As she recovered from the incident, she realized, "I had gained an understanding of the brain that academia could not teach me," because her right-brain consciousness had observed as the left-brain functions shut down one by one. She experienced firsthand how the right hemisphere thinks in pictures, while the left hemisphere collects information and thinks in language. "I'd watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process information," she says.
She also got special insight as to what goes on in the traumatized brain and how it can be rehabilitated. She chronicled her findings in My Stroke of Insight, and in a talk at the TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference that has become a favorite on YouTube. She regularly shares her unique blend of scientific and personal knowledge in presentations to professional organizations.
She's using her observations to create a program that will help victims of stroke and other brain injuries in their rehabilitation efforts. "Currently, normal rehab for the nervous system is from the outside-in, whereby a person or machine creates the movement. I will be utilizing virtual reality and other forms of modern technology to re-teach the nervous system from the inside out," she says. Taylor is in the preliminary stages of testing the effectiveness of her new rehabilitation methods. "My big dream is to develop a Taylor Neurological Rehabilitation Center here in Bloomington for brain trauma ranging from coma to everyday injury," she says.
Her Insight: "Before, I had a fantasy that I was much more than neurocircuitry," she says. "But I am neurocircuitry—I can only recognize someone by their face because I have cells that perform that function." At the same time, she realized that she, and we all, can cognitively choose which circuits to run. For example, a burst of anger takes 90 seconds to come and go, unless you choose to rethink the thoughts and restimulate the response.
Though Taylor is still teaching neuroscience, she's also using her right brain more. During her recovery, she painted stained-glass brains to improve her motor skills and linear thinking, and also to express the artistry she felt had blossomed from her right brain. Though she wouldn't have chosen to experience a stroke, she says, "It was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their brains from the inside?"
Twice as Intriguing: Nancy Segal
Her Story: Nancy Segal is a twin for whom her fraternal twin sister was long a source of fascination and consternation. "When I was young, I was very curious as to why my sister and I were so different, in terms of looks and personality, even though we were twins and had the same parents," she says. "She was a reader and I was very sociable. We would regularly complain that we had no one to play with, even though we were both right there in the house!" As a second-grader, Segal met a pair of identical twin girls. "They were very close, and I envied them. After that, I became very sensitive to the two types of twins."
As a psychology major at Boston University, Segal was assigned to write a paper on personal adjustment. She thought back to how she and her sister were put in separate classrooms after third grade—a positive situation for them—and decided to write about twins adjusting to school separations. "I just loved reading about twins. I couldn't get enough. Then I got an A on the paper, which was very reinforcing." When she entered graduate school at the University of Chicago, her fate as a twin researcher was sealed.
Her Research: "I'm perhaps most proud of the first twin study I did," Segal says. "It generated a lot of data I still analyze, so it forms the centerpiece of all the work that I have done after that."
Segal arranged for identical and fraternal twins to come into her lab, where she gave them puzzles to solve. "I knew my sister and I would have been competitive at a task like that," she says. "The identical twins worked so beautifully together; it was almost like a dance. Whereas, sure enough, the fraternals worked well individually but were very competitive when asked to work together." The identicals cooperated more easily, Segal says, because they came equipped with similar information- processing styles. Such comparable ways of thinking facilitates emotional harmony, too. "Many of my subsequent studies showed that identical twins have closer relationships than fraternals."
Segal's 30 years of research brim with amazing tales of twins separated at birth who then grew up to show the same preferences and habits, down to the way they hold their beer cans. Twins are walking laboratories, built for teasing out the impact of environment on genetic makeup, the constant interplay between the two notwithstanding. "Genes are not everything, of course, but when I see twins raised apart who end up so similar, it shows in a dramatic way that genes affect many aspects of our behaviors and personalities."
Her Insight: The very fact that drove Segal to become a twins researcher helped her career soar. "Because I was a twin, I found that twins opened up to me more. They immediately felt a kinship with me." This proved important in building a database of twins willing to be experimental subjects. Parsing the striking similarities among identical twins has only increased Segal's admiration for the differences between her and her sister, who is now a corporate attorney in New York City. "We both have certain strengths, and we're generous with those. As with any sibling, we've had periods of drifting apart, but the older I get, the more I appreciate her."
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