Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information … explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like.

Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, became widely known after describing her 1996 stroke and its effects on her cognition, later popularized in her TED talk and memoir. In explaining hemispheric specialization to general audiences, she contrasts the left hemisphere’s language- and sequence-oriented processing with the right hemisphere’s holistic, sensory, present-moment awareness. This quotation reflects her public-facing account of how the right hemisphere integrates multisensory input—visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and auditory—into an immediate experiential “collage,” and how it learns through bodily movement (kinesthetic learning). The phrasing is characteristic of her lecture style when narrating what perception feels like from the inside.

The quote argues that the right hemisphere apprehends reality as an integrated, embodied scene rather than as a linear, verbal narrative. “Thinks in pictures” and “learns kinesthetically” emphasize nonverbal cognition: understanding through images, sensation, and movement. The “enormous collage” metaphor suggests simultaneity—many sensory channels arriving at once—highlighting how present-moment experience can feel rich and immersive when not filtered into words and categories. In Taylor’s broader message, this description also serves a normative purpose: it invites listeners to value embodied awareness and to recognize that different neural modes of attention can produce different kinds of knowledge and well-being.