The choreographer of her life

By Intikhab Amir

Every human being is a complex mix of two personalities, a coin with two sides. Both happen to be different from each other. One believes in togetherness, unity, and love for others. For her, the world is a big family. The other tends to be self-centred and egocentric. He is bent to make hell of this world.
One individual with two personalities! It sounds naive, the height of absurdity. Medical science, however, enforces this apparently weird concept.
The culprit for the duality is none other than the human brain. The human brain, according to researchers, is composed of two parts: the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. One is a proponent of unity, the other implants individualism.
Explaining the complexities of human brain, Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher, in her Ted Talk, helps her listeners to understand the composition of the human brain, its functions, how it keeps our body a coherent entity, how it absorbs information and disseminates it, how it shapes human behaviour and attitudes towards others, and how it nourishes superiority complexes among human beings promoting individualism – a threat to world peace.
Taylor grew up studying the brain. She studied her own brother, a schizophrenic patient. But, her most enriched experience studying the human brain came from none other than her own brain. She suffered a stroke on December 10, 1996, which, in her words, left her “an infant in a woman’s body,” as her brain was rendered unable to process information.
The seven-minute ‘Ted Talk’ leaves the listeners with mixed feelings. It arouses their interest by providing them a peep into the human brain; expanding their knowledge about its composition, size, and functions. Simultaneously, it breaks them into laughter when told how their own brain alienates them by implanting in them an obsession with ‘I am.” Similarly, it also leaves them with wet-eyes when she explains her ordeal: when the idea dawned upon her that she was not the choreographer of her own life. It was the brain’s enormousness in her little body that was the source of her all energy. Ends