Book Review: Stroke of Insight
By Kathy Boyd
The KIHC book club celebrated its first anniversary by reading and discussing My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. We agree that it is an extremely hopeful, comforting and inspiring book.
Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist, suffered a stroke in her mid thirties. Her book examines her pre and post stroke life, her astounding step by step description of the stroke itself, her chronicle of the arduous path to recovery, and a discussion of the workings of our brain. The book is simply written and a rather quick read, yet it is chock full of amazing information.
We appreciated her description of how the brain works. She made clear the differences in left and right brain hemispheres and the completely different ways that the two process information. She demonstrates that the brain’s different ways of processing give us a “complete” picture of the sensations that our bodies experience. She reminds us that we are energy beings, processing energy input, with our miraculous brains making “sense” of it all.
