Quick answer: On Modern Wisdom, Robert Greene told Chris Williamson about a neuroscientist whose brain hemorrhage switched off her mind's filters. In his telling, it felt like bliss, almost like heaven, but it nearly killed her, and it took her eight years to recover. Greene doesn't name her in the clip, but the book he names, My Stroke of Insight, is by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor.
Source: Modern Wisdom, "What Death Reveals About Life - Robert Greene," clipped as a YouTube Short.
A stroke "different from mine"
Greene knows strokes firsthand. He suffered one in August 2018, three months after finishing The Laws of Human Nature, and has talked often about the long recovery. In this clip he says the woman in his story had "a hemorrhagic stroke in the brain, different from mine": bleeding in the brain rather than a blockage.
As the blood shut down parts of her brain "one by one by one," Greene says, she got to experience "what the world is like when the brain isn't filtering."
When the brain stops filtering
Greene's description is vivid. Normally, he explains, part of the cortex keeps track of where your body ends and the world begins, so you can move through a space. As that shut down, she stepped into the shower and the water felt like part of her. "There's nothing separating her from anything else."
Then the inner chatter went quiet. "Your brain is always chattering," Greene says. "Her brain goes completely silent. What bliss!" She saw the world "not as visual things, but as little pixelated dots," and it felt "like a mystical experience." But, he adds, "she's dying. It's literally killing her."
"An infant in a woman's body"
She survived, but Greene says she came out "like an infant in a woman's body," with no language, unable to speak or understand what anyone was saying. Recovering her cognitive abilities took eight years.
That part matches Taylor's own account. On December 10, 1996, at age 37, the Harvard-trained brain scientist had a massive hemorrhage in the left side of her brain, caused by a blood-vessel malformation she had been born with. Within about four hours she could not walk, talk, read, write or recall her life. She had surgery to remove a golf-ball-sized blood clot, and she writes that it took eight years to fully rebuild her mind. She uses the same phrase Greene does: "an infant in a woman's body."
Heaven, then "hell"
The twist in Greene's version is what came after. Once she could think and write again, he says, she was depressed, telling herself that during the stroke "I felt like I was in heaven... and now I can think, I can write, I have cognitive powers but my life is hell." That is Greene's retelling, not a quote from her book.
According to Greene, that longing is why she wrote My Stroke of Insight: to find her way back, logically, as a scientist, to the peace she felt during the stroke. Her book became a New York Times bestseller in 2008, after her TED talk about the experience went viral, and Time named her one of its 100 most influential people that year. She has kept writing about it, including in her 2021 book Whole Brain Living.
Real-name note
Robert Greene is the author of The 48 Laws of Power. Modern Wisdom is hosted by Chris Williamson. The neuroscientist in the story is Jill Bolte Taylor.
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FAQ
Who is the neuroscientist Robert Greene talks about? He doesn't name her in the clip, but the book he mentions, My Stroke of Insight, is by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor.
What kind of stroke did Jill Bolte Taylor have? A severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain on December 10, 1996, caused by a congenital arteriovenous malformation.
How long did it take Jill Bolte Taylor to recover? Eight years, by her own account.
Did Robert Greene have a stroke? Yes. Greene had a stroke in August 2018. He says it was a different kind from Taylor's hemorrhagic stroke.