With nearly 9 million views on TED.com alone, Jill Bolte Taylor’s 2008 talk regarding her stroke has truly gone viral. Last week The New Yorker released a list of the Five Key TED talks, and of course hers made the list. It is truly a tour de force, an 18-minute presentation that will stick with you long after you’ve seen it.
Taylor is a neuroanatomist, whose life had been dedicated to studying the brain, and one morning in December 1996 she realized she was having a stroke. In around eighteen minutes, she tells the complete story of her stroke from the very beginning to the end. The material is compelling enough in and of itself, but it’s Taylor’s delivery that truly engrosses the audience. In particular, Taylor handles two things extremely deftly: avoiding the Curse of Knowledge, and using emotion.
As someone with such an intellectual background and distinguished career, it could have been easy for Taylor to have trouble connecting with her audience. Of course at TED most attendees are on her level in terms of intelligence and achievement, but Taylor clearly makes an effort to connect with a more general audience. Although her talk is filled with scientific observations and descriptions of complex functions happening inside the brain, she speaks colloquially and without jargon or twenty-dollar words. This complex material could slip easily into abstraction and ambiguity, but Taylor masterfully avoids that pitfall and keeps her content supremely accessible. For anyone dealing with complex material in a presentation, Taylor’s talk is a great example of how to avoid alienating your audience with the Curse of Knowledge.
Another notable strength of Taylor’s talk was her use of emotion. At the beginning of her story, she is lighthearted and amusing at times. She brings out a real brain (spinal cord attached and all) to show the audience exactly what they’re discussing. She garners laughs when her first thought is, “This is so cool,” after realizing she’s having a stroke– excited about the possibility of experiencing personally, from the inside out, what she’s studied so intensely throughout her career. Her description of the slow detachment of the right and left side of her brain, and the utter collapse of brain functioning altogether, sounds like some kind of Hunter S. Thompson acid trip gone wrong. She speaks of the peace, beauty and pure energy she feels when the cumbersome, organized, intelligent left side of her brain goes dead, when she’s left with only the dreamy, infinitely present right side.
And then, it’s as though she hits a wall. Her voice begins cracking and her eyes watering when she talks about her left side of the brain screaming, “We’ve got a problem, we’ve got a problem” until it stops and she’s left in an infantile state. She describes being carted away in the ambulance, curled up in fetal position, thinking, “I am no longer the choreographer of my own life,” and eventually she comes to the point where her spirit had surrendered. Her voice breaks while she’s relives these painful memories, but she speaks of the peace, the nirvana, the stroke of insights she gleaned from those moments. She muses– voice still wavering but in control– that the more we can give into the right side of our brains the more peace we can spread. A message worth spreading, indeed.
Watch Taylor’s talk in its entirety here.
