My Stroke of Insight. A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

My Stroke of Insight by Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is the latest addition to this genre, and her perspective is unique. Prior to her left-sided hemorrhagic stroke, she was a neuroanatomist. Indeed, she had initially turned to the level of anatomy to understand and explain schizophrenia. From growing up with a brother diagnosed as schizophrenic, Jill's life moved toward the dissection and analysis of postmortem brains to develop a biological account of psychosis, alongside an impassioned teaching of neuroanatomy to college students.
It is from this radical materialist position that Jill sets about narrating, explaining, and recovering from her stroke and the severe communication difficulties that it initially created. The first few chapters present a basic grounding in neuroanatomy with a strong lateralization focus, establishing a dominant lexicon for the rest of the book. This is then followed by three chapters that trace the minutiae of her subjective experience of the acute phase of a left-hemispheric hemorrhage (originating from an arterio-venous malformation, AVM, within the left middle cerebral artery territory, a left perisylvian focus with the resultant hematoma covering left superior temporal and inferior and middle parietal cortices). I have never read or heard such a rich, eloquent, and fascinating account of the acute breakdown of cognitive, symbolic faculties concurrent with physical debilitation that characterizes this kind of stroke during the first hour of onset.