For two months I have been constantly working as a "machine." The intellectual activity that my brain performs and the ability to produce multiple thoughts in seconds, without rest, led me to think about the possibility of suffering a mental, emotional and physical “collapse”. Following this, "accidentally" I found this.
After suffering a stroke, an English filmmaker put the lens on his revealing and crude rehabilitation process. This film is a profound personal journey in the complexity, fragility and wonders of the human brain, after Sodderland miraculously survived a stroke and found herself starting again in a strange world, deprived of language and logic. . "If the brain is damaged, is it possible that the damage extends to the identity of a person?", Is one of the big questions that this film tries to answer.
In 2011, 34-year-old Lotje Sodderland lived what for many is a family life: he worked in a demanding job (24/7) in an advertising agency, traveled the world and spent a lot of time with his wide circle of friends. One night he woke up with a severe headache; He tripped out of his apartment (where he lived alone) and arrived days later at the hospital. She had had a cerebral hemorrhage, the result was obtained when she learned of a vascular anomaly that developed before her birth. They put her in an induced coma, endured emergency surgery to her parietal and temporal lobes. And in the sequel, she transformed. Sodderland's stroke left her with significant cognitive problems: speech and memory impairment; problems with the sequence of events; distorted vision, sometimes psychedelic and, an inability to read or write that persists to this day.
A cerebral hemorrhage occurs when an artery in the brain explodes. This flow of your blood can disrupt normal circulation to the brain, which can lead to a stroke, which occurs when a part of the brain is deprived of oxygen. Stroke can cause temporary or permanent brain damage. Hemorrhage in the brain can also raise the pressure inside the skull to dangerous levels. This high pressure in turn can cause bleeding to bleed faster, leading to a vicious cycle of brain damage.
Causes
There are many causes of a cerebral hemorrhage. Some include a tangle of blood vessels, the so-called arteriovenous malformation (AVM); coagulation disorders; cerebral aneurysms; head injury and the use of anticoagulants. The use of drugs and tobacco can also cause bleeding.
Brain hemorrhages can be fatal. The damage of a hemorrhage is determined by its size, by the amount of inflammation in the skull and how quickly the bleeding is controlled. Some people may be left with permanent brain damage, while others recover completely. 
In the case of the filmmaker Sodderland, the challenge today is to rebuild his identity.
Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist with a post-doctoral position at Harvard University who had dedicated his life to the study of the human brain, witnessed the disintegration of his neuronal functioning. He was 37 years old when a blood vessel exploded in his brain. Through the eyes of a curious scientist, she observed how his mind deteriorated as he could not walk, speak, read, write or remember anything in his life. Because of his understanding of the brain, his respect for the cells in his body and being an incredible mother, Jill recovered completely. In My Stroke of Insight: a Brain Scientists Personal Journey, he shares his recommendations for recovery and the knowledge he gained from the unique functions of the two halves of his brain.
When he lost the capacity of his left brain, his consciousness moved away from normal reality where he felt one with the universe . Taylor helps others, not only to rebuild their brains from trauma, but also to those of us with normal brains, to better understand how we can consciously influence the underlying neural circuit in what we think, what we feel and the way we react to the circumstances of life.
It takes us on his eight-year journey of recovery, from the obstacles of rehabilitation to spiritual vision, a vision he gained from his experience. His story about the morning of his stroke is fascinating, especially for medical and medical students. It is a rare opportunity to read a story about the hopes and fears of someone who is experiencing acute brain injury. It is with this inner perspective that Taylor gives an idea of a world in which we cannot begin to imagine. As he slowly loses the ability to speak or understand language, he continues to map his stroke, correlating each loss of function with increasing bleeding in the brain.
Spiritual Experience
In the part of her book where she talks about spirituality, Taylor writes that she experienced an inner state of peace because of what she refers to as the "right hemisphere of consciousness." “Before this experience with stroke, the cells in my left hemisphere had been able to dominate the cells in my right hemisphere. The judgment and analytical character of my left mind dominated my personality. When I experienced bleeding and the loss of my cells from each center of the left hemisphere that defines my being, those cells could no longer inhibit the cells of my right mind. As a result, I have gained a clear delimitation of the two very different "characters" that cohabit in my skull. The two halves of my brain not only perceive and think in different ways at the neurological level, but also demonstrate very different values depending on the types of information they perceive, and therefore exhibit different personalities. My vision spill is that at the core of the right hemisphere consciousness is a character directly connected to my feeling of deep inner peace; completely committed to an expression of peace, love, joy, and compassion in the world. ”
Taylor mentions that it has traditionally been difficult, if not impossible, for us to distinguish between our right and left mind characters simply because we experience ourselves as a single person with a single consciousness. However, with very little guidance, most people find it easy to identify these same characters, if not within themselves, then at least in their parents or partner. His goal is to help find a hemispheric home for each of our characters so that we can honor their identities and perhaps more on how we want to be in the world. By recognizing who is who inside our skull, we can take a more balanced approach to the brain to the way we direct our lives. 
