because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder:

schizophrenia. And as a sister

and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand why

is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect

them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true.

What is it about my brother's brain and

his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his

dreams to a common and shared reality, so they

instead become delusion?

So I dedicated my career to research into the

severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state

of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in

the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard

Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question,

"What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals

who would be diagnosed as normal control,

as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with

schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?"

So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry

of the brain: which cells are communicating with

which cells, with which chemicals, and then in

what quantities of those chemicals?

So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing

this type of research during the day.

But then in the evenings and on the weekends,

I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up

to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own.

A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain.

And in the course of four hours,

I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to

process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage,

I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life.

I essentially became an infant in a woman's body.

If you've ever seen a human brain,

it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another.

And I have brought for you a real human brain.

So this is a real human brain.

This is the front of the brain,

the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down,

and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head.

And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that

the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another.

For those of you who understand computers,

our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor,

while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor.

The two hemispheres do communicate with one another

through the corpus collosum,

which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers.

But other than that,

the two hemispheres are completely separate.

Because they process information differently,

each of our hemispheres think about different things,

they care about different things, and, dare I say,

they have very different personalities.

Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy. (Assistant: It has been.)

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment.

It's all about "right here, right now."

Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures

and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies.

Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously

through all of our sensory systems

and then it explodes into this enormous collage

of what this present moment looks like,

what this present moment smells like and tastes like,

what it feels like and what it sounds like.

I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me

through the consciousness of my right hemisphere.

We are energy-beings connected to one another

through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family.

And right here,

right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet,

here to make the world a better place.

And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.

My left hemisphere -- our left hemisphere -- is a very different place.

Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically.

Our left hemisphere

is all about the past and it's all about the future.

Our left hemisphere is designed to take that

enormous collage of the present moment and start

picking out details, details and more details about those details.

It then categorizes and

organizes all that information, associates it

with everything in the past we've ever learned, and

projects into the future all of our possibilities.

And our left hemisphere thinks in language.

It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my

internal world to my external world.

It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you gotta remember

to pick up bananas on your way home.

I need them in the morning."

It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me

when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important,

it's that little voice that says to me,

"I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am,"

I become separate.

I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow

around me and separate from you.

And this was the portion of my brain that I lost

on the morning of my stroke.

On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a

pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain --

caustic pain -- that you get when you

bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me --

and then it released me. And then it just gripped me --

and then it released me. And it was very unusual

for me to ever experience any kind of pain,

so I thought, OK, I'll just start my normal routine.

So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider,

which is a full-body, full-exercise machine.

And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing

that my hands look like primitive claws grasping

onto the bar. And I thought, "That's very peculiar."

And I looked down at my body and I thought, "Whoa,

I'm a weird-looking thing." And it was as though

my consciousness had shifted away from my normal

perception of reality, where I'm the person on the

machine having the experience, to some esoteric space

where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.

And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was

just getting worse. So I get off the machine,

and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I

realize that everything inside of my body has

slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and

very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace,

and there's this constriction in my area of perceptions,

so I'm just focused on internal systems.

And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to

step into the shower, and I could actually hear the

dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice

saying, "OK. You muscles, you gotta contract.

You muscles, you relax."

And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall.

And I look down at my arm and I realize

that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body.

I can't define where I begin and where I end,

because the atoms and the molecules of my arm

blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.

And all I could detect was this energy -- energy.

And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me?

What is going on?" And in that moment, my brain chatter --

my left hemisphere brain chatter -- went totally silent.

Just like someone took a remote control

and pushed the mute button. Total silence.

And at first I was shocked to find myself

inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately

captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me.

And because I could no longer identify

the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive.

I felt at one with all the energy that was,

and it was beautiful there.

Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back

online, and it says to me, "Hey! We got a problem!

We got a problem! We gotta get some help."

And I'm going, "Ahh! I got a problem.

I got a problem." So it's like, "OK. OK. I got a problem."

But then I immediately drifted right back

out into the consciousness -- and I affectionately

refer to this space as La La Land.

But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would

be like to be totally disconnected from your brain

chatter that connects you to the external world.

So here I am in this space, and my job -- and any

stress related to my job -- it was gone.

And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine:

all of the relationships in the external world and any

stressors related to any of those -- they were gone.

And I felt this sense of peacefulness.

And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage!

(Laughter) Oh! I felt euphoria.

Euphoria. It was beautiful.

And then, again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says,

"Hey! You've got to pay attention.

We've got to get help." And I'm thinking, "I got to get help.

I gotta focus."

So I get out of the shower and I mechanically

dress and I'm walking around my apartment,

and I'm thinking, "I gotta get to work. I gotta get to work

Can I drive? Can I drive?"

And in that moment my right arm went totally

paralyzed by my side. Then I realized,

"Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke! I'm having a stroke!"

And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow!

This is so cool." (Laughter) "This is so cool!

How many brain scientists have the opportunity

to study their own brain from the inside out?"

(Laughter)

And then it crosses my mind: "But I'm a very busy woman!"

(Laughter) "I don't have time for a stroke!"

So I'm like, "OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening,

so I'll do this for a week or two, and

then I'll get back to my routine. OK.

So I gotta call help. I gotta call work."

I couldn't remember the number at work,

so I remembered, in my office I had a business card

with my number on it. So I go into my business room,

I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards.

And I'm looking at the card on top and even though

I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like,

I couldn't tell if this

was my card or not because all I could see were pixels.

And the pixels of the words blended

with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols,

and I just couldn't tell.

And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity.

And in that moment, I would be able to

reattach to normal reality and I could tell

that's not the card ... that's not the card ... that's not the card.

It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down

inside of that stack of cards.

In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is

getting bigger in my left hemisphere.

I do not understand numbers. I do not understand the telephone,

but it's the only plan I have.

So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. I take the business card,

I put it right here, and

I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card

to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad.

But then I would drift back out into La La Land,

and not remember when I came back if I'd already

dialed those numbers.

So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump

and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed

them, so that as I would come back to normal

reality, I'd be able to tell, "Yes, I've already dialed that number."

Eventually, the whole number gets dialed

and I'm listening to the phone, and

my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me,

"Woo woo woo woo." (Laughter) And I think to myself,

"Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!"

And so I say to him -- clear in my mind, I say to him:

"This is Jill! I need help!"

And what comes out of my voice is, "Woo woo woo woo woo."