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 Boltey 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. And I was serving on the board of

directors for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was

doing something that could make a difference in the lives of people like my brother.

Would you consider yourself a spiritual person before the stroke?

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