NAMI North Carolina ‘Singin’ Scientist’ Featured at Spring Conference

News Release

Singin’ Scientist’ Featured at Spring Conference

Released April 2, 1998

Blending expertise as a Harvard neuroscientist with musical talent and her own experiences as a stroke victim, Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D., travels the country with her guitar, briefing audiences on the basics of the human brain and the biological basis of serious mental disorders.

Taylor, who bills herself as the “Singin’ Scientist,” is among 20 speakers and panelists slated to participate in “New Frontiers in Treatment and Research,” the spring conference of the North Carolina Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NC AMI). The conference will be held April 3 and 4 at the Holiday Inn in Research Triangle Park.

“Most people understand that conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases are brain disorders,” explained Beth Melcher, Ph.D., NC AMI’s executive director. “But when it comes to schizophrenia, depression and other serious mental illnesses, people are only just beginning to understand and acknowledge their neurobiological origins.”

Sister, Scientist, Stroke Victim

Taylor has devoted her career to brain research, inspired by an older brother diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 25. “As a sister and as a scientist, I want to understand why it is that I can attach my dreams to my reality and I can make my dreams come true. Why is it that my brother cannot connect his dreams to his reality and they instead become delusions. That’s my interest in the human brain and mental illness.”

The December day in 1996 when, at age 37, Taylor suffered a stroke—”my stroke of insight,” as she calls it—she woke up “feeling peculiar,” with a pounding headache behind her left eye. “I thought the headache was very intrusive to my day,” she recalled, “and I was not happy about it.”

While deciding if she felt up to driving herself to work, Taylor’s right arm suddenly “went dead” and dropped to her side. “That was when I realized-‘Oh my God, I’m having a stroke,'” Taylor said. “My next thought was, ‘Wow! This is so cool!’ Then I thought, ‘How ironic—I’m the brain lady and now I have a neurological disorder of my own.'”

Within weeks, Taylor underwent surgery to repair the flaw in her brain’s arterial system that caused the stroke. After returning home, Taylor began the painstaking process of regaining basic skills and reconstructing reality.

“I remember looking around when I returned home from the hospital to my apartment,” she said. “I saw the stained glass in my art room and realized—’Oh, I’m an artist.’ When I saw my guitar and my cello, I realized, ‘Oh, I’m a musician. ‘

“I also knew what a high level performer I had always been, and all of a sudden I was flat on my back and my brain was empty. I couldn’t communicate verbally, and I couldn’t understand what other people said. I felt that everything was a synaptic gap away.”

As soon as she was able, Taylor focused on recovering basic communication skills. “First, I had to learn to read again,” she said. “That was a top priority.” She said she also worked hard to regain her abilities as a public speaker “because I love it and it’s fun for me and the audience.”

In describing the effects of the stroke on her thought processes, Taylor said it’s as if “I’m sitting in the middle of my brain, and all the walls around me are lined with file drawers. When the stroke happened, all those drawers closed and moved just beyond my reach. I knew the information was there, but I just couldn’t get to it.”

In observing her own behavior after the stroke, Taylor realized many of her impairments paralleled those of her brother. “I would look at my hands and I would see how my dexterity was compromised—just as I’d seen in my brother’s hands—and how I had to be deliberate in my movements just as he was. When I saw myself doing things like my brother, I realized, ‘This is what it’s like for him.’ It was profound to have that insight into his reality.”

‘I Want Their Brains’

Since leaving her post as co-director of the Harvard Psychiatry Brain-Tissue Resource Center in Belmont, Mass., last year, Taylor has addressed dozens of audiences, including many mental health professionals alongside family members and friends of people with brain disorders. While she adapts her presentations to the needs and interests of each audience, her fundamental message is always the same: By understanding the brain and how we can manipulate brain chemistry, we will ultimately master even the most severe mental illnesses.

Because that understanding can come only with further research—and brains donated for research are chronically in short supply—Taylor’s presentations always include an appeal for brain tissue donations.

“There’s a point at which my audiences realize I want their brains,” she said. “I can always see when it happens, and I always reassure them, ‘Don’t worry. I’m in no hurry.'”

At that moment in her program, Taylor usually reaches for her guitar and sings “1-800-BRAINBANK,” a jingle she composed to help drive home her message. “The real story is the science,” she said. “The music simply allows me to lighten the mood and engage the audience through a different medium. “

Lessons in Strange Packages

With more than a year of recovery behind her, Taylor is writing a book and negotiating with an interested publisher. “The book is about how my relationship to my brother as a child prepared me for the comeback I was later to face with my own brain disorder,” she explained.

Taylor readily admits she is now very different from the way she was before the stroke. “Since those files got closed, I have to have a connection—an association-to open them again. There are some files—I don’t know what they are-—that may remain closed forever.”

Taylor believes at least some of those closed files contain troublesome “emotional baggage” and ought to stay closed. With those memories lost, Taylor explained, “The pieces of my brain that were good before my stroke now have the potential to become excellent. The pieces of my brain that were mediocre are now non-existent. And I’m fine with that. “

These days, Taylor is most frustrated with the loss of physical stamina resulting from the brain surgery to correct the arterial problem. “My medical reports say I’ll never get back my physical stamina, but in my opinion, I’m exceptional when it comes to those kinds of things because that’s what I study.”

Perhaps even more important to her ultimate recovery than her knowledge of the brain is her attitude.

“Whatever comes my way is a lesson,” she said, “and some lessons come in very strange packages. I can either live that trauma and focus on that trauma and get lost in that trauma or I can say, ‘What kind of gift is this to my understanding of what it is to be a human being?'”

From Knowledge, a Cure

Jill Bolte Taylor will present her program, titled “Brain Research: From Knowledge Will Come a Cure,” from 10:30 to 11:45 a.m. on Saturday, April 4—the second day of NC AMI’s two-day conference. The “New Frontiers in Treatment and Research” conference is open to the public, with one-day and two-day registrations still available.