Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

Hello, hello, everybody.

Welcome to the Gathering Room as usual, but not as usual.

A fantastic, amazing special guest is going to come in.

We are going to talk together about a topic that I think is of interest to all of us.

It's about hope.

And here with me is the great, the brilliant, the hilarious, the adorable and the intrepid

Jill Boltey Taylor.

Now, Jill was with us a few, I think a couple months ago because she's written this incredible book, Whole Brain Living.

And I want everybody to go out and buy this book immediately because everyone I've given it to, and I've given it to literally hundreds of people if you count everyone online.

And I get emails every day telling me how great the book is, like I eat anything.

And it's actually...

Now, you don't know Jill.

I don't know what rock you've been living under, but you sure haven't been watching TED Talks.

Because her brilliant TED Talk, my stroke of insight, was the first TED Talk ever to go viral.

And it described Jill's experience as a Harvard neuroanatomist having a massive left hemisphere stroke when she was, what, 37, Jill?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And watching with a scientist's eye as her own brain was very, very badly damaged and then very

gradually rebuilt over a period of about eight years.

And miraculously, she recovered completely something I think, I think that counts

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