Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

So yes, I have a brother who's 18 months older than I, and he would eventually be diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia.

So as a child, I just noticed that this guy and I, we were completely different in the way we interpreted our experiences.

For example, if we're out playing kickball and the ball goes flying out into the yard and my mom is on the stoop and all of a sudden she jumps up and she's screaming at us, I interpret that as terror that her kids are going to get killed if we run out into the street.

But my brother interpreted her hollering as anger.

And that's a fundamental difference when we are not understanding and perceiving people's emotions in the same way.

So I just became really fascinated with what are the differences between me and my brother and what is going on?

And it had to be at the level of the brain because biologically, he's the closest thing to me that exists in the universe.

So I became fascinated with body language, social relations, vocal languaging, all of that.

And what am I as a human being?

I was just fascinated with what am I as a living being?

So that caught my attention.

And then as I got older, I really became fascinated with how does our brain create our perception of reality?

What is normal and what is not normal?

So yeah, no, I grew up to be a neuroanatomist.

I study the brain at a cellular level.

So because fundamentally, I figured it was

the differences between me and my brother were going to be in the way our brains wired each other.

Oh, that's a big question.

I believed that, first of all, every ability we have is because we have brain cells that perform that function.

And to me, the single-celled organism is just this, that is life.