YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

lines on the record: 62
first: 2025-04-09
most recent: 2025-04-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A stroke of insight. Yeah, no, if I could go back that day and not do it again, I would say, no, if I could choose to have it, I would choose to have it. I have learned so much. I have grown so much as a human being, and I just really feel like I have identified my purpose.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my friends tell me I'm much more fun. I have more time for people. I'm more compassionate. I'm more generous of spirit. I think those are improvements.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For years, they keep rethinking the same thought that restimulates that emotional circuitry and they rerun the loop. I hook right back into that hostility, and I'm going to run it again. And I can stay angry, people can stay angry for days and weeks and years. It's phenomenal. Just because they're choosing either consciously or unconsciously, they're choosing to rerun the loops, the circuitry.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where do you focus your attention and pay attention to how things feel in your body? Because you know what you feel like in your body when you get angry. And you have a choice when you get angry of either being angry or of pain attention to what it feels like in your body when you are angry, and when you have that kind of physiological response, when you get angry, it only takes ninety seconds. It takes ninety seconds from the moment that you feel that trigger happen and you feel yourself starting to get angry for the chemicals to flush through your body and then flush completely out of you. 90 seconds is all. So if you start feeling next time Oprah, next time you start feeling yourself getting angry, I want you to look at your watch.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allow me time because my mind is wounded. I have slowed way down in my ability to communicate. Be patient with me. Don't finish all of my sentences for me either because I need to be able to go through that hunt and process. And if you ask a question and then answer it yourself, I'm left out of the loop and I learn that you don't really care to get any information from me, so I stop trying.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just talk. And did you ever wonder when you're really mad and you're yelling at yourself? Did you ever wonder who's doing the yelling and who you're yelling at? Yeah, I think it's the left hemisphere brain chatter, yelling at that right hemisphere which isn't always doing things absolutely to the detail that left hemisphere would like because it doesn't care about any of this stuff.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pay attention to what you're saying to yourself and take some responsibility for that voice. I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not going to.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I believe 100% that anybody can. I think it's that attitude of gratitude. Do you know what it feels like inside of your body when you're feeling grateful? You're just feeling this celebration of life and, oh my gosh, how fortunate it is for me to be on the planet, to have this form. And who knows what the future is going to bring and who knows what the past has brought. It doesn't matter. All I have is right now, and I'm celebrative, that gratitude. And that to me is the power of now.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really that easy. And that doesn't mean you have to work, work, work real hard to do that. Just take responsibility for the thoughts that you're thinking and allow yourself to move yourself into the circuitry that brings you peace.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we do it? Pay attention to what you're thinking. Pay attention to what you're thinking and you are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are created by a tiny, tiny little group of cells about the size of a peanut sitting in your left hemisphere and many of us let that little peanut rule our lives and you have to recognize that it's just a group of cells that is designed to tell stories so that we feel safe in the external world. You are not your thoughts. So pay attention to what you're thinking and then decide if those are thoughts that are creating the kind of life that you want created. And if it's not, then change your thoughts.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's go to the GGP. The Gigi thing. I mean, you think about the power between the mother, daughter, relationship. And if anybody's going to have any power in my life, it's going to be my mother. Right. Well, I didn't even know what a mother was, much less who my mother was. And I really like this new entity, but she had none of her own power, which meant she couldn't coax me into doing anything the way that she used to be able to because the game was different now. I changed the rules. Oh my God. I took away her power. She's so free. That's the beauty of it. Pay attention to what's going on in your own brain and you take responsibility for the circuitry you're running, you make the rules of a new game. And as soon as you change the way you interact with other people, the game has changed. It demands change to happen. Wow. Wow.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Exactly. But you had the ability to consciously think taxes and have that experience. You have the ability to focus your mind on what you want to focus it on. Okay, so let's go to the GP. So when you don't think about it anymore, it doesn't exist.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I didn't like the way it felt in my body, so I chose not to run that circuitry. It's circuitry. It's all about circuitry. For example, you can think something that makes you feel sadness, and sadness has a physiological feeling in your body. And your throat tightens and things happen inside of you physiologically. I didn't like the way that felt. So I just decided that wasn't circuitry that I was going to run anymore. So I said no to the circuitry. I said, no. I just, you know, you have to remember that your brain's just a bunch of cells. And I look at the cells as a bunch of little children. And some little children I want to play with. And there are other little children who I don't really like what they do and I'm going to say I don't want to go there. Exactly. Anybody can do that.