soft though.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: It is. Now, this has been in alcohol or formaldehyde since at least 2008, probably earlier. And when you first pull a brain out, it's even softer. It's like a tough jelly. So that when you first bring out a fresh brain, if you take your finger and you just poke it into the tissue, it'll squeeze right in and then you pull your finger out and then it'll scrunch right back together again.

Steven Bartlett: Oh, okay.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah. So this is a prepared specimen and we have to do that and lock together the proteins or the lipids in order for us to be able to handle it for educational purposes.

Steven Bartlett: So this is the computer and then this is the wires that control the rest of the body?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, it's part of the system because this what you're holding is the central nervous system. And then the central nervous system sends between each of the vertebra. Here you have different vertebra. Between different vertebra, you will have different nerves coming out and then going around the body. And then you're also going to have vagus nerves coming off of the brainstem area and going down into the abdomen, taking care of the viscera.

Steven Bartlett: The first time you saw a brain like this, how did it change your perspective of life?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I love it. I love it. I was very blessed to have an aunt who was a debutante back in the years where debutantes did not get jobs. And she wanted to be an emergency room doctor, but there was no way that she was going to do that. So she would actually encourage me to pick up roadkill and we would take it home and dissect it.

Steven Bartlett: It's beautiful. See that look, we have two responses. The left brain says, "Oh my gosh, this is disgusting. This is the worst thing I ever had." And that's a part of your brain that's designed to kind of critically judge and say no it's not safe it's not cool push it away. But the right hemisphere comes online with curiosity. So people see these things and they go, "Oh no, not my thing," or they go, "Oh my gosh, that is so cool." I feel both at the same time. I feel I have almost a respect for the person whose brain that belongs to.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: And then the other part of me is just totally fascinated and almost, you know when you look at it, you still don't realize that you have one of those in your head.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes. Now, so you're still looking at that as that's one thing. I don't look at it like that at all. This is a brain, but what's important about this brain is our brain health, our brain abilities is 100% dependent on the cells that make up that brain. So most people, many neuroscientists talk about the brain and how the brain does in the external world and the behavior and the neurotransmitter systems and all of that. I go down to the raw data of the cells. So I am a cellular neuroanatomist. And so I care about the cells making up the nervous system. And how do we interact with them? How do we relate to them? How do we care for them? How do we feed them? How do we provide for them so that they can be healthy, so that I can live a whole brain life in a healthy way?

Steven Bartlett: For context, where did you do your PhD?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Did you do your PhD in Neuroanatomy at Indiana State University? Indiana State, and my research was at the IU School of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine. So that's where I focused on neuro. And from there, I went to Harvard Medical School and did two postdocs, one in neurobiology and then one in psychiatry.

Steven Bartlett: And when I say the 10th of December, 1996, which was four years after I was born, roughly, you were 37 years old.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: What happened on that day? Can you give me a play-by-play?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes. Well, the day before that, I was teaching and performing research at Harvard Medical School. And I'm a gross anatomist, which means cadaver, entire body, as well as histology, which is tissue, as well as neuro. So I'm all about anatomy. So I'm teaching and performing research at Harvard Medical School. And I woke up the next day and I was experiencing a major hemorrhage in the left half of my brain. So I woke up, I sat up, and I immediately had a pulsing pound behind my left eye. And generally, I didn't have that. And it was pretty severe. And it got all of my attention. And I have my before and after is before and after that morning.

Steven Bartlett: What happens next? So you've got a pulsing pain behind your left eye. What do you do then?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, I thought, "Wow, that's weird." And it's the caustic pain that you get when you bite into ice cream. It's like that freeze brain. And I thought, "OK." And I felt suddenly weak. And I thought, "OK, so I got up and light was kind of burning on my eyes." I didn't want light in the morning that day. So I closed the curtains and I thought, "Well, let's get my blood flowing. Maybe I'll feel a little better." So I jumped onto my cardio glider, which was a whole body full exercise machine. But I'm looking at my hands and realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I look at my body and I'm thinking, "Whoa, I'm a weird looking thing." And my perception of reality shifted away from my perception of being the one on the machine, having my normal morning experience, to, "Wow, I was witnessing myself having this experience." And I'd never had that happen before. And I thought, "Okay, so this isn't helping." So I get off the machine and I head across my living room table. And I'm realizing every movement is very rigid and very precise. And I'm actually kind of directing. I felt very robotic getting into the bathroom. So I remember pulling on the water. And when the water came out, it smashed into the tub and the volume just reverberated in my brain. It was so loud. The sound was amplified and it pushed me against the wall. But when the volume hit, I'm a neuroanatomist. So what that means is that I'm teaching students about all of the anatomy here and which fibers are coming in and going where and what is the tracks of everything. And so sound comes into the ears and it goes right down to the pons region of our brain down here. And this is where life and death is. This is where those cells, if you're going to inspire, you need your pons and your medulla in order to have those cells functioning. So when mine were being disturbed, that was the moment I realized I've got a problem. This is a grave problem. This could kill me. So I got out of the shower. I dressed mechanically, just dressed. I'm still going to work. And then my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And it's really strange when a limb goes paralyzed. It doesn't just like drop down. It goes "bomb." I mean, it's a heavy entity. And I thought, "Oh my gosh, paralysis. Oh my gosh, I'm having a stroke." And then I'm thinking, "Okay, you know, oh my gosh, how many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" And I literally thought, "Okay, I'll do this stroke thing for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my job, right?" So then it was a matter of, I have to get help. I have to communicate with the external world. And the problem was that the hemorrhage was happening inside of the left thinking portion of my brain, which is where language is. So I was drifting for four hours. I was drifting in and out of the consciousness of the present moment. And the present moment, in the present moment, I don't know who I am. I don't know what I am. All I know is what's in the present moment.

Steven Bartlett: So explain that for me. So the left side of your brain was where the stroke was happening.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes, it was.

Steven Bartlett: So you were in the right side of your brain.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I was waffling back and forth because it was growing. It started small. So I had what we call an arteriovenous malformation, where an artery, which is a high pressure system, it's bringing blood into the system. And then I have a vein and the vein is a no pressure, low pressure system. And then we have these little capillary networks in between.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah, this is an ischemic stroke.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I had the hemorrhagic stroke. So when you think about stroke, most people think, "Oh, blood clot." And the blood clot blocks a... The thing about arteries is they taper, taper, taper, taper, taper until they get down to the capillary level, which is where the red blood cells kind of line up in single file and pass through that. And it's a very low pressure system. And then it absorbs back up into the vein. Well, what I had was the hemorrhagic stroke and a blood vessel exploded. And when it exploded, then the blood goes out into the extracellular matrix, which is extracellular between the cells. And the cells cannot function. Blood is essentially poison to cellular communication. So it's no good. And wherever blood goes, those cells start going offline. And then as that hemorrhage grows inside of the brain across time, more and more cells are becoming incapacitated.

Steven Bartlett: So you were in that moment unable to remember how to speak properly, unable to...

