Whole Brain Living by Jill Bolte Taylor - String Quartet of the FOUR Characters in Your Brain

Inspired by Jill Bolte Taylor’s description, I love the idea of our brain functioning like a string quartet 🎻— it’s such a powerful and memorable metaphor. The insights from her work are incredibly helpful for understanding how we solve problems, how we think, and why we behave the way we do in different situations and at different times.

(Jill Bolte Taylor is an American neuroanatomist who, at 37, suffered a major left‑hemisphere stroke and was able to observe her own brain functions shutting down in real time. Her recovery, plus her scientific background, led first to My Stroke of Insight, then to Whole Brain Living, where she proposes that each hemisphere has both a thinking and an emotional “character,” giving us four distinct inner personas.)

Enjoy this video and go read her book!

I encourage you to keep listening to the string quartet and think of the 4 characters along the way:

Character 3 (Right Emotional – playful, spontaneous)
Strongest in the 1st movement (Allegretto) with its light, capricious, rhythmically playful surface, like curious, slightly ironic exploration.

Character 2 (Left Emotional – anxious, defensive, brooding)
Comes through in the 2nd movement (Moderato con moto), whose more troubled, unsettled lyricism and undercurrent of tension feel like guardedness and inner worry.

Character 4 (Right Thinking – spacious, reflective, transcendent) Resonates with the 3rd movement (Lento), where the slow, introspective lines and sense of suspended time suggest wide‑angle, contemplative awareness.

Character 1 (Left Thinking – structured, controlled, “getting on with it”)
Is most present in the 4th movement (Allegretto), whose tighter motor rhythms, formal clarity, and driven momentum feel like the system re‑asserting order and forward motion.

#wholebrainliving
#jillboltetaylor