Whole Brain Living

The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life

By: Jill Bolte Taylor Ph.D

Narrated by: Jill Bolte Taylor Ph.D

The New York Times best-selling author of My Stroke of Insight blends neuroanatomy with psychology to show how we can short-circuit emotional reactivity and find our way to peace.

For half a century, we have been trained to believe that our right brain hemisphere is our emotional brain, while our left brain houses our rational thinking. Now neuroscience shows that it's not that simple: In fact, our emotional limbic tissue is evenly divided between our two hemispheres. Consequently, each hemisphere has both an emotional brain and a thinking brain. In this groundbreaking new book, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor presents these four distinct modules of cells as four characters that make up who we are: Character One, Left Thinking; Character Two, Left Emotion; Character Three, Right Emotion; and Character Four, Right Thinking.

Everything we think, feel, or do is dependent upon brain cells to perform that function. Since each of the Four Characters stems from specific groups of cells that feel unique inside of our body, they each display particular skills, feel specific emotions, or think distinctive thoughts. In Whole Brain Living, Dr. Taylor shows us how to get acquainted with our own Four Characters, observe how they show up in our daily life, and learn to identify and relate to them in others as well. And she introduces a practice called the Brain Huddle - a tool for bringing our Four Characters into conversation with one another so we can tap their respective strengths and choose which one to embody in any situation.

The more we become familiar with each of the characters in ourselves and others, the more power we gain over our thoughts, our feelings, our relationships, and our lives. Indeed, we discover that we have the power to choose who and how we want to be in every moment. And when our Four Characters work together and balance one another as a whole brain, we gain a radical new road map to deep inner peace.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist. In 1996 she experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain causing her to lose the ability to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Her memoir, My Stroke of Insight, documenting her experience with stroke and eight-year recovery, spent 63 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list and is still routinely the number-one book about stroke on Amazon.

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