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I had nothing. I didn't even have me. I had no Jill Bolte-Taylor because she was over in the left hemisphere. And eventually that whole hemisphere ended up swimming in a pool of blood and was non-functional. But it took four hours to get there. So I was waffling into the present moment, blissful euphoria. I didn't exist. I know who I am and that I exist at all because I have a tiny little group of cells inside of my left hemisphere that tells me who I am. Have you ever awakened in a hotel somewhere because you've traveled so much and you're going, "Where am I?" There's this blank, right? And it's like, "I don't know, but the bed's comfy. What a nice room." And all of a sudden you're just right here right now and you're not about the past and you're not about the future and you're just in the present moment. And joy lives in the present moment. Love lives in the present moment. Laughter lives in the present moment. The present moment is a fantastic place, and we are wired to that by literally half our brain. So why wouldn't we spend more time over here? Or at least balance it out. That's all I ever ask for. I am not here to wave a flag for the right hemisphere. I want whole brain living. I want people to understand the different parts of their brain, what they do, so that it says, "Okay, so let's say, do you meditate?"

Steven Bartlett: Sometimes.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay, sometimes. What's it like for you?

Steven Bartlett: Difficult.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay, why?

Steven Bartlett: Because you start thinking about stuff.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay, because this part of your brain won't be quiet. Left thinking brain. We're languages. It won't be quiet. Or you just had a little argument with your sweetheart, and so down here now you're in your emotional system and you're not really feeling peaceful and you got on that airplane and things weren't like perfectly smooth, and now you're ruminating about, "Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh," and whatever. And that takes you away from the present moment. But the present moment is not about me, the individual. I think about this. So I look at the brain, it's divided into four categories, very specific anatomically. Each one of those result in a constellation of skill sets. And then that constellation of skill sets actually manifests in our lives as personalities. And we all have all four. Now, do we all practice all four? No. Some of us do. We usually have a dominant. You seem to like your left thinking brain a lot. When do you have fun? What does Steve do for fun?

Steven Bartlett: This. No. Also, I watch Manchester United play and I lift weights.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah. What's that like for you? Is it work or is it refreshing to be in your body?

Steven Bartlett: Oh, when I'm at the gym, it's yeah, it's I'm just in my body, which is yeah.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay, but no, not just. But when you're at the gym, you're in your body. Now, can you go back in your own mind and have that feeling?

Steven Bartlett: Can I?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes. How?

Steven Bartlett: Well, go there in your mind. I actually imagined myself on the treadmill at my favorite gym and how that felt. And I had a brief moment of that feeling emerge in my mind.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: And what did it feel like?

Steven Bartlett: Present. Present. Yes.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay. And any other emotions that you can attach to?

Steven Bartlett: Just like calm, peaceful, without concern, very present.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the present is a nice place for you.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay. What else do you do to get there?

Steven Bartlett: Massages. I receive massages.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah. Okay, okay. And what happens to your brain? Do you analyze what's coming and just work your butt off, or do you allow yourself to actually drift and shift into the present moment of "Oh my gosh, I'm so glad I'm here"?

Steven Bartlett: I allow myself to drift.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Good. Where do you go?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I don't know. It's like a fuzzy middle ground place.

Steven Bartlett: Yes.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: No boundaries. Some kind of limbo. This portion of the brain up here is going to be the part that says who you are as an individual. It's your ego center. This hemisphere, the left hemisphere, has the picture of nature with you in the middle because you exist in your left hemisphere. That's where the world revolves around you. The world revolves around you. In the right hemisphere, you don't even exist. You exist as a part of it all. So what you hear gets integrated with what you smell, with what you feel, gets integrated in the excitement of possibility. So I'm not working from a plan. I'm not in the past. I'm not in the future. I'm not all about me. I'm just here. So when you're on a table, massage table and you're allowing yourself to go fuzzy, that's essentially the skill set of what's going on in the right hemisphere.

Steven Bartlett: When you dive into water, you swim?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Not well.

Steven Bartlett: Okay. But do you dive into water?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I do, yeah.

Steven Bartlett: Okay.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Or even just in the shower. When you feel, when you dive into water and you feel the water, the pressure against your body, the temperature of the water, you feel the phenomenon of wetness. This is a present moment experiential opportunity. Diving into the water. Now, a lot of people might dive in the water because I'm racing and the whole goal is to get to the end because I got that left brain thing going on and that's the goal. But if I'm just being, this is, you know, are you being or are you doing, right? When we're being, we're simply being here. We're being alive. We're being aware. We're being in experience.

[Gestures with her hands]

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So as I take in this room, I take in this whole room. My left brain says, I'm going to focus on you. And I got these books and I've got these things and I got the brains and everything and everything's a thing. But to the right brain, everything is one thing. And when I live my life knowing that I can shift out of the stress circuitry of that left brain that says, more cortisol, more cortisol, do, do, do, then when I, it's the, it's the, that's the push, the right brain is the pause. And that's why I was saying before, we're not a robot. We're not a computer. We are a biological organism. And so we don't plug ourselves in and turn it on and it stays on and forever until it dies. And then we buy a new one. We have rhythms, we have natural patterns and we have to push and we have to pause and we have to pause because we are 50 trillion molecular geniuses that are eating and creating waste and we need to clean up the mess. And that's what happens during sleep.

Steven Bartlett: And so when you were stood there, you'd put your clothes on, the left side of your brain was offline. So you were very much in this sort of blissful, euphoric, present moment state. What did you do next?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I go through all the details of trying to get myself help. And that meant to me, the one plan I could get between shifting back out into the euphoria of my right hemisphere, where I'm just in bliss, I'm just happy. I'm just there, and I don't have a plan.

Steven Bartlett: Why didn't you call 911?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Because it was just floating in a pool of blood. It wasn't there for me.

Steven Bartlett: What do you mean?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, when you look at where my hemorrhage happened, it happened. So language, the creation of sound and language, dog, dog is a sound, It's going to come out of Broca's area. And then Wernicke's area back here is going to place meaning on that sound. And my hemorrhage was impacting this whole area. And in there with language is numbers. 911. Didn't exist for me. Was not an option.

Steven Bartlett: You can remember 911.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Didn't exist for me. It'd be kind of like I say to you, what's 8,322 times 4 million? it doesn't exist for you until you figure it out.

Steven Bartlett: 164,374,000.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I'm checking.

Steven Bartlett: Exactly.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So 9-1-1 didn't exist for me. So I had to, when I would come back into the left hemisphere consciousness, then I got to my phone and I have a phone pad here and I spent 45 minutes waffling in and out right hemisphere, left hemisphere. And finally I found my business card that had my phone number at work. And I had to set the pad of the phone pad up against right next to the business card and match the shapes, the squiggles, in order to figure out how to call my office because I had no idea what numbers were.

