I read a very interesting interview with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist and spokeswoman for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, who had a stroke that damaged her left hemisphere. For a period she could not walk, talk, read, write, or remember many of the incidents of her life. She underwent major brain surgery to remove a golf-ball-sized clot in her brain’s left hemisphere. She describes her experiences in the book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.
In the book she draws attention to brain patterns or circuity, and states that we have much greater choice in the circuits we run than we think we have. For example when we get sad or angry or fearful she says we have a choice - to run with that circuity or to observe it. It can be easier to engage the circuitry and then it becomes us. We identify with the emotion - I am my anger, I am my sadness, I am my fear.
However, there is another approach which is to say - I am in this moment running this circuitry; is this the circuitry I really want to run? And how long am I going to run it? She states that we do have a real choice on which way we want to go. When angry we can be aware of the process of anger and see it as the brain working in a certain way, or as she says "I’m running my anger circuitry, I can feel what this is like in my body". Then, she believes, we have a choice if we want to stay with it or not.
She also writes about how we can develop this capacity to observe our brain circuity. I think the most important thing is to consciously choose to bring your mind to the present moment. How do you do that? You decide that you’re going to see what your eyes are looking at; you bring your consciousness to the present moment. When you are going up the stairs, you look at the steps, you look at the handrail. Most of us unconsciously climb the steps, never think about the steps, can’t even say what the color of the carpet is, if there is a carpet, because we’re somewhere else.
Pay attention to the present moment. Bring your mind, bring your ears to the present moment, start savoring the awareness of the information you perceive in the present moment, and let that grow. And it’s like with any circuitry: the more you concentrate on it and experience it, the more it will develop itself.
The full interview can be found in Spirituality and Health, May/June 2009
