Jill Bolte Taylor

Jill Bolte Taylor (; born May 4, 1959) is an American neuroanatomist, author, and public speaker.

Taylor began to study severe mental illnesses because of her brother's psychosis. In the early 1990s, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, where she was involved in mapping the brain to determine how cells communicate with each other. On December 10, 1996, Taylor had a massive stroke. Her personal experience with a stroke and her subsequent eight-year recovery influenced her work as a scientist and speaker. It is the subject of her 2006 book ''My Stroke of Insight, A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey''. She gave the first TED talk that went viral on the Internet, after which her book became a ''New York Times'' bestseller.

In May 2008 she was named to ''Time Magazine'''s 2008 Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. "My Stroke of Insight" received the top "Books for a Better Life" Book Award in the Science category from the New York City Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in 2009.

Taylor founded the nonprofit Jill Bolte Taylor Brains, Inc., she is an adjunct lecturer in anatomy, cell biology and physiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and she is the national spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. Provided by Wikipedia