He also mentions that many of us talk about how our head (left hemisphere) is telling us to do one thing while our heart (right hemisphere) is telling us to do the exact opposite. Some of us distinguish between what we think (left hemisphere) and what we feel (right hemisphere). Others communicate about our mental awareness (left hemisphere) versus our instinctive body awareness (right hemisphere). Some of us talk about our little mental ego (left hemisphere) compared to our mental capital ego (right hemisphere), or our little self (right hemisphere) in front of our inner or authentic being (left hemisphere). Some of us delineate between our mental work (left hemisphere) and our mind on vacation (right hemisphere); while others refer to his research mind (left hemisphere) in front of his diplomatic mind (right hemisphere). And of course we have our male mind (left hemisphere) in front of our female mind (right hemisphere), and our yang consciousness (left hemisphere) counteracted by our yin consciousness (right hemisphere). And if you are a Carl Jung fan, then there is our detective mind (left hemisphere) in front of our intuitive mind (right hemisphere), and our judging mind (left hemisphere) in front of our perceiving mind (right hemisphere). Whatever language is used to describe these two parts, based on his experience, Taylor believes that they originate anatomically from the two distinct hemispheres inside our head.
He believes that the longer we set in motion our circuits of inner peace and compassion, the greater our projection of peace and compassion in the world, and therefore, we will have more peace and compassion on the planet. This means that the clearer we have what kind of information a certain side of our brain is processing, the more choice we will have in our way of thinking, feeling, and behaving not only as individuals, but as collaborative members of the human family.
From a neuroanatomic perspective, Taylor gained access to the experience of deep inner peace in the awareness of his right hemisphere when the areas of language association and orientation in the left hemisphere of his brain became nonfunctional.
The brain research conducted by doctors Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili has helped her understand exactly what was going on in her brain. Using SPECT technology (single photon emission emission tomography), these scientists identified the neuroanatomy that underlies our ability to have a religious or spiritual (mystical) experience. They wanted to understand which regions of the brain were involved in our ability to undergo a change of consciousness - far from being an individual to the feeling that we are one with the universe (God, Nirvana, euphoria).
Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns were invited to meditate or pray inside the SPECT machine. They were instructed to pull a cotton cord when they reached the climax of their meditation or felt united with God. These experiments identify changes in neurological activity in very specific regions of the brain. First, there was a decrease in the activity of the language centers of the left hemisphere, resulting in a silencing of speech in the brain. Secondly, there was a decrease in the activity of the orientation association area, located in the posterior parietal gyrus of the left hemisphere. This region of our left brain helps us identify our personal physical limits. When this area is inhibited or exhibited, the contribution of our sensory systems decreases, the view of where we begin and where we end up in relation to the space around us is lost.
This recent research, makes a good neurological sense that when Taylor's left language centers were silenced and, his left orientation association area was interrupted from his normal sensory input, his consciousness moved away from feeling like a solid, to a perception of itself as a fluid - in one with the universe.
In this context, people who have experienced and suffered a stroke, witness the spiritual experience, and along with it, the visions, sounds and perceptions that are acquired during that time and that not only this, but any other disease It can make you experiment.
Taylor concludes one of his chapters by telling us that: "The mental health of our society is established by the mental health of the brains that make up our society, and I must admit that Western civilization is a rather difficult environment for my loving and peaceful character of my right hemisphere, to live. Obviously, I am not alone in this feeling; by looking at the millions of beautiful people in our society who have chosen to escape from our common reality by self-medicating themselves with illicit drugs and alcohol. I think Gandhi was right when he said: <>. It seems to me that the conscience of my right hemisphere is anxious for us to take the next leap as humanity so that we can evolve this planet in a place of peace and love that we long for it to be. ”
Bolte Taylor, Jill (2006). My stroke of insight, chapter 15, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: http://drjilltaylor.com/
Felsenthal, Julia, My Beautiful Broken Brain Reveals the Traumatic, Triumphant Aftermath of a Brain Hemorrhage, accessed May 23, 2016 at http://www.vogue.com/13415789/my-beautiful-broken-brain-lotje-sodderland -sophie-robinson-interview /.
My beautiful broken brain documentary: http://mybeautifulbrokenbrain.com/
