My Stroke of Insight

On the morning of 10 December 1996, Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, then 37, had a massive stroke when a blood vessel burst in the left side of her brain. Within four hours she watched her mind fail until she could no longer walk, talk, read, write or remember any of her life. As her left hemisphere, the rational side concerned with detail and time, flickered in and out, she shifted between the euphoric peace of the intuitive right brain and the logical awareness that let her get help. Taylor recounts her recovery, which took eight years, and what it showed her about how the brain creates the perception of reality. It has appeared in 29 languages.

Maya Zlatanova, co-founder of FindMeCure, named it in an interview among the books with the greatest impact on her.