Steven Bartlett: And what did you say when the person answered on the other end?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I said, this is Jill. I need help. And what came out of my mouth was and then I thought, oh my God, I sound like a golden retriever. And then he spoke to me and I thought, oh my God, he sounds like a golden retriever. I had had a golden retriever and they're very verbal. So I knew at that point, I did not know because I could still hear myself, my language inside of my brain. Language is very complex in this because different cells do different things. And in this left-thinking portion, we can read, we can write. Those are completely different circuitries. We can speak. We can uncomprehend when others speak. I mean, it's complex. So this is a busy, busy, busy place. But as long as this is the only portion of our brain that we value, then we live based on the values of that portion of the brain. And what that brain values is me and mine. And I want more. And that's the world we're living in. It's selfish.

Steven Bartlett: Well, it certainly is. Because people talk about there being a spiritual crisis in society at the moment, with many of the things you're describing, the individualism, the narcissism, sociopathism, the leaders of the world being very zero sum in how they approach economies and how they treat others you're saying that's because we're so right there over here is on the right side on the right side it's right here right now and in the right here right now what do i care about i care about connection because i'm not individualized here i'm a part of the whole i am we are all standing around this beautiful planet and i man is equal to all the other creatures and all the other life and to the life of the planet. We are one construct here. And we either figure out how to nurture and support and be one thing. We are one human family. In our right hemisphere, you are my brother. I love you. I can support you. I can nurture you. I can encourage you because you're a part of me. And then the left hemisphere comes online and says, oh, Jill, that is so inappropriate for you to say. And he has his body space and I have my body space and we need to be formal and we need to right and wrong and good and bad. And we need to establish how the construct of the social norm is that we are now going to take the mass of all that we are and fit ourselves in that so that we can communicate with one another and run a world.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: You make that phone call. You sound like a golden retriever. What happens next? Does your colleague get concerned?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: He recognizes it is me. It is I. And he comes to my home. and back in those days we had managed care. So you have to go to the right place or you don't get coverage. So he took me there and then they took a picture of my brain and then they put me in an ambulance and sent me to Mass General Hospital. And I'm still curled up in a little fetal ball going, hold on, hold on. And I was slowing down and I knew that I was becoming weaker and weaker and I wondered how detached from my own ability, my own body can a person become before they can never get back inside this tiny little body because I felt that I was literally energetically as big as the universe.

Steven Bartlett: And what did that scan show?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: It showed a major hemorrhage in the left half of the brain. Yeah, about that size. Actually, it was a little bigger than that on that day. But two and a half weeks later when they removed, that's why we have a golf ball, a golf ball-sized blood clot from the left half of my brain two and a half weeks later, December 27. And then I woke up and I had this huge hemorrhage. I mean, I had this huge scar, but my mother comes rushing in and she says, speak to me, speak to me, because this is my language. If my language cells are gone, I will have no language and I will struggle the rest of my life for language. And I whispered to her, I'm better. I'm better. And what I meant by I'm better was that I felt bright again. I felt bright. I felt like whatever life was going to give me at that point in time, I had brightness. I was still alive. I did not die that day. And when, you know, so many people have said, how, what motivated you to get better? Or how can you, could you have been so happy? And it was like, I did not die that day. and that meant no matter how disabled I was, I could not walk, talk, read, write, recall any of my life. I became an infant in a woman's body at the age of 37. I completely fell off the Harvard ladder and none of that mattered. All that mattered was I was alive and what that meant was I had the potential to grow and heal and become whatever I would become and it didn't matter and it still doesn't matter. What matters is I'm alive. It's the gift of life. And that's for me, the wonder of what we are as living beings. And we, you know, we are at a time where we are in a mental health crisis and our mental health is 100% dependent on the health and well-being of the brain. And the health and well-being of the brain is 100% dependent on the health and the well-being of the brain cells. So how do we nurture those cells and love those cells so that we can live the life we want to live and we can live in joy, we can live in present, we can live feeling connected to something that is magnificent as a life force power of the universe and have this magnificent left brain that allows me to have language, allows me to be a part of society in an effective way, and allows me to have pain from my past so I can learn and grow from experiences that have happened to me that I would rather not repeat.

Steven Bartlett: What is the complex range of emotions you're experiencing as you recount the story?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Awe. I feel such awe for life. Life. This is life. There is life and there is death. And we have life. And life is the miracle construction of the universe. Argue about it all you want, have a million conversations about it, analyze it to death. But the fact of the matter is you are alive in this moment. You are alive. You can say you have eyes that can see and ears that can hear and you have a digestive tract that can bring in nutrition and you have manual dexterity and you have mobility. You have legs that can run around the planet and you have this magnificent mind so that you can do what you want to do. You are a miracle and we have forgotten that. And for me, it took me, this whole stroke experience took me straight back to the part of my brain, that right thinking part that connects me in that transformation or that transcendence experience of being so much more than just a little human being running around the planet. Oh my gosh, life is this miracle. And it makes me feel awe and wonder. It excites me so much. And if everybody had that and recognized that and could grasp that and hold that, imagine the different world we'd be living in.

Steven Bartlett: Eight years. Eight years. Of recovery.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: Every day, every breath, everything, I thought of nothing else other than what can I do and what's in the way of being able to do what I want to do next. and rebuilding, using what I had in the right hemisphere to rebuild the circuits. I knew I had language. I knew I could speak. I knew I had vocabulary. I knew I had ideas. I knew somewhere in there I had numbers. It took four years for me to even understand what's a one. I mean, wow.

Steven Bartlett: Wow.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I did not die that day. I did not die that day. And so I have all the possibility of what will be. And it was wide open. I wasn't going to be a neuroscientist again, because that left hemisphere. I never held myself to returning to whom I had been before the stroke. That girl died that day, as far as I was concerned. But the phenomenon was that, as I'm a gross anatomist, so I taught cadaver lab. And when you are teaching, you have a whole body there, and you're teaching medical students about what's inside of there. You get your hands in there, And you say, I want you to slip in behind the stomach. And I want you to slip this hand in here. And I want you to know the relationship between the stomach and the duodenum and the liver and the splenic nerve and the kidney. I want you to feel it because I want you to have a three-dimensional image of that inside of your mind so that you can use that information. Very right-brained. So when we learn, we learn facts and details with the left brain. But we learn context and big picture with the right brain. So we have these two very different ways of working it out.

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Steven Bartlett: So you said there's four personalities in everybody's brain. What are those four personalities?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: As we're looking at the brain, just from an anatomical perspective, the way evolution happens for the mammalian brain is that there are creatures who have a spinal cord, and there are creatures like that, like worms. And then a little brain, a little medulla, will form at the top of that tissue, and then now that brain controls and streamlines information processing to the rest of the system. And then we add a pons.

Steven Bartlett: What's that?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: It's just a structure of cells. So this is the medulla. Yeah. We would have spinal cord there. And this is the pons. We call that the pons. It's a group of cells. It's a small brain.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah, it's a smaller brain.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: And in relationship to that pons is this cerebellum. And the cerebellum has this gorgeous cell in it called the Purkinje cell. And they're like a hand. They're like, you know, two-dimensional. And they all line up like this. And then fibers run through those. And it's part of the mechanism of timing so that you have fluidity of movement because of the way those cells are aligned. So not all cells are created equal and not all cells look alike. Cells have the right shape for the right job. So as then we grow and now we have the mammalian brain, we're going to have the hippocampus. You've heard of that for learning and memory. The amygdala. You've heard that for am I safe? Am I safe? Are you safe? Oh, okay. Yeah, there's a group of cells right there that is scanning constantly. Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? And you're fine until you're not safe.

