This Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk about why she became a brain scientist…her brother was schizophrenic…and how she discovered her right brain when a stroke shut down her left brain. And how she learned to “tend the garden of my mind.”
JILL BOLTE TAYLOR’S STROKE OF INSIGHT INTERVIEW
The clearest description of how the brain functions comes — for me — from Jill Bolte Taylor. Her book, My Stroke of Insight, gives wonderful insight into the right brain, which has been so neglected in our left brain culture.
Stress Proof Your Brain with Dr Rick Hanson
Rick Hanson is the author of the New York Times best seller Buddha’s Brain the practical neuroscience of happiness love and wisdom.
Leading Edge Seminars recently brought Rick Hanson to Toronto for a two-day session that quickly sold out. The audience consisted mostly of people in the helping professions — the majority were therapists — for whom learning and teaching mindfulness are key factors in their approach to well being.
Hanson started by drawing our attention to the brain itself: “three pounds of tofu-like tissue containing 1.1 trillion cells, including 100 billion neurons.” Chemicals called neurotransmitters enable neurons to receive signals telling the neurons to fire. When they fire, they send signals to other neurons….and as the famous saying goes, neurons that fire together wire together. Which is the good news and the bad news.Continue Reading
Boomer Tsunami
HERE’S the link or pdf for BOOMER TSUNAMI, as published in the Toronto Star in 2008.
For a journalist with close to 30 years experience in the trenches, writing features about everything from canoeing the Nahanni River – on the border of the Yukon and Northwest Territories — to Nanasivik, the coldest mine on earth – on Baffin Island; try visiting in winter! — to the Harvard Business School, MIT and many other seats of higher learning. To Jamaica — I interviewed Michael Manley — then at sea with Paul Watson (Sea Shepherd Society saviour of whales), then off to the rain forests of Costa Rica, and dropping by helicopter onto an offshore oil rig after the Ocean Ranger went down…Quebec politics and feminism (special interests), sports (I played hockey on a boy’s team when I was a kid) and delving into the toughest topic of all: child sexual abuse. My book OUR LITTLE SECRET grew out of cases I wrote about for the Toronto Star…..politicians, business leaders, local heroes, the struggles of people, giving a voice to people who felt they had no voice, contributing to the shaping of public opinion….it was a very rich and meaningful life.Continue Reading
Mindfulness and Guided Practice
Three books by brain scientists are at the core of my approach to mindfulness and guided practice: Norman Doidge’s THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF: STORIES OF PERSONAL TRIUMPH FROM THE FRONTIERS OF BRAIN SCIENCE, Jill Bolte Taylor’s, MY STROKE OF INSIGHT, and Rick Hanson’s BUDDHA’S BRAIN: THE PRACTICAL NEUROSCIENCE OF HAPPINESS, LOVE AND WISDOM.
(Photo: that is me after a yoga class at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.)