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what an opportunity. I mean, because think about it, I got lost all my emotional baggage on top of it. I lost all my pain. I lost any suffering I'd ever had. I lost all those memories. I lost it all and I got to start fresh at the age of 37”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I got reborn essentially, if you will, and start from scratch, and here you go. What are you going to do with your second life? Yeah.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After about seven or eight or nine years, yeah, at that point, it was a good eight or nine years before I remembered items from my past that I know no one had taught me But it took many, many, many, many years.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked about it. My mom and my friends, my family, we recognized that we had to let the person whom I had been go because I wasn't her anymore. I didn't have any of her recollection of her life. I had none of her knowledge. I had none of her education. I had none of her memories.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's who you are, that's an identification for you. Because that person died in my mind. And so in the absence of her, I was going to be somebody new and I couldn't be held to whom she had been because she would have been a Harvard brain scientist and I couldn't hold myself to that. I had a big hole in my head. So she was gone and we grieved her. We mourned the loss of her, but she was gone.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was a long way off. You still didn't have an identification with. No, no, it was two and a half weeks before the brain chatter started to come back. And it was like a slate that had been wiped clean. And so I didn't remember all of my all of my science was gone. I had to learn to read from scratch. I had to learn to write from scratch. I had to learn all my science. I still had the picture. The right hemisphere thinks in pictures. Yeah. So, as the left hemisphere and the brain became more normalized again from the swelling, the pictures were there. So I had to learn language again, which meant I had to learn what my name was again. But even when”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the surgery, they drill three holes, take a blob of bone out of my head, sucked out a blood clot the size of a golf ball, put the bone back on, and said, go home and heal. Essentially, it's going to be two years before we know anything. And when I woke up later that day, there was a brightness. I felt bright again. I had been just totally flat affected, just dull, just dull. Happy, but dull. And once that blood clot was gone, I felt like, okay, my spirit, the energy of me, I feel like I can be enthusiastic about life again. So it doesn't matter. Whatever happens now doesn't matter because I feel like I'm me again.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even though I'm drooling, even though I have no hygiene care, I have no ability to take care of myself. Somebody's feeding me. It didn't matter. What mattered was I still had life and I was still capable of honoring my own life. I was perfect and whole and beautiful, just the way that I was. That was my perception.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Family members You're projecting all your fears of what you think it would be like to be in my shoes, but you're not in my shoes.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's beautiful, it was beautiful, it was tranquil and peaceful, and I felt so whole and so enormous. And I would sit on my couch with this goofy grin on my face because I was alive.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Silent, no brain chatter, no brain chatter telling me I am Jill Bolty Taylor, that I am a neuronatomist. These are my credentials. Or I need to do this.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a doctor. I live in this place. I own these things. None of that. I sat in an absolutely silent mind for the two and a half weeks before surgery and then up to two and a half weeks after surgery.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went back to your home. No, not in the beginning. Not in the beginning. I was just absolutely exhausted. So when I got home, it was like, I just wanted to go to bed and hibernate. I just needed to recover my mind.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The excitement's going on. Something's going on. Something's coming. So this woman walks in the door and she walks to the side of the bed, picks up the sheet, crawls in bed with me, wraps her arms around me, and starts to rock me like I'm her baby again. And here I am going Oh this is what a GG is. Oh, you didn't recognize her as your mother and didn't know what a mother was. No, no. Had no idea. All I knew was this very loving, kind, generous of spirit woman came in, wrapped herself around me, and just took ownership of loving me. And that was the new beginning. So one day I had been her Harvard doctor daughter, and the next day I was her infant in her arms again. And that was where we began. That was where we began.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gladys Gilman Taylor. Yes. Yes. Wonderful. Angel in my life. And everybody's so excited though because Gigi's coming to town. So it's like, okay, well, you know, I'm excited because Gigi's coming to town, but I don't know what a Gigi is.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not stupid. Exactly. Exactly. She respected me. She came to me. She treated me as an equal. She treated me as though I was wounded as opposed to stupid. And there's a huge difference in affect and energy that comes at you when someone is helping you.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There for she was there for neurological exam, but she asked my permission to do this for her students and I agreed and so she performed her neurological exam and I failed everything just like I was supposed to fail it and then but she didn't leave until she knew that I was done with her. She allowed me to dismiss her. But she made a connection with me and I felt safe with her and I felt I'm going to be fine in her care. She's watching out for me. Yes.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Her team Well, she was just, I call her the queen of neurology because she had just meant so much to me pre-stroke. And she came in with her entourage because Master General Hospital is a teaching hospital. And she came in and I was just so glad that embarrassment was no longer a circuit that I had going on in my brain because I was my dairy air in the air and having a sponge bath as the queen of neurology comes into the room and with her entourage. But she came. Entourage of students. And she came in and she touched me from behind as she walked around me like a good horse handler would. And she was gentle with me and she helped position me. And then she leaned too down to my face and she spoke to me. She didn't speak to her students as they were all gathered around the room. And she asked my permission and I didn't understand the language, but I knew what she was saying.