Steven Bartlett: Okay, so like threat detection.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes, that's exactly what it is. You have two emotional systems, one in your left hemisphere and one in your right hemisphere. And the right hemisphere is going to be right here, right now. Am I safe in the right here, right now? So let's say all of a sudden a snake went by and we would jump. we would startle because it's your right amygdala saying, oh my gosh, am I safe? And then the left hemisphere is going, oh my gosh, it's a snake. No, I'm not safe. Push it away. And when we're calm, that's when the hippocampi, because we have two amygdala, one in each hemisphere, two hippocampi, one in each hemisphere. And when the amygdala are calm and you feel safe, now you can learn and focus, focus with the anterior, with the cingulate gyrus and learn new things. So, you You know, these groups of cells. Now, if you wipe out an amygdala, you're not gonna feel any fear. You wipe out a language center, you're not gonna have any language. You wipe out motor skills to your index finger and you can you paralyzed So every ability you have is because we have these brain cells that perform that function So for the four parts of us so we have an emotional system in each hemisphere. The emotional system of the right hemisphere, this is a right here, right now machine. Right here, right now. That's all it has. Doesn't have the past, doesn't have the future, doesn't know who you are. Doesn't have anxiety, depression. Well, it has anxiety, but most of that is going to be based in the left hemisphere because this machine, the left hemisphere, has linearity across time. So this emotional system is remembering every traumatic event that ever happened to you that you don't want to have happen again.

Steven Bartlett: Is that where trauma lives in the brain?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Trauma is living in there, as is addiction. Addiction, there's a group of cells in here called the insular cortex, and that's where craving is. And that's part of the limbic system of the left hemisphere. And if you wipe out craving, do you still have an addiction? So this is so. So let me just keep going. So we have these two emotional systems and then we have these two thinking systems. And the thinking system is what distinguish us as humans from all of their mammals. OK, so our mammals, our dogs love us. There ain't any question about that. Our dogs can punish us when we're not very, you know, we don't show up and we've sent them to doggy care if they're not happy about that. So mammals have other forms, but we have this higher executive functioning. And in the right hemisphere, it's right here right now. And in the left hemisphere, it's all about me. Because in there, in that thinking, is my ego center in that prefrontal region. I, me, I exist. Back here, orientation association area, I begin and I end here. This is the package of me, the individual. I have a language. I can create language. I can understand language. I can read. I can write. I have mathematics in there. And this motor system controls the opposite side of my body. So that's a personality.

Steven Bartlett: So to summarize them, what are the four types?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay. So when I look at a brain, and this is totally randomly named, and I did that because I had to communicate about it somewhere. So I call left thinking character one. And I actually give that part of my brain a name. I call her Helen. Hell on a wheel, she gets it done. You're talking to Helen right now. She's giving you facts and details. She is all about what is right and wrong and good and bad. How do I fit myself into a society? How do I use my words in order to communicate? So this is the part of us that goes to work. It's our A-type personality. Character one, left, thinking.

Steven Bartlett: And that's on this side here?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah. Well, it's this outer layer of cells is called the cerebral cortex. And the cerebral cortex is actually in human made up of mostly six layers of cells. It's very complex. In some areas, especially where you have sensory systems, it's just going to be four layers. But this is a complex portion of the organ that separates us from other animals.

Steven Bartlett: What about character two?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So character two is going to be the left emotion. Now, the difference between the things you can say predictably about the left hemisphere is it has linearity across time and it has me, the individual. And my emotional system then has my past pain. and it's kind of always looking for a reason to knee-jerk react and have emotional reactivity. So, so many people are trying to fix or heal or get rid of their emotional reactivity. This is a portion of our brain which is running constantly in the background to protect us in the present moment when new information comes in. So we want to work with that and we want to appreciate it and we want to love on it and we want to be kind to it because it's generally not very happy because it is storing all of our pain from the past.

Steven Bartlett: And what do you call that?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Character two. I call mine Abby. We could spend a whole semester talking about character two because character two is our pain from the past. And in our society, everything's about our pain from the past and our professional self. Character three is going to be the emotional content of the right hemisphere. Well, this is right here, right now. What am I experiencing emotionally? Experiential. This is where, what's the temperature of the air? What does it feel like to have clothing on? What does that feel like on your body? When you meditate, they ask you to become aware of your environment, right? And focus on your breath.

Steven Bartlett: Exactly.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Because they want you to expand yourself, one, out of the thinking consciousness and right and wrong and good and bad structure, the box that we think in of the left thinking. And they want you to stop, you know, thinking about your girlfriend. and boy, we didn't really end it very well. Or boy, I had a great morning this morning. Okay, so this is playful. So character three, it's young. We have two little people inside of ourselves and that's the emotional. They're immature. We are feeling creatures as biological creatures. We are feeling creatures who think. So a lot of character threes, actually we have character three moments that land us in jail because it's not thinking about consequences of behavior. It's just thinking, oh yeah, the neighbor's pool. It's three o'clock in the morning. They won't notice. Let's go jump in their pool. And then the next thing we know, you know, we've been arrested. So then character four is the thinking portion of our brain. This is our wisdom. We go and we have experiences and we learn because neuroplasticity is real. And we have to have neuroplasticity. And this is all about the cells. Neurons in real time reaching out, making new connections constantly, but their cell bodies are in position. But in order for me to make an association between you and something else, then I actually grow to you and I grow to the something else. And then I learn about that. So our capacity to learn is the underlying feature is neuroplasticity. I would not be sitting here talking to you today if neuroplasticity didn't turn on fire when I needed it for eight years. And it took eight years for me to use what I had in this brain to rebuild the skill sets of this brain. But the thinking portion, the character four portion of our brain, is the wisdom that we gain from the knowledge that we have had and we have associated it and we can relate to it. And this part, all it cares about is that emotion that I felt that morning, which was awe, awe that I'm alive at all. And when we can connect to that, people, you know, it's billion dollar industry of meditation to quiet what's going on in the left hemisphere so that we can open up the possibility to what's going on in the right hemisphere. And it's our peace. We are wired at the core of our being, of our right thinking tissue to feel peace. And we do not exist in a world that is peaceful. So if we are functioning on an extreme left brain, left thinking, and we are emotionally volatile when people insult us, and we're all about the me, me, me, and we have forgotten about the we, look at the world we currently live in. And right now we are so skewed to me the individual, and I want more, and I'm against you because you're not a part of my tribe. We balance that by knowing that I'm alive. It is this incredibly precious gift. The odds that I had to beat just to be here. Have you ever stopped to think about the odds you had to beat just to be here? Think about this. Now, first of all, think about this. The little egg cell that would evolve into you eventually, it took form. It's about the size of, you know, it's an egg cell. It's tiny. but it took form during your mother's fifth week of gestation. So your mother, your grandmother's pregnant, right? And that little egg cell that would be your mother has now made it into the womb. And during the fifth week of being there, the little egg cell that would grow into you took form. It differentiated into the ovum. And so you, the little egg cell, witnessed the next eight months of your mother's gestation, your mother's birth, your mother's screaming, your mother's toddler years, your mother's learning to sing and laugh and play and learn geography and mathematics all the way through her puberty. And then, so she's born with some 400,000 egg cells in her two ovaries. And out of those 400,000 egg cells, approximately 500 of those egg cells are going to be the next follicular eruption month by month by month with her period. And your little egg cell, imagine you're hanging out in your little ovarian follicle and it's your turn and you're getting all prepped by the hormones of the body and you're going, oh my God, it's my ride, right? And you're this little egg cell. And then the hormones swoop by your little egg cell and it beams you out and the fembriae of The fallopian tubes gather you up and you begin your promenade, your fallopian promenade on the way road to your mother's sacred womb. And in that moment, your father was there for you. And you were one of the lucky ones. And you beat the odds of all those egg cells. You beat the odds. And how can that not be something that we celebrate the wonder of? The odds you had to beat just to be here. And then for the next nine months, that little egg cell is going to multiply its DNA, repackage that DNA. One cell becomes two, becomes four, becomes eight, becomes 16, becomes 50 trillion cells over the course of nine months. And you're multiplying egg cells at a rate of 250,000 new cells per second. Per second, not per minute, per second. You're this explosion and literally the energy of the universe is what is fueling all of this from happening. You are nothing other than mass and energy working together. And then there's you. And it's like, how on earth can I have mental health problems and not acknowledge and have awe for what we are? Oh, my gosh. And that was the gift that stroke gave to my life. And you can see I get a little excited about it.

