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Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor appeared on Oprah Gail Winfrey's podcast, Oprah's Super Soul, for a conversation centered around her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist Personal Journey. The throwback episode was originally aired on November 22, 2017, and was re-uploaded on April 8, 2025, on Spotify.
During their discussion, Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, Dr. Taylor explained how the brain processes feelings of emotion, particularly anger. According to Dr. Taylor, anger is simply a short-lived physiological response.
"You have a choice when you're angry by either being angry or paying attention to how it feels like in your body... When you have that kind of a physiological response... it takes 90 seconds for... the chemicals to flush through your body, and then flush completely out of you," she said.
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She claimed that, by merely being aware of your body's response to anger, it just takes 90 seconds for the chemical release, that causes anger, to trigger, intensify, and then fade away.
"It began with a pounding pain behind my left eye" – Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor recalls the morning of her stroke
Elsewhere in the podcast, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor recalls the morning she had the stroke. On December 10, 1996, Taylor woke up with a pounding pain behind her left eye, which she found unusual since she showed no early signs of stroke.
She recounts going to the cardio glider to exercise and experiencing a shift in consciousness, where she became a "witness" to herself. From the eyes of a neuroanatomist, she found the experience fascinating.
“So I got off of the machine, and I noticed that everything in my body had slowed way down, and my thoughts had slowed, and my body was deliberate and rigid, and there was a constriction in my area of perception," she said.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor continued:
"I was living outside of Boston, where it's noisy. I had no perception of noise, and I just became tuned in to the workings of my body."
Upon entering the shower, Dr. Taylor realized she was experiencing an auditory system problem. She also claimed, in that moment, she became aware of the incredible gift of life, that we have been given, and how, yet, human beings often take it for granted, not recognizing its temporary nature.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor soon discovered that her right arm was paralyzed, as she walked out of the shower.
“Well, I had just gotten out of the shower, and I had dressed for work, and I was walking around my apartment, and I was visualizing the road to McLean Hospital asking, Can I drive? Can I drive? And then the right arm went totally paralyzed, and it was just like a thud against my body,” she said.
Oprah Winfrey and neuroanatomist Dr. Taylor discussed how she transformed a life-threatening experience into a spiritual epiphany, as they continued with the Oprah's Super Soul podcast.
According to Good Reads, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor won the top "Books for a Better Life" Book Award in the Science category for her 2006 book My Stroke of Insight, A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, in 2009. The book covers her journey from experiencing a massive stroke at the age of 37 to gradually recovering from it.
