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10% Happier with Dan Harris

Understand Your Brain, Upgrade Your Life | Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.612.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2023

⏱️ 65 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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The better you understand your brain – and the more effectively you can work with it – the happier and healthier you will be. This is the central contention of today's extraordinary guest, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and she makes this assertion based on two levels of deep expertise. First, Dr. Taylor is a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist. Second, back in the '90s, she experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain causing her to lose the ability to walk, talk, read, write or recall any of her life. She later recovered, but that experience, which you will hear her describe in riveting detail, gave her incredible insight into how the brain works. 


She wrote a massive best-selling book called, My Stroke of Insight, which she has now followed up with a book called, Whole Brain Living, where she lays out exactly how to understand your brain and how to work with it.


In this episode we talk about:

  • Dr. Taylor's personal story and how her life has changed post-stroke
  • The marvels of the human brain
  • The differences between the brain's two hemispheres 
  • How our society is skewed towards the left hemisphere and how living too much in the left hemisphere can burn us out
  • The brain's "four characters" and how to work with these characters through a practice she calls "The Brain Huddle" 
  • The differences and similarities between "The Brain Huddle" and another practice we've talked about before on this show called, "RAIN"
  • And she describes a tool for understanding your emotions called, "The 90-Second Rule"



Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jill-bolte-taylor-552

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is the 10% happier podcast.

0:06.0

I'm Dan Harris.

0:11.2

Greetings, my fellow suffering beings.

0:12.8

The central contention of today's extraordinary guest, and I mean that she is extraordinary.

0:18.9

Her central contention is that the better you understand your brain, the more effectively

0:23.2

you can work with it, and as a consequence, the happier and healthier you will be.

0:28.7

She makes this assertion based on two levels of very deep expertise.

0:33.6

First, Dr. Jill Bulti Taylor is a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist.

0:38.8

And second, back in the 1990s, she experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere

0:44.0

of her brain, causing her to lose the ability to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of

0:49.8

her life.

0:51.2

She later recovered, but that experience, which you will hear her describe in riveting

0:56.0

detail, gave her incredible insight into how the brain works.

1:00.3

She wrote a massive, best-selling book about that experience called My Stroke of Insight,

1:04.8

which she has now followed up with a book called Whole Brain Living, which lays out exactly

1:08.5

how to understand your brain and how to work with it.

1:12.0

In this conversation, we talk about Dr. Taylor's personal story and how her life has changed,

1:16.8

post-stroke.

1:17.8

We discuss the marvels of the human brain, the difference between the brain's two hemispheres,

1:22.8

the left brain and the right brain.

1:24.6

The left brain is our ego center where our sense of past and future resides.

1:28.6

The right hemisphere is home to our sense of interconnection, awe, and present moment

...

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