Stroke of Insight
On December 10, 1996, Taylor woke up to discover that she was experiencing a stroke. The cause proved to be bleeding from an abnormal congenital connection between an artery and a vein in the left hemisphere of her brain, an arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Three weeks later, on December 27, 1996, she underwent major brain surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to remove a golf ball-sized clot that was placing pressure on the language centers in the left hemisphere of her brain.
Taylor's February 2008 TED Conference talk about her memory of the stroke became an Internet sensation, resulting in widespread attention and interest around the world. It became the second most viewed TED talk of all time.
Read more about this topic: Jill Bolte Taylor
Famous quotes containing the words stroke of, stroke and/or insight:
“I believe that Harmon would be the easiest to defeat, though he might gain much strength from the Republicans. Clark would surely lose New York. I am beginning to feel that by some stroke of genius they may name Woodrow Wilson, and that seems a pretty hard tussle.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“When any man expresses doubt to me as to the use that I or any other woman might make of the ballot if we had it, my answer is, What is that to you? If you have for years defrauded me of my rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, of from late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field of wheat, or a pasture for kine?”
—Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898)
“I shall speak of ... how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another.... Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next.... Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)