Thanks Abbas. This is a fascinating "lecture"; she's a stand-up neuroanatomist one minute and then she's an evangelical pantheist. I kept thinking of some of the characters/internal monologues in old Talking Heads' songs. She's very lucky to have survived and recovered.
I remember the first time I ever met someone effected by a stroke. He was my first girlfriend's father. I visited him a the hospital and the experience was unnerving. He appeared to be aware that I was there but he was unable to talk or make any kind of gesture. I just remember his eyes. They moved about in a pattern that one associates with confusion. Not panic but a kind of constant puzzlement. Whatever part of the brain had been effected by his stroke it had left him unable to communicate and ultimately his condition worsened and he died within a month of the onset. He never even got to leave the hospital.
The effects of a stroke, it's location and severity, seem so contingent. A matter of a fraction of a millimeter and a different set of brain sub-systems is effected and with that possibly parts of the personality. Jill Bolte's account is very entertaining and she does address the horrific side to that experience. I can only hope that some small part of the right hemisphere processes, those oceanic feelings that she describes were there for Mary's father but I'll never know. Again thanks.
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Comments
Dude! Where's the article?...I'm going to bed.
Posted by: Pete Chapman | Apr 2, 2008 5:26:40 AM
Original source http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/229
Posted by: Srijith | Apr 2, 2008 6:28:26 AM
Thanks Abbas. This is a fascinating "lecture"; she's a stand-up neuroanatomist one minute and then she's an evangelical pantheist. I kept thinking of some of the characters/internal monologues in old Talking Heads' songs. She's very lucky to have survived and recovered.
I remember the first time I ever met someone effected by a stroke. He was my first girlfriend's father. I visited him a the hospital and the experience was unnerving. He appeared to be aware that I was there but he was unable to talk or make any kind of gesture. I just remember his eyes. They moved about in a pattern that one associates with confusion. Not panic but a kind of constant puzzlement. Whatever part of the brain had been effected by his stroke it had left him unable to communicate and ultimately his condition worsened and he died within a month of the onset. He never even got to leave the hospital.
The effects of a stroke, it's location and severity, seem so contingent. A matter of a fraction of a millimeter and a different set of brain sub-systems is effected and with that possibly parts of the personality. Jill Bolte's account is very entertaining and she does address the horrific side to that experience. I can only hope that some small part of the right hemisphere processes, those oceanic feelings that she describes were there for Mary's father but I'll never know. Again thanks.
Posted by: Pete Chapman | Apr 2, 2008 8:26:16 PM
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