At least three of this year’s TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover’s, Benjamin Zander’s, and Jill Bolte Taylor’s. The first of them has just been posted:
Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I wrote the day of her talk, she walked us through what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical (“I can’t define where I begin and where I end”) to the borderline-hilarious (“I’m a busy woman. I don’t have time for a stoke”). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare researcher who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.
And now you can see and hear it, too:
The brain she’s holding there is a real one, by the way.
We’ll alert you to the other two classics when they’re published.