Open Thread: Having A Stroke Feels Blissful

Posted on April 3, 2008 by Ampersand

Please use this thread to say whatever you’d like to say, or to share any links you’d like to share. Self-linking is encouraged.

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As a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor has always known more about brains than most people. But when a brain hemorrhage triggered her own stroke, she suddenly had a front-row seat on the deterioration of the brain.

Dr. Taylor recounts the details of her stroke and the amazing insights she gained from it in a riveting 18-minute video of her speech at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in Monterey, Calif., last month. Her fascinating lecture includes a detailed explanation of the differences between the left and right sides of the brain, complete with an incredibly cool prop — a real human brain.

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19 Responses to Open Thread: Having A Stroke Feels Blissful

  1. Tapetum says:
    April 3, 2008 at 5:48 am

    I love the TED videos.

  2. MissRobyn says:
    April 3, 2008 at 7:23 am

    http://notesfromtheunderwhelmed.blogspot.com/2008/03/im-on-oprah-bitches.html

    I was on Oprah for being an evil smoker. And it was kind of hilarious.

  3. Zak Frinks says:
    April 3, 2008 at 9:55 am

    Your blog has blown me away. Wonderful! It really is superb. I love the video.
    http://transubstantiation.wordpress.com/
    Zak

  4. Daisy says:
    April 3, 2008 at 11:32 am

    Interesting! My mother was in a great mood after her stroke. It actually improved her mood 5000% –seriously. It made me re-evaluate a lot.

    Nothing much here, except some activists got arrested for trying to SAVE THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS FROM EVIL GREEDHEAD MOFOS!!!!! (Truthfully? I don’t think they/we will succeed, but we’re all gonna go down fighting, I hope.)

  5. Acheman says:
    April 3, 2008 at 1:09 pm

    Nice video, but I thought it was a shame she framed it in terms of the simplistic, basically untrue left brain vs right brain story.

  6. Daran says:
    April 4, 2008 at 12:36 am

    Ampersand (quoting me:)

    I’ve gotten to know Daisy of Our Descent quite well, since she became a regular commenter at FCB, and I have yet to find a substantive difference between her views and mine on gender issues. Yet she is a feminist in good standing with the rest of the blogospheric movement, while I get vilified. Why is that?

    Please, nobody answer that question. Or if you want it discussed (Daran or anyone else), please take it to an open thread. Thanks.

    The question was rhetorical. However anyone is, of course, welcome to take it to FCB as well.

    Dianne (quoting me):

    I don’t care whether my comments are feminist or not. I say what I think, regardless of what labels other people choose to pin on me.

    Good. But don’t worry too much, I’m always annoying people by labelling them in ways that I find consistent with their positions, even if not with their self-images. For example, Robert is pro-choice because, even though he hates abortion and is disgusted by it, he doesn’t want to illegalize it. Plus I probably should have put a sarcasm tag on.

    I’m neither annoyed nor worried. What I find irritating is when people attribute views or attitudes to me that I do not hold, based upon the labels they or other people pin on me. That doesn’t strike me as a likely outcome of your remark.

  7. Robert says:
    April 6, 2008 at 11:31 am

    Progressives constantly preach the corruption of the human soul, but no one ever offers sound methods for reversing inherent human selfishness.

    Jesus did, among others. They’re just DIFFICULT methods. And they don’t work for the authoritarians who so often hijack progressive movements, so they often aren’t in vogue in those circles.

  8. Ampersand says:
    April 6, 2008 at 11:32 am

    How would you contrast that with the authoritarians who have hijacked the conservative movement?

    Edited to add: For that matter, what progressive leaders are you considering authoritarian, specifically? Barack Obama? Katha Pollitt? Howard Zinn? Angela Davis?

  9. Robert says:
    April 6, 2008 at 11:32 am

    Our authoritarians don’t kill huge fractions of their own population in an attempt to impose the ideological agenda.

  10. Ampersand says:
    April 6, 2008 at 11:33 am

    I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about, Robert. Specifically, who are the authoritarians in the progressive movement who have killed huge fractions of their own populations in order to impose idealogical agendas?

  11. Robert says:
    April 6, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    Stalin? Mao? Chavez? Castro?

    (Well, in fairness, Chavez hasn’t gotten around to killing huge numbers yet, and probably won’t be allowed to by his neighbors. And Castro was more of a gulag builder than a death camp builder.)

  12. Dianne says:
    April 6, 2008 at 1:28 pm

    Our authoritarians don’t kill huge fractions of their own population in an attempt to impose the ideological agenda.

    Er? Hitler. Pinochet. What’s-his-name the S Vietnamese leader under the US. I guess I can’t add Bush since you specified their own populations and he’s only killed hundreds of thousands to millions of Iraqis and Afghanis. Evil leaders come in all ideological flavors.

  13. Ampersand says:
    April 6, 2008 at 1:43 pm

    Stalin and Mao? Really?

    Just goes to show, conservatives really are unable to fashion a reasonable, logical argument about anything. (ETA: Yes, that was unfair, but I don’t think Robert’s argument merited a fair response.)

    Edited to add: “Leader of a communist dictatorship” does not equal “progressive leader.”

  14. Robert says:
    April 6, 2008 at 2:48 pm

    They aren’t progressive leaders. Read. They’re authoritarians who hijacked progressive movements. Did Stalin take over a right-wing enterprise? No. He took over a progressive one.

  15. Robert says:
    April 6, 2008 at 10:05 pm

    Oh, and I need to apologize for and withdraw the “read” crack. Bad day here. Nothing to do with you, but I took it out here. My bad. Sorry.

  16. Ampersand says:
    April 7, 2008 at 9:45 am

    Apology accepted, thanks.

    If your point is that all movements can, in theory, be hijacked by authoritarian dictators, I agree, but I’m not sure what the utility of the point is, or why you brought it up.

    If your point is that progressive movements, but not right-wing movements, can be hijacked by authoritarian dictators, then I can see why you brought it up, but I don’t think it’s an accurate point.

  17. Robert says:
    April 7, 2008 at 12:18 pm

    Reversing human selfishness is usually something that progressive movements have to consider; right-wing movements either use or ignore human selfishness, or assume it as part of an unchangeable background. That’s why “progressives” came into it. See my comment 7.

  18. nobody.really says:
    April 7, 2008 at 12:22 pm

    A propos to this, check out The Authoritarians, which should have been named Dictators and the Women (and Men) who Love Them. Here’s an excerpt from Chap. 1:

    Right-Wing and Left-Wing Authoritarian Followers

    Authoritarian followers usually support the established authorities in their society, such as government officials and traditional religious leaders. Such people have historically been the “proper” authorities in life, the time-honored, entitled, customary leaders, and that means a lot to most authoritarians. Psychologically these followers have personalities featuring:

    1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society;
    2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
    3) a high level of conventionalism.

    Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these followers rightwing authoritarians. I’m using the word “right” in one of its earliest meanings, for in Old English “riht”(pronounced “writ”) as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct, doing what the authorities said. (And when someone did the lawful thing back then, maybe the authorities said, with a John Wayne drawl, “You got that riht, pilgrim!”)

    In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, so you can call them “right-wingers” both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Rightwing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey.

    You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted their chosen authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao. Happily they spent most of their time fighting with each other, as lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’s Front of Judea devotes most of its energy to battling, not the Romans, but the Judean People’s Front. But the left-wing authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers now to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the United States for the past three decades.

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