Steven Bartlett: A little, yeah.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: We are so beautiful. We are so beautiful. We are perfect and whole and beautiful just the way we are. And it's like if we would become balanced as a society, we would—I truly believe, truly believe with every essence of my being that our number one job is to love one another. When we love one another and we support one another and we encourage one another, we all grow and we will benefit as humanity. And when that happens, we will really recognize we have fragile resources on this planet and we need to nurture the planet as a part of us because we have a symbiotic relationship with this planet.

[She chokes up]

Steven Bartlett: Why?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Because it's, you know, lots of conversations about are we going to make it or are we not going to make it? What is the future of humanity? Where do we go? How do we, how, what happens? We live in a threat every day of our existence being completely blown apart.

[Steven picks up a pair of glasses]

Steven Bartlett: Okay. What are these?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I would like for you to put those on.

[Steven puts on the glasses]

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay. Now.

Steven Bartlett: Okay.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: And I just want you to sit in that for like, oh, just a, you know, 30 seconds, 20 seconds. Actually, it's a pretty good look on you there. It's like Men in Black.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah. Exactly.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay. Okay. Now I would like for you to pull your right one. Do you see how it's got a little edge?

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Flip it up. It'll flip up.

[Steven flips up the right lens]

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah. And flip it all the way up. Now, what you're doing right now is you are bringing light in from the lateral portion of your visual field. What does that mean?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So close one eye and leave one eye open. Okay. That's a ball. Okay. Down the middle is an artificial line. Outside, the outside portion, that is called lateral. And the inside side is called medial. And so the lateral light is now coming in and that hits the medial side of your retina. And the retina is the back of the eyeball. Okay. So the light's coming in from the outside of my eye and it's hitting the inside of my eye. It's coming out from the outside of your visual field, it's hitting the medial internal side of your retina, and then those fibers are boom crossing over to the opposite hemisphere. Okay, I'll put a diagram on the screen for anyone.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So right now you are purposely stimulating your left hemisphere. So I just want you to just, how do you feel inside of your body? Just describe a few things to me. How do you feel?

Steven Bartlett: Feeling analytical about anything. Thinking about my back has got a little bit of a pain in it, but otherwise just very focused on doing this job as the host of The Diary of a CEO.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Beautiful. Just focus, which is what that left hemisphere should do. So go ahead and flip that down.

[Steven flips the lens down]

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay, yeah. And then just stay for like 20 seconds and let everything kind of equilibrate to whatever the darkness is that's in there. Yeah. All right, okay. Go ahead then and pull up the other side. It's a good look. It's like a little flag right there.

[Steven flips up the other lens]

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah. Okay. How do you feel?

Steven Bartlett: Weirdly, I felt more relaxed now than before.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: No, now you feel more relaxed?

Steven Bartlett: Now I feel more relaxed.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Your whole body just went calm. Yeah. What else? Tell me something more. Any aches or pains in your body?

Steven Bartlett: I just feel way more relaxed. I feel like I'm laying low on a sun lounger.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah, that's what the right brain feels like. So you're bringing less information in from that, the light of the lateral side of your visual field. It's hitting the medial portion of your retina and crossing into your right hemisphere. So what you're doing right now is you're sending light energy photons into the right hemisphere, and it is pushing through. And now this is an easy, easy way for people to control and choose how they want to be between their two hemispheres and really get to know, oh.

Steven Bartlett: How do I know this isn't just a placebo? Because I do feel way more relaxed. I can't be bothered to carry on this.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: But if you look at the anatomy, if you look at the anatomy, this is where light is coming in on the, you can't really see it on here, but that's going to be information from your eyeballs, which would be sitting right here, right there. This is fibers. You're wired for this. This is how you are wired. That's why everything about you. This isn't about a placebo having a behavioral impact. This is about the anatomy of the brain.

Steven Bartlett: Have they tested this in trials to see?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh, absolutely. In fact, they just did a brand new one at Harvard and showed it on fMRI.

Steven Bartlett: Have they done like a double blind control trial where they put these glasses on and then ask people how they feel?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, even more than that, they're manipulating the light source in different kinds of ways. I'm not involved with that work, but I know that Marty Teicher at Harvard as well as Frederick Schiffer. Now, Frederick Schiffer is a psychiatrist who has been doing psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for his whole career. And he would use these types of glasses with his psychiatric patients and would show the patient that there is a part of them that is less well and one side that is more ill. And so he would use the relationship between these two different characters, these two different personalities to find more peace and healing.

Steven Bartlett: I feel very, it's weird. I felt, I just lifted up the right side again and put the left side down. And I immediately felt, well, not immediately, but it took a little while, 20 seconds. I felt focused again. Is that just placebo? Am I making it?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: No, that's why you're why. That's why you can feel focus because of the cells that you are now stimulating. In the other hemisphere, it's not about focus. It doesn't care about focus. It cares about the big picture and your relationship to the big picture. So it's not like the brain is just this soup of cells. These cells are very specifically organized. Every ability you have is because you have brain cells that perform that function. And all you're doing right now is preferentially stimulating certain cells. It's kind of like, okay, I'm going to open my eyes and I'm going to experience vision. Well, that's not a placebo.

