JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: And I lost all my memories
ROBERT KRULWICH: And yet she says sitting there and that's suddenly wordless space—
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: I had found a peace inside of myself that I had not known before. I had pure silence inside of my mind. Pure silence.
JAD ABUMRAD: Pure silence
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: Pure Silence
JAD ABUMRAD: What was—
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: You know, not that little voice that you know you wake up in the morning and the first thing your brain says it Oh man the sun is shining. Well imagining you don't hear that little voice that says man the sun is shining you just experience the sun and the shining.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Is this the absence of reflection of any kind? Is it just sensual intake and “period?”
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: That is exactly what it was it was. It was all of the present moment.
JAD ABUMRAD: Did you have thoughts?
JTB: I had joy.
(R. laughing.)
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: I just had joy. I had, I had this magnificent experience of I’m this collection of these beautiful cells. I am organic. I’m this, this organic entity.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Did you have a dead head period by any chance?
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: You know why I missed that by a few years, but I get that a lot.
ROBERT KRULWICH: And, and the other thing that she told us is that lying in that bed without words, she says she felt connected to things, to everything, in a way that she never had before.
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: Oh yeah I lost all definition of myself in relationship to everything in the external world.
JAD ABUMRAD: You mean like he couldn't figure out where you ended.
ROBERT KRULWICH: How much of that was about language. A little part? A lot? I mean.
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: Oh I would say it was huge. Language is an ongoing information processing it's that constant reminder. I am, this is my name, this is all the data related to me, these are my likes and my dislikes, these are my beliefs, I am an individual, I'm a single, I am a solid, I'm separate from you. This is my name…
JAD ABUMRAD: Now as fruity as this may all sound to pin all this on language, we have run into this idea before. A couple seasons ago. Paul Brucks, remember him?
ROBERT KRULWICH: Yeah sure.
JAD ABUMRAD: Neuropsychologist.
P: Well if you have to ask me about myself…
JAD ABUMRAD: He told me that there's a theory out there, which he believes actually, that all a person is in the end. Like all the personhood of a person, the I or the you of a person all that is in the end is a…
P: Story.
JAD ABUMRAD: A story you tell yourself.
P: What we normally think of when we think about ourselves. Is really a story; it's the story of what's happened to that body over time.
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: I did not have that portion of my language center that tells a story curious little Jill, me, Jill Bolte Taylor climbing the Harvard ladder, through language, loves dissection, cutting up things, that language was gone. I got to essentially become an infant (baby sounds) again.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/