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I teach first year medical students, so you know I'm preaching to these kids, your patients, they may be in this totally discombobulated condition, but when you walk in the room, you've got to show up for them a hundred percent. And I agree. I think it should be a model for life.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A patient's energy instead of taking it away. Yeah, I learned that there are two kinds of people on the planet, people who bring you energy or people who take your energy away. And that was all I had at that point. So I had this precious little reservoir. And if someone was going to come and interact with me, I needed them to bring me themselves. I needed them to look me in the eye and to touch me and to just bring their hope and their energy to me as opposed to taking energy away. No.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I arrived in the emergency room, it was just a hustling beehive and energy coming at me from everywhere and people are swarming the gurney and they're poking me and prodding me and giving me something to sign in this condition where it's like, I have no idea who I am and I have to sign this thing and my right arm had gone paralyzed and I was fortunate that it came mostly back, but it was still just totally limp and I was like, that is crazy. It was crazy. Can you sign this?”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was going to get me help, exactly, because the right hemisphere is the big picture of language, which is intonation, voice inflection, the bigger picture of the emotional content of language. So he could have said to me anything, and I didn't get the verbiage, but because of the way his voice communicated, I could tell that he understood I needed help and he would get me help.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your own mind, you knew what you were saying. Yes, yes, clearly. I just couldn't translate what was inside my head to the external world.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That now can translate language exactly is no longer functioning. Wow. And so I'm saying to him clear in my mind, I'm saying this is Jill. I need help. But what's coming out is because I couldn't get the apparatus to work.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell us what happened. Well, when my colleague first answers the phone, he says, and I'm sure he didn't say that, but that's what I heard. He sounded like a golden retriever. Because I had had a golden retriever, and I thought he sounds just like a golden retriever. I was like, wow, you know, and at the same time, I'm thinking, oh, I've got a problem. Because the problem.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a number flash into my mind, but at this point I didn't really know what numbers were, so I had to match the squiggle, the shape of the squiggle in my mind to the shape of the squiggle on the pad and it dialed out that way.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the hemorrhage is getting bigger and bigger. And as the hemorrhage gets bigger, more and more circuits are going offline.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It had been inhibiting actually having inhibiting fibers over those circuits inside of my right hemisphere. So I didn't have that conscious awareness.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And disagreements and Right, right. We are brothers and sisters. We have this level of hostility that focuses on our differences instead of our similarities, which is very unfortunate in the way that it then can cause animosity. Because all of a sudden then I see you as, oh, you're different than I am. And so you don't feel like a safe space. But you're really not separate from me. So again, it's that left hemisphere that defines separation.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So when I look at people who have had any kind of trauma, I ask, what have they gained? What I gained was this incredible knowingness of deep inner peace, an excitement of realizing everything was interconnected, and I lost the boundary of my body, so I felt that I was enormous as big as the universe because I no longer defined that this was where I began and this was where I ended.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I lost my ego. Yeah, I was essentially an infant in a woman's body, and I didn't have any of her recollection of her life. So was I her anymore?”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right hemisphere is the big picture. All the information, exactly it gives us the context of everything. It also gives us the more subtle kinds of understanding. It's our intuition. It's our witness or our observer. It's our ability to experience peace, deep inner peace. So the two hemispheres are very different in their function.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's our language. It does our language. It's our ability to think sequentially, to think methodically, to think linearly, to be able to know A plus B equals C, any kind, it's our numbers, it's our ability to communicate with the external world.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mine, yes, it started relatively small deep inside over here. And then, but it was a hemorrhage, so it got bigger and bigger and bigger over the course of the morning.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you're going to show us the This spinal cord hanging down. This is the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere, spinal cord in the back.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I just got out of the shower and I had dressed for work, and I was walking around my apartment, and I was visualizing the road to McLean Hospital asking, can I drive? Can I drive? And then the right arm went totally paralyzed. And it was just like a thud against my body. It was amazing. It never had anything like that happen before.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That this is what we are, and we've lost that appreciation for what we are as a living entity and that it's temporary. It's temporary. So take care of it. Take care of it, nurture it, be good to it.”
2025-04-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Super Soul Special: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source