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Can you imagine that? Plugging yourself into the pure energy of the universe?

That is what Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor talked about in her Ted.com presentation. She told her story of suffering from a hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain, and how that rendered her "like an infant in a grown woman's body."

Dr. Taylor described what that condition meant by showing the audience a real brain, demonstrating how the left and right hemispheres of the brain functions. Apparently the left hemisphere accounts for the rational, the logical, and the linguistic capability of the human brain. It categorizes, it names, it organizes what data the right hemisphere receives as pure sensations.

But losing the function of her brain's left hemisphere--her ability to function as a "normal" human being--opened up a new vista of "pure euphoria, nirvana." The comments posted in the Ted.com site compares her experience to an "acid trip." And the way she described that experience really seemed like it.

Just before the doctors went into surgery, she gave up "like a balloon losing its air, its soul," and said goodbye to her life. But then the realization that she was still alive and blessed with this "insight" into what the brain's right hemisphere could tap into, convinced her to fight for her life just so she could "spread the idea."

What was this insight that Dr. Taylor tapped into? It was this idea that half of our brain is connected to the energies of the universe, that it allowed us to be literally one with the cosmos.

Of course, like an acid trip, it can be the soaring experience that Dr. Taylor described or it could be a rapid descent into paranoia. But then, the way she told her story, it seemed that tapping into that pure energy can only bring that expansive feeling of love and peace. (Perhaps it is when we are pulled back into our rational selves that we feel paranoid.)

And so Dr. Taylor--neuralanatomist and intellectual--is spreading the idea of human beings tapping into the right brain to re-connect ourselves into the pure energies of the universe. Perhaps, she says, when we do that we will be able to project the peace and love that this universal energy emits.

 


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