Response Paper

Gerard Cove Gaba October 9, 2012

While thousands of psychologists around the globe devote their lives studying other people’s brains, Jill Taylor is faced with a very rare opportunity to study her own brain while experiencing stroke. What captured many people’s attention, including my own, was her detailed reflection about her own conscious experience- something that is nearly impossible to be mistaken about. She watched her brain functions slowly shut down one at a time. In addition to that, she claims to have heard dialogues of muscles coordinating with each other to contract and relax, and that she even experienced drifting away from the external world and felt this sense of peacefulness when her energy left and her spirit surrendered. I was also intrigued when she experienced being just in space and in this state of peace in “Nirvana. Though some critics might argue for the validity of these claims, one cannot deny that her experience of “euphoria” definitely motivated her to recover and that this stroke of insight could be a guide of living in peace.

On the flipside, there has been an astonishing discovery about mirror neurons. I was really fascinated by the technicality and the complexity of the neuron system that Ramachandran spoke of. These mirror neurons allow us to imitate and emulate other people’s actions and there is little room for debate that the emergence of this neuron system definitely shaped our civilization in terms of survival of this species. Another idea that intrigued me was the ability of these mirror neurons to empathize the sensation of other people which we can perceive from our point of view.

There are a couple of psychological perspectives underlying the work of these two brilliant scientists. Jill Taylor’s studies on the microcircuitry of the brain and her actual experience was outlined by the neuroscience perspective as she shares to us in detail her different sensory experiences...