Steven Bartlett: If I want to be able to actively switch between these different parts, these four personalities in my brain so I can be most effective in a given situation, is there a practice where I can control my brain in that way?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: In your life, this is a practice. You don't just learn it and then go do it. This is a practice. You've got to say to yourself, first step, step number one, recognize in this moment, am I using my left thinking judgment, listening to this conversation? And what is my judgment? Is my judgment, yes, this makes sense. This is interesting. I want more. Or is this, oh, this is just crap. I just can't go there. I got to turn it off. Or, okay, I'll give you an example. Once you know who your four characters are, once you have really thought about them, studied about them, paid attention to what you're when they come out in you, what they feel like inside of your body. I can jump between all four in an instant because I know them so well.

Steven Bartlett: But is there a practice you have to say?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So this is what I do. Well, once you know the four of them and the only way to know them is to practice with them, get to know them. When do you get really unhappy? Who unhappies you? When do you want to growl at people? I wouldn't name a name.

Steven Bartlett: And don't name a name.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: But you know, see, you went straight into that character two part of you. That's the only part of you that holds grudges. Your right thinking doesn't care about that. It doesn't even know about that because that's in the past. So here's the key. Step number one, observe yourself. When am I being a character one? When am I at work? When am I speaking and organizing and making a to-do list? And when do I like to be the boss? And when do I like to control? People, places, things, and time. And all of that. When am I doing that? Well, you know that part of yourself very well. He's probably called Steven. The part of you that is not very happy. You know, your parents probably know this part of you. Your girlfriend definitely knows this part of you. Right?

Steven Bartlett: Yes.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay. When are you playful? What does it feel like? It feels completely different than when you're at work or when you're not happy. When are you at play? And if you're not at play much, then you might want to give yourself a little bit more play. So I was working with a group of physicians because physicians are very busy people. And right now, the physician is a very high level of suicide. So I care passionately about this population because they're not finding any peace. Because society expects them to be left thinking all the time. They're supposed to be the authority and they can't have any mental health issues. Because they're the ones we go to for mental health issues. So all they can do, they don't have time. They are busy, busy, busy, and they're not very happy about it. And our system is a mess. So they're having to deal with that. So I was working with a group and I said, okay, I want you to take a chalk outside of the ER room and I want you to draw a hopscotch. And what happened was all these doctors in and out and these medical professionals were hopscotching in and hopscotching out. And that, just that helped them bring their glee back just for a moment, just for an instant. So this is the glee and it's exciting and it's fun. And it's like, figure out what brings you joy and do that. And know, and this is why it really helps to know this because if you're gonna say, okay, I'm gonna go play basketball. I come from Indiana, everybody plays basketball. I'm gonna go play basketball and I'm gonna go do it for 20 minutes. And my character one is over here saying, we don't have time for you to go shoot some hoops, girl. We got business to take care of. We're on a deadline. And little character three comes in and says, I will refresh you. I will be your pause. I will refuel your spirit. I take the stress away from that subject. I release. I have all kinds of endorphins and excitement stuff going on. And then I go back and I do such a more creative and open job because I made space instead of just the drive, drive, drive, drive, do, do, do, linear, linear, linear. The beauty of being a human is you have all four parts of this brain. This is our design. But we are functioning with only one online as conscious. Imagine, imagine if you could say in this instant, I want to, I want to, I want to feel as though, just feel as though whatever your spiritual beliefs or your beliefs about a higher power, whatever, just call it the universe because we know there's a bunch of rocks spinning around in space and we're on one of them hanging on for life, just being human, right? So that's all happening. So oh my gosh I can say thank you to all those rocks for being in the positions they're in so that we're still here and I can feel this deep sense of gratitude and as soon as I feel that gratitude and that oh oh my god I existed all and it could be over like that but then it's over but right now it's a party life can be play.

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Steven Bartlett: How long do you think emotions are supposed to last?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: 90 seconds. From the moment you think a thought, we only do three things inside of our brain at any moment in time. We think thoughts, we feel emotions, and we run physiological loops to what we're thinking and feeling. So let's say I'm going to think a thought like you did. I said, think of somebody you're not happy with. And you went and you thought about it and then you felt it and we could see it in your body. So you thought the thought, oh, that's the person, I'm mad at them. And then it's like, oh, I'm really mad at them. You can see, you feel, I'm really mad at them. And then you either act on it or you don't act on it. But if you simply observe it, it will loop right through just like a muscle reflex. It's an emotional reflex, less than 90 seconds, which means, and everybody's saying, oh, I can stay mad for a whole lot longer than 90 seconds. But what you're doing then is you're rethinking the thoughts that's re-stimulating the emotional loop, re-stimulating the physiological response. And it just goes on forever.

Steven Bartlett: When you feel that emotion, is there a way to, is there a strategy for making sure that you don't act upon it or you don't re-loop?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, I enjoy it.

Steven Bartlett: You enjoy the emotion?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I enjoy it.

Steven Bartlett: Even if you're angry?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Even if I'm angry. Thank God I'm capable. I am wired to be mad. I am wired to be angry. I'm wired to push things away and say, that is not okay. I get big, I get ugly, I make myself heard because that's a healthy boundary I'm going to establish. So I celebrate the fact that I'm capable of anger. I love that I can be sad. I'm glad that I can grieve. Oh my God. Grief is this powerful emotion that can consume us, totally envelop us, take us to our knees. And it's like I have a friend right now who's about ready to pass away. Beautiful, beautiful person. She's been great, wonderful friend in my life. I love her and I will celebrate every time the wave of emotion hits me because that's how much I loved her. That's how much I loved her. I celebrate that I'm capable of being taken to the floor in that kind of pain and just weep my whole soul. I mean, I'm wired for this. This is life. Why do I want to just put myself in a little box and say, I don't want to have grief. I don't want to have pain. I don't want to be mad. I don't want to do this. I want to be a robot. I don't want to be a robot. I want to be a whole human with a whole brain. I want all of it. It's delicious. Oh, my gosh. And it lasts this long, and then it's gone. Mmm. Thank you.

Steven Bartlett: And I'm guessing your headache feels a little better. Why did you say thank you?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Because it's so rare that people will really connect with another human being for anything more than like three seconds and then I'm uncomfortable and I can't do that anymore, love. But we're here to love one another. You're the gift of my life. People on this planet are the gift of my life. We are the gift of your life. And if we are constantly judging each other negatively and pushing each other away and killing each other, we are violent against each other. And it's like, oh my gosh, we are so off track of what we could be as whole breed living. I truly believe the next step for our evolution is waking up the whole brain. And if we wake up our whole brain, the game is changed. And that becomes no. It's not okay for us to create war. It is not okay for us to create hate. It is not okay for us to make that division anymore. That is not what we respect and that is not what we want as humanity. We want to be whole. We want to be the next level. We want to feel safe with each other.

