Can Nirvana be "located" in our brains?

maitri

Can the understanding of how our minds - and brains - works help us to easier understand and access the state of mind we might call Nirvana? I have just read a wonderful book that I'd like to share with those who are interested - My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey:

On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor - who was a 37-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist - awoke with intense pain behind her left eye—a blood vessel had exploded in the left hemisphere of her brain, and within hours, Jill could no longer walk, talk, read or write. She was suffering from an arteriovenous malformation—a rare type of stroke.

While Jill struggled to phone for help, she was aware that the left hemisphere of her brain was shutting down, taking with it her language, organizing and other analytical skills along with its language centers -and thus her ego center.

Her feeling of being a seperate identity disappeared along with most of her memories.

Without the dominant left side of her brain controlling her thoughts, Jill says her mind went silent, leaving only the right side of the brain functioning. Through the right side of her brain, Jill says her consciousness shifted away from reality—and the trauma her body was suffering through—and into a place of inner peace and Nirvana. She felt "at one with the universe."

The interesting thing is that Taylor (like the Buddhist, I believe) says that this bliss and peace is always accessible - and that it actually is the natural state of our (right) mind - that is the right part/hemisphere of the brain.
She says that this part of our brain/mind is naturally blissfull accepting, non-judgemental, friendly and loving. Her experience is that if we learn how to ‘tend the garden of our minds’ we can learn to live in this inner peace (while also having access to our other very useful cognitive functions from our left part of the brain).

The experience was life-changing. Not only did Jill face years of recovery after her stroke—and major brain surgery to remove a large blood clot in her brain—she also discovered a better quality of life through increased use of the right hemisphere of her brain.

The book takes a closer look at how the right hemisphere of the brain works and how Jill says people with normal brains can access it to find their own inner peace and improve their quality of life and the lives of others:

- I believe the more time we spend running our deep inner peace circuitry, then the more peace we will project into the world, and ultimately the more peace we will have on the planet, she says.

Jill Taylor pushes the envelope in our understanding about how we can consciously influence the neural circuitry underlying what we think, how we feel, and how we react to life’s circumstances.
She teaches us through her own example how we might more readily exercise our own right hemispheric circuitry with the intention of helping all human beings become more humane.

I just thought Buddhists (and others) might find this book very interesting. Personally I find it very helpful.

(Parts of this post are quotes from different places.)

Link: http://www.mystrokeofinsight.com/