I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of

the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time, taking time to be more fully present.

Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right

now.

I'm talking to Dr. Jill Bulti Taylor who wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight, it's

called because she had a massive stroke and remained conscious the entire time and lived,

obviously, sitting here with me now, to write about it. Dr. Taylor is a Harvard-trained,

neuroanatomist who teaches at the Indiana University School of Medicine and as a national

spokesperson for the mentally ill for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, welcome.

Thank you, it's great to be here.

Can you tell us a little bit about what your life was like before the stroke?

Before the stroke, I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother diagnosed with schizophrenia

and he's only 18 months older than I am, so he was my constant companion as a child.

So my introduction to the world was through his eyes as well as through my own and I recognized

as a little girl that he was very different in the way he perceived experiences around

and then chose to behave and just his overall way that he put the world together, it was

different from mine.

So I became very highly tuned into body language, tone, how people interact with one another,

what people found of value, how they made the decisions that they made.

So at the time of the hemorrhage though, I was at Harvard Medical School teaching and

performing research, my area of specialty was the post-mortem investigation of the brain

as it relates to schizophrenia.

...