Steven Bartlett: Are you hopeful?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Completely, 100%. That doesn't mean we couldn't be gone in an instant, but absolutely. That's the beauty of the right hemisphere is it is hope. It's possibility. And that's why when you talk to me about AI, yes, I think a lot about AI. AI is, wow, I listen to your podcast. There's a whole lot of, wow, and I don't have that. And this is why.

Steven Bartlett: What was that, sorry?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: You know, it's hard. It's hard. You've had some really difficult conversations about, you know, the reality of the potential dangers. But here's why that doesn't bother me. Because I have a whole brain. And my whole brain says, yes, that is that. And that is going on. And that is scary. And I think about it through the perspective of a neuroanatomist. So I see the internet is like this higher level of consciousness that we're feeding ourselves into and everybody's plugged in. And now we're creating robots and consciousnesses that will think independent of us. So we're essentially creating an other that we cannot control. Well, I can't control who's got those nuclear codes. So from my perspective, I'm just glad I wake up every day and it's like, oh, I get another great day. And it's like, oh, possibilities.

Steven Bartlett: So have you always been like this?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: No, this really came with a stroke. This so much came with a stroke because I lost all of the box. I lost the box, the box, the box of thinking this is right. This is wrong. This is the way we're going to do it. I value money. I was climbing the Harvard ladder. You know, I was a little girl from Indiana. I was climbing the Harvard ladder. I mean, that was pretty big deal to a little girl and her family. And so I was climbing the Harvard ladder and then bam, that was all gone. And when that was all gone, what I gained was connection, heart, time, possibility. My business perspective has shifted in that I don't reach out to people. I don't solicit. I don't hustle. I don't need to. Because if I'm working, great. I love to work. I love my work. It's yummy. I mean, it's like, how can I not? But I love to paddleboard. I live half of a life, have my time on a boat out in a beautiful cove, pretty much in isolation with the bear and the deer and the fish and the bobcat. I live in nature. I live the life I want to live. And then I get off the boat and I come and visit people and we talk or I go and I do whatever it is I'm doing.

Steven Bartlett: Had you not had this stroke, how different do you think your life would look?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh, I'd be probably a professor of neuroanatomy at Harvard Medical School, teaching and performing research, doing that thing. That was my dream.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think you'd be happier or less happy?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh, no. I'm so glad I had that stroke. I am so glad I had the stroke. It set me free. It set me free. Having the stroke set me free from having to live a life based on other people's expectations about what my life should be.

Steven Bartlett: Because it changed something in your brain?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Because that went totally offline and it wasn't going to be a choice anymore.

Steven Bartlett: Is it still offline?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: No. So it went offline, which allowed you to focus on other things. Think about the brain and think about your consciousness and think about you have four parts of you and all four parts are always running and they're kind of vying for the microphone. Who's going to talk in this moment, right? Who's going to think what? Who's going to perform what? Who's going to do what? So we have these whole brains. And then imagine that you lose your business sense. You lose that guy. Character one. Character one falls off the planet. Which is the factual part, the working part. So that would leave me with just the sort of emotional part and the present part and the wisdom.

Steven Bartlett: Yes.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: So do you miss it?

Steven Bartlett: Well, it's gone.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Your ego has pretty much dissolved because that's a part of it. But you might be angry. You might be angry because I was doing so well and I was living a life and I liked those facts and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I wanted to do more business and I wanted to do more businesses. And you are that guy. I mean, you are so diverse in your business. You are so good at being character one. But let's say he goes offline. What do you have left? So my character went offline. Would you still value? Would you have value? What value would you have if you weren't him? Tell me.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah. I think my girlfriend would appreciate me still. My dog would probably appreciate me. Maybe more because you'd probably spend a little more time with it.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yeah, probably, yeah.

Steven Bartlett: My girlfriend would definitely appreciate me more.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because you'd have time. You wouldn't be running that wheel. You'd be a different part of you. And then if you can master and help heal your pain from the past or your disgruntled self that, well, you know, I had this problem and now I can't use my left arm. And so I'm going to be a miserable human being the rest of my life because my left arm doesn't work anymore.

Steven Bartlett: How do we do that? How do we heal our trauma from the past, from a neurological perspective?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, I think what we do is we recognize, first of all, the question, everybody wants to heal it. So the way to heal it is not to get rid of it. I cannot get rid of my trauma from the past. My pain from the past is real and it is mine and it is expansive and it is mine and everybody has their pain from the past, their trauma. We all have trauma. So what do I do with that trauma? Do I let that trauma just fester in that character two part of my brain and then I just look at everyone else who's not like me now and say, well, you didn't have any trauma. You know, you're better off than I am. You know, I start making a negative, hostile judgment about, well, this is my trauma and I want to protect it. The purpose of trauma is to say to you, you're a biological creature. You're in the present moment. You're a real human being. You have a life. My life, part of my life is my trauma. And I will bounce from trauma to trauma to trauma to trauma. And if I look at the trauma and say, this is a horrible thing, well, maybe it was a horrible thing. And maybe that was 30 years ago, and that was a horrible thing. And the more you think about it and you root into it, and the more often we run a circuit, the more that circuit stronger that gets and begins to run on automatic. And so now I'm always worrying about, oh, my God, am I going to have more trauma? And I put all my energy into that trauma. Well, what am I doing? It's just the same as if I'm just a workaholic and doing nothing but character one. And so the power of whole brain living is to know that I have four parts of me. And that trauma is important information. And let's say I was attacked or I was raped or I had a horrible experience with a person. And now in the future, whenever I see a person that looks remotely like that, I knee jerk away from that because I perceive myself from my trauma that that's not safe. So I push it away. That is an appropriate response. But then I say, oh, but this is actually a different person. And I can open up my right hemisphere and with curiosity look at this new person and say, well, you might look like somebody who hurt me many years ago, but you're not that person. Who are you? And make a connection in the present. So the trauma is supposed to be information. We get in trouble when we turn it into a lifestyle. So how do I heal that? I acknowledge it. I value it. I say thank you to it. I acknowledge its purpose and I pull my energy into the other parts of my brain. My character four, Queen Toad, can come in and self-soothe me and hold me. And what would character four say to the trauma? You're loved. You're okay. Thank you. Thank you for this information. Thank you. And hold it. Well, trauma needs to be heard. It needs to be held and it needs to be heard. And then it can, like transform itself into the next level of, oh, okay, I'm okay even though I had that trauma. Even though I had this stroke that all but killed me, I'm not resentful. Why would I be resentful? It's my life. This happened to be the life story of me. We all have a life story. So the question is how much energy am I going to put into that and hold myself back when I have all these other incredible possibilities. And if I was hurt or I was raped, then I can actually, if I want to take that anger because I am madder than hell about it, then I can advocate for other people to help women get self-defense courses so that we can actually protect ourselves. I mean, I can turn it into something else. I can make lemonade out of lemons. We all can. We're wired for that.

Steven Bartlett: You've talked a lot about how you think about the brain from a cellular perspective and how we keep it healthy from a cellular perspective. So I wanted to get some of your advice on lifestyle choices that I should be making to have an optimally healthy brain at the cellular level.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Number one, sleep. Sleep is everything. Sleep, sleep, sleep. These are billions, 800 billion cells that are eating and creating waste for you to have a consciousness in every instant. Imagine the number of cells it takes for you to just look at me and have a relationship in this moment with me. I mean, your brain is working hard. So it's eating, it's creating waste. Go to sleep. Sleep should be a priority. And if you sleep, then the microglia can come out and then all the garbage and waste can get cleaned up. The waste gets pushed away. And you wake up crisp and fresh the next day because your brain cells have been taken care of. What are you feeding them? If you are feeding them preservatives, you are preserving them. Oh my gosh, pay attention to what you're consuming. Fresh fruits, fresh vegetables. Try to do it if, you know, I know we exist in a world where not everybody can eat organic, but boy, pesticides are poison. So paying attention to what we are consuming. How much sugar are we eating? Sugar is just not a healthy choice, no matter what. Now, I love chocolate and I'm going to eat chocolate. It's my vice. I'm going to do it anyway. Dark chocolate, it's a bean, it's a vegetable. Somebody said that to me once and I believed him. Okay, so what are you eating? Movement. You have to move your body. You are an organism. So many of us think that, especially if we're in that character one left thinking brain, my body is designed to move my left, my brain around. No, you are an organism. So finding ways to get yourself into the different characters is great for you. If you can't get into your body, name for me a song, if you would, that as soon as you start in on it, your body goes.

Steven Bartlett: Well, get your beat going.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Give me one.

Steven Bartlett: Why did I think of Giggs' "Walking the Hardest"?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Then do it.

Steven Bartlett: No, I can't do it.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Yes, you can do it.

Steven Bartlett: I was thinking of because it was playing outside before we started recording. I was thinking of Olivia Dean's new song "Man I Need," but I can't sit here and sing "Man I Need."

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well then don't sing it.

Steven Bartlett: So for me exactly, but that was forced. Now can you do it like you mean it? We ought to put the glasses back on you and see what happens.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Okay, for me I'm disco era. Want some hot stuff baby? This I cannot not do this. I become my body, all of me. It's like dance like nobody's watching. That's what character three is all about.

Steven Bartlett: So why is that important for a healthy brain?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh my gosh, it's the break. It's the pause. It's the fun. It's the joy. It's the present moment connection. What is my life going to be like if I don't have any of those things I just listed? So exercise, quality sleep, nutrition. Hydration. Hydration. Hydration.

Steven Bartlett: Why is that so important?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh my God. Your body is nothing but cells connected to one another. And cells are filled with water and the space between them is filled with water. And it's a delicate balance of what atoms and molecules are inside the cells versus outside the cells. But you're just a big liquid ball. Excuse me. Yes, you are. I said it and I meant it. That's what you are. You are a fleshy ball of you. That's it. Water. You need to be hydrated. Now, you can't overhydrate. If we overhydrate, then we're distilling what's going on in those populations of in the cell or extracellular matrix. So don't just, you know, drink your weight in water every day, but you have to stay hydrated.

Steven Bartlett: What about learning? Is it good for the brain?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Oh, yes. Yeah, it's wonderful. When I learn, let's say I'm going to learn to do a sport. So, and let's say that sport's going to be tennis. Yeah. And so I'm going to go to my character one and character one is going to say, okay, this is how you hold the racket. And, um, and this is how you hold your body. And this is where you, how you're going to swing that and try that. And so left hemisphere comes in and gives you the plan and it gives you the details and you, you do that. And then, uh, at some point you've done it enough that now you're just going to start whacking a ball, right?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Whacking a ball. And you're going to practice it over and over again. And then it gets like really fun. And then it's back in your body. And now we're back to girls just want to have fun. We're back into character three.

Steven Bartlett: Well, we know alcohol is bad.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Well, you're drunk because your cells are drunk. Just think about it. If I'm going to consume alcohol, it's going to suck the water out of those cells. They're going to be dehydrated and I'm going to end up with a headache. And when they get fragile because the membrane has been abused over and over, eventually they tend to cremate and blow up and that's the end of those cells. So alcohol is not good.

Addiction is... we exist in a society where the left hemisphere, especially character two, where our cravings and addictions are, is if I'm not happy because I'm not living a fulfilled life because I'm on YouTube or I'm watching social media and all these people are getting all these clicks and I'm not getting all these clicks and I'm not living this lavish life that these other people are living, then I'm down on me and I'm just not very happy. I'm going to make poor choices because that is what that part of us is designed to do.

So I say take responsibility for the energy you bring into a room. If you pay attention to who walks in and what part of you walks in and you come in as a whole person, now I am completely available to master the moment, whatever the moment is.

Steven Bartlett: Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, if you had a closing message for my audience, something that maybe a subject we've missed or something that you think is the most important thing to close upon, what would it be?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Your life is worth 30 seconds. If you're in your car and you're getting ready to pull out between those two cars that are coming, your life is worth 30 seconds. Take a breath, take a pause and save your own life. It has changed my life. As soon as somebody said to me, "Jill, isn't your life worth 30 seconds?" I thought to myself, oh my gosh, actually it is. And what does that mean? It means just relax. It means I'm not going to try to squeeze myself into boxes where I maybe don't fit or belong. I'm going to pause.

Steven Bartlett: Physically, you're talking about physical? So seriously, if you're driving... so you're saying slow down. Slow down. 30 seconds, your life is worth 30 seconds. Be conscious about it.

Thank you. Very fascinating, incredibly fascinating. You have a remarkable energy and you have a wonderful way of reminding me of the... I guess transitioning me from the working, factual part of my brain to being more present in the moment. And I imagine you've done that for everybody that's listened today. There's a real pureness to you that I wonder if many of us might have just lost along the way somehow. So thank you so much for being who you are. Your journeys are unbelievably incredible, unbelievably inspiring. And the fact that you've been so centered on gratitude and an appreciation for life despite all that you've been through is a remarkable thing.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast. Alaska Sleeves left a question for the next guest, not knowing who it's for. And the question left for you is: what do you do when your life doesn't turn out the way that you had hoped?

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: I think the universe, that option wasn't for me. Next. So easy. Thank you to that right hemisphere consciousness that connected to the universe with all those atoms and molecules and big old rocks floating around. That wasn't meant for me. Something better is on its way. Or I'm going to go paddleboard. I'm perfectly good with that.

Steven Bartlett: Thank you so much.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Thank you.

[End of interview]

Steven Bartlett: If there's anything we need, it is connection, especially in the world we're living in today. And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards. Because on this show, when I sit here with my guests and have those deep, intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again. We feel deeply connected to each other. At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest and we've turned them into these conversation cards. And we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting. And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards. This is the brand new edition. And for the first time ever, I've added to the pack this gold card which is an exclusive question from me. But I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards. So if you want them, join the waitlist now and you'll get early access when they get released. Head to the link in the description below.

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