Relief for The Type A Personality
Integrating Left & Right Hemispheres
Being High-Strung or Having a Type A Personality
A little over 50 years ago, psychologists identified that people generally fell into two broad categories in terms of their “personality types,” Type A and Type B. High-strung individuals (Type A) were identified as work-obsessed, impatient, and possessing a ‘short fuse,’ while those who were always easy-going fell into the Type B category. While there seemed to be no negative consequences of being a Type B personality, the Type A person risked developing physical problems such as coronary heart disease and a host of mental health issues.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomists and self-diagnosed workaholic gained important insights about her own Type A Personality and how to change it after experiencing a massive stroke. On the morning of December 10, 1996, she had the unique opportunity study her own brain from the inside out, when she awakened to discover that a blood-vessel exploded on the left-half of her brain. Over the course of several hours, while she had a massive stroke, she became unable to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, and essentially became an infant in a woman’s body.
In order to understand her insight, one must first know a little about the make-up of the human brain. Dr. Taylor teaches us in the above video that:
The two hemispheres (cerebral corticies) of our brains are completely separate from each other. Each of our hemispheres function completely different. They think about different things, they care about different things, and seem to have different “personalities.”
Right half: parallel processor, focus of time in the present (in the here and now), thinks in pictures, and learns from the kinesthetic of our body, information in the form of energy streams-in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes in a collage of what the present moment looks like, smells like, and tastes like, what it feels like, and what it sounds like. If the right half of our brain could speak it would say: “I am an energy being connected to all the energy around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere.” In the sensations of the right hemisphere, we are perfect, we are whole, and we are beautiful, connected to everybody and everything.
Left-half: serial processor, thinks linearly and methodically, focus of time is about the past and the future, it takes the enormous collage of the present moment and starts picking out details, categorizes and associating it with everything in the past that we have ever learned, and projecting it into the future all of our possibilities. It thinks in language (brain chatter that connects your internal world to your external world), it is the voice that tells us “I am” that makes us separate from the energy flow around you into a separate being, disconnected from those around us.
According to Dr. Taylor, “The time that we choose to run the deep inner circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be.”
Dr. Taylor detailed her experiences and resulting theories about the importance of mindfully integrating left and right brain experiences into a more present focus in her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.
More of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: