Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old brain scientist when she experienced a massive stroke to her left hemisphere in 1996. Remarkably, after years of intensive rehab, she fully recovered, and has written My Stroke of Insight to provide, well, insight, into the experience of both the stroke itself as well as the recovery.
The opening pages are slow going; even after a half-dozen neuroscience reads, I still find the detailing of neural activity centers dense and often dry. However, once Taylor transitions from the science to the memoir (i.e., what it felt like to have the stroke and how she recovered), my reading enjoyment rapidly increased. There was not much here that I found terribly new (a signal to me that perhaps I'm free to lay off the neuroscience, at least until the next big breakthrough in the understanding of the brain), but Taylor did reinforce that the traditionally-held limits on brain plasticity are only that - traditionally-held limits, and that her own brain plasticity far exceeded what she might have expected...and as a 37-year-old.
I also appreciated her articulation of the types of tasks that came more easily versus those that were a sapped her strength and energy. The closing chapters focused primarily on aspects of mindfulness, and I admit to skimming those in the same way that I skimmed the opening neuroscience. This is not a bad book by any means, but it is one that a personal interest in the subject matter is, IMHO, crucial to fully appreciating.
Three-and-a-half stars.
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