“Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke! And in the next instant, the thought flashed through my mind, this is so cool!”

You want a guided tour of the human brain? Follow Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Taylor’s extraordinary account of the cranial hemorrhage that shut down her left brain when she was 37 years old. But the talk’s value — its preciousness — lies less in the plain-language, enthusiastic science it offers us, than in the door it courageously opens to the mystery of the brain’s right hemisphere and beyond...to the pulsing miracle of life and the vast universe that is our home.

Part of the joy of this talk is that nothing unfolds the way you’d expect. The sudden loss of her left-brain organizational and self-defining capabilities was not, for instance, terrifying. Taylor saw her stroke as a gift of unparalleled awareness: the shattering of the self-created box we live in that we call “life.”

What makes her presentation invaluable is Taylor’s fearless mapping of the physiology of compassion, the physiology of Nirvana.