Most Replayed Moment: The 4 Personalities Living In Your Brain! How To Switch Between Them

**Steven Bartlett** (0:00)
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So you said there's four personalities in everybody's brain. What are those four personalities?

**Jill Bolte Taylor** (1:07)
As we're looking at the brain, just from an anatomical perspective, the way evolution happens for the mammalian brain, is that there are creatures who have a spinal cord, and there are creatures like worms, and then a little brain, a little medulla will form at the top of that tissue, and then now that brain controls and streamlines information processing to the rest of the system. And then we add a pons.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:38)
What's that?

**Jill Bolte Taylor** (1:38)
It's just a structure of cells. So this is the medulla.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:41)
Yeah.

**Jill Bolte Taylor** (1:41)
We would have spinal cord there, and this is the pons. Oh, is it the pons? It's a group of cells.
Yeah, it's a smaller brain. And in relationship to that pons is this cerebellum. And the cerebellum has this gorgeous cell in it called the Purgenji cell, and they're like a hand, they're like two-dimensional, and they all line up like this. And then fibers run through those, and it's part of the mechanism of timing so that you have fluidity of movement because of the way those cells are aligned. So not all cells are created equal and not all cells look alike. Cells have the right shape for the right job.
So as then we grow and now we have the mammalian brain, we're going to have the hippocampus, you've heard of that, for learning and memory, the amygdala, you've heard that, for am I safe?

**Steven Bartlett** (2:33)
Am I safe?

**Jill Bolte Taylor** (2:34)
Are you safe? The amygdala, yeah, there's a group of cells right there that is scanning constantly, am I safe? Am I safe? And you're fine until you're not safe.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:43)
Okay, so like threat detection.

**Jill Bolte Taylor** (2:44)
Yes, that's exactly what it is. You have two emotional systems, one in your left hemisphere and one in your right hemisphere. And the right hemisphere is going to be right here right now. Am I safe in the right here right now? So let's say all of a sudden a snake went by and we would jump, we would startle because it's your right amygdala saying, oh my gosh, am I safe? And then the left hemisphere is going, oh my gosh, it's a snake, no, I'm not safe. Push it away.
And when we're calm, that's when the hippocampi, because we have two amygdala, one in each hemisphere, two hippocampi, one in each hemisphere. And when the amygdala are calm and you feel safe, now you can learn and focus, focus with the anterior, with the cingulate gyrus, and learn new things. So these groups of cells, now if you wipe out an amygdala, you're not going to feel any fear. You wipe out a language center, you're not going to have any language. You wipe out motor skills to your index finger and you're paralyzed. So every ability you have is because we have these brain cells that perform that function.
So for the four parts of us, so we have an emotional system in each hemisphere. The emotional system of the right hemisphere, this is a right here, right now machine. Right here, right now, that's all it has. Doesn't have the past, doesn't have the future, doesn't know who you are.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:05)
Doesn't have anxiety, depression.

**Jill Bolte Taylor** (4:06)
Well, it has anxiety, but most of that is going to be based in the left hemisphere. Because this machine, the left hemisphere, has linearity across time. So this emotional system is remembering every traumatic event that ever happened to you, that you don't want to have happen again.