Scientist talks about her Near Death-like Experience and brain function.

[Magda Hassan]

Very powerful talk.
http://ted.com Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

[Charles Drago]

So who is the observer?

Who's driving the vehicle?

[Ed Jewett]

I saw this clip years ago, soon after I'd had my own stroke (of a different nature)(hers was a burst-vessel bleed, mine was dislodged plaque); as I watched the video for the first time, I wept, laughed, and cheered. I read the book. I corresponded with the woman. I later asked her an independent question related to the development of a human brian in utero and she answered. My own experience was similar in the sense that, having suffered a stroke and being immobilized in a hospital bed, one's mind has the pleasure of having its left-brain chatter shut down. It is a spiritual experience. It is/was akin to the same message/experience in using HoloSync binaural beat-driven brain wave state, opening up the left/right brain communication and integration.

[Charles Drago]

She kept referencing "I" when describing the experiences.

"I" or ego is written off by materialists as brain function -- whole-brain function.

Yet her "I" experienced this un-whole brain phenomena -- the same "I," apparently, who/that later shared them with audiences. Yet the materialists' "I" should not have been present during the crisis, should it?

Nor should the materialist "I" be present during NDEs when those sections of the brain allegedly uniquely capable of visual construct and memory are unplugged. Yet "I" subjectively experiences and describes NDEs -- including how they "look.:

So again: Who/what is "I"?

[Magda Hassan]

Perhaps she just talks that way as she thinks it is easier for that audience to understand. She also just refers to 'energy'.

[Ed Jewett]

Maybe someone should extend an invitation for her to join the conversation.

http://drjilltaylor.com/

***
From Wikipedia:

Movie

"My Stroke of Insight" is being transformed into a major feature film: "Sony Pictures Entertainment and Imagine Entertainment have teamed on My Stroke of Insight, brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor's memoir about her journey back from a debilitating stroke. Ron Howard has signed on to the direct the film, and he wants Jodie Foster as his star. But Foster isn't formally attached at this point. But Semi Chellas is writing the script and Howard and his Imagine partner Brian Grazer are producing. The author, whose book was published last year by Plume, and Ellen Stiefler will be executive producers."[42]
[edit]Ballet

Cedar Lake Ballet Company made a ballet about My Stroke of Insight called "Orbo Novo." "The piece's title, Orbo Novo, is drawn from a 1493 reference to North America by Spanish historian Pietro Martire d'Anghiera. But the "new world" that Cherkaoui is exploring is current theories about the brain, and the text that the 17 superb dancers speak during the first moments of the 75-minute work comes from My Stroke of Insight, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's uncanny recollection of her stroke. The choreography is based on the ramifications of a single resonant idea: the duality between rationality (the left brain) and instinctive, sensual responses (the right brain); between control and the lack of it; between balance and instability, solitude and society." [43] "Thus were the dancers speaking Taylor's words ("My spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria"), while they physically embodied brain waves and misfiring synapses, with a nod, perhaps, to the double helix: rubbery splayed limbs; über-arched backs; ever-rippling torsos." [44] "Orbo Novo' is a humorous and insightful take on (Taylor's) story," said dancer Jubal Battisti. "It has a lot to do with the hemispheres of the brain switching between left and right and what that reveals." [45]
[edit]

Criticism

Some commentators, such as Vaughan Bell[46] , while often acknowledging the quality of the TED talk, have expressed criticism on its scientific content as they question the work of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry and others. Regardless of this criticism, Dr. Taylor is shifting the way the medical community looks at the ability of the brain to recover and is regularly invited by Neurological Departments all over the world to speak about the brain.

***

Some critical thinking about the Jill Bolte Taylor video
http://westallen.typepad.com/idealawg/20...cal-t.html


***

I'm guessing that there is something in CD's comments which parallels this, but part of my own critical thinking is to not insist all the time on logic and rationality, but to allow ample room for other ways of knowing and being.

[Charles Drago]

Perhaps she just talks that way as she thinks it is easier for that audience to understand. She also just refers to 'energy'.

I think it's deeper than that, Maggie.

The "I" is, for me, the irreducible essence, that which is constant and independent -- the observer behind the eyes and distinct from the brain, the demise of which it can witness and, should said demise be reversed, comment upon in physical life.

If personality solely exists in the left hemisphere, what is the "I" that comments upon the left hemisphere's silence/disconnection?

[Magda Hassan]

Well, it is deep. Very DEEP indeed. Perhaps as deep as it goes. Perhaps not.
She does talk about the hemispheres has having 2 distinct personalities. Not the personality residing in just the left side. It is a different kind of 'I' that resides in the right side.

[Magda Hassan]

Or perhaps not a different kind of 'I' so much as the same 'I' with different experiences.

[Phil Dragoo]

It suits materialists' ends to posit no identity or consciousness outside a rigid biochemical state.


And surely no spirit in dust, and no meaning to life save that awarded by the state.


Soviets consigned dissidents to asylums. Orwell's Inner Party O'Brien explained the limits of linguistics.


Zen may lay traps for the egoI can only infer from a series of koans.


The query "who observes, who experiences" devolves into Bud Abbott in the left brain, Lou Costello in the right.


Heroin will say hahaha, what is the existential angst.


LSD, peyote, mushrooms and the kindred chemicals will offer the same dissolution of the boundary between man and his environment.


Dr. Taylor, that part of the shower not-tile, posits a more peaceful world to be had by more and better choosing of the blending of the parallel and serial processors.


Kierkegaard was on a card I found in the drawer of a dusty drawing table in an unused room in the back of a family pump factory:


Life must be lived forwards but can only be seen in reverse.


So, the right brain lives and the left brain reflects?


Dr. Taylor suggests the hemispheres are totally separate, only connected by 300 million Velcro fibers.


If science suggests only ten per cent of the universe is detectable, the rest dark matter, and ten per cent of the brain's function utilized, the answer to Who Goes There or rather, Who Am I may be as esoteric or familiar as one may decide.


Life is opportunity costwe are fortunate for every revelation from travelers returning from terra exotica.


Present company included.