Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the Indiana brain scientist who suffered a stroke in 1996 at the age of 37 and the author of her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey,” which became a New York Times bestseller, is in the news again.
Her dream of an exhibit featuring giant brains will be mounted around Bloomington, Indiana this spring. According to the Associated Press, she said that the idea behind The Brain Extravaganza! project was to remind people of the importance and complexity of your body’s control center.
Each of the 22 5-foot-tall fiberglass brains will be decorated by a different artist and mounted around the city in early May where they will remain in place until the fall reminding people of the power of the brain. Each brain display costs $3,200 to produce which will be covered by individual sponsors whose name will appear on a plaque on the bottom of the piece.
Fiber artist Martina Celerin is using a glue glun to attach pieces of green-colored felt to one of the hemispheres of her brain creation. “My theme is bipolarism,” she said. “One half of the brain is shaded in greens, and the other half will be shaded in blacks.” Her brain is sponsored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill-Greater Bloomington Affiliate.
Joe La Mantia, another local artist, is displaying pictures of people’s faces and animals on his “brain” to denote a theme of “communication.” According to La Mantia, “The animals — frogs, kissing birds, a giraffe — represent the right hemisphere of the brain, where the imagination is. The faces represent the left side of the brain, where writing and math are.”
In her memoir, Taylor describes how as a neuroanatomist at Harvard University, she felt the severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain while she was having the stroke. Afterwards, she was unable to walk, talk, read, write or remember any of her life and it took her eight years to fully recover.
For more on The Brain Extravaganza! please visit Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s website.
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