"My Stroke of Insight"

[smartyjones]

so dh strongly rolled his eyes when i programmed oprah XM into his new car -- the other day, i heard a short piece of an interview with Jill Taylor, a PhD Harvard brain scientist who had a stroke at age 37 and has written a book of it. she said she thought it was a good read for anyone who has themselves or has someone they care for who has neurological and/or brain injury issues.

 

i myself experience migraines with aura so there are some things i feel i can relate to what ds experiences. he goes through times of much "what, what -- what did you say". one time, after a migraine, i kept asking dh 'what' then realized i wasn't having any trouble hearing him but it was not connecting in my brain. i thought this could be what ds experiences.

 

obviously, her stroke is a different event, but i think some things she describes are likely what pans kids experience -- maybe to a lesser degree but with greater frequency or regularity and it provides some really great insight.

Edited March 22, 2012 by smartyjones

[rowingmom]

There was a write up on her a couple of years ago in the Canadian Reader's Digest, and I think she has a TED talk as well if you search youtube. I thought her description of what she was feeling during her stroke was interesting. My Dad suffered a stroke and then head injury 15 years before he died at age 71. My Mom (an RN) along with various caregivers and us kids coming home on weekends to help out, managed to look after him at home for the duration. He was wheelchair bound, aphasic and tube-fed, but could read, type and understand what was being said. You could tell that sometimes his verbal processing was slow, but not all the time. I often wondered if he felt the change in his cognitive abilities. His stroke was on the opposite side from hers, so he probably did not have the expansive feelings she had.

[PowPow]

Hey SMARTY! (my favorite forum name:)

 

is there somewhere online I can hear this?

 

Thanks.

[rowingmom]

I just had to watch it again myself:

 

 

The part where she talks about sensory overload, especially sound, makes me think of my poor 5yo daughter screaming everytime she had to go to a school assembly. She could never sit through them.

[smartyjones]

is there somewhere online I can hear this?

 

http://drjilltaylor.com/

 

it's all very interesting to me -- she speaks much of the differences of the left brain and right brain. in addition (or due to or some combination of both) to pans, ds is a poster child for 2E and i wonder that it seems as if the two hemispheres of his brain don't so much always jive together as they do for most people.

Edited March 22, 2012 by smartyjones