In the 19 April 2008 issue of New Scientist magazine is an interview with Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Bloomington.

In December 1996 Dr Taylor had a stroke that robbed her of memory, motor skills and even personality. It effectively wiped out her cognitive mind. In the eight years it took her to fully recover from this personal disaster, Taylor says that she found ways to control her thoughts and rebuild her mind.

“On the morning of the third day my mother came to my side. Now, I did not know what a mother was, much less who my mother was. She came in, acknowledged everyone in the room, and then immediately picked up the sheet and crawled into bed with me. I didn’t know who this person was. All I knew was this very kind woman just crawled into my bed, wrapped her arms around me and started rocking me, like I was her baby. And I was her baby. She just recognised that I was an infant again and that was that.”

That is not only a touching story; it illustrates the very physical fragility of the self, and what can happen to a mind when even a tiny blood vessel ruptures in the brain. All the years of learning and experience are undone, and it’s back to square one. Second time around the learning process can be much quicker, but still it’s liking starting with a blank sheet of paper.

What is most extraordinary is Taylor’s description of her recovery: her intimate awareness of what had happened to her self, and how matter-of-fact she is in her approach to neurological healing. Taylor talks of consciously reconstructing her brain with her thoughts.

Maybe hindsight has to some degree crept into Taylor’s recollection of her thinking at the time she was recovering from the stroke. But it strikes me that such detachment requires some kind of meta-consciousness. Or at least after the recovery process has begun.

“People say ‘Oh I’m so much more than the sum of my thoughts, I’m so much more than neurocircuitry,’ and I’m like, yeah, I had that fantasy once, too. I don’t any more. As human beings we all have the ability to focus our minds on what we want to think about.”

This is undoubtedly so, as anyone who has practised meditation, or had to deal with and work through depression or other forms of mental illness, will attest.

Taylor says she knew when the recovery was complete:

“I felt I was completely recovered when I felt I had become a solid again. Until then I felt that I was a fluid.”

That is a very interesting way of putting it, and the story of stroke victim Jill Bolte Taylor shows what an incredible degree of self-awareness is possible in human beings who put their minds to it. Most of us seem to stumble from day to day with our heads full of idle chatter, and rarely if ever give our inner selves a second thought.