In the early 1990s, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, where she was involved in mapping the brain to determine how cells communicate with each other.

She gave the first TED talk that went viral on the Internet,[citation needed] after which her book became a New York Times bestseller.

The cause proved to be bleeding from an abnormal congenital connection between an artery and a vein in the left hemisphere of her brain, an arteriovenous malformation (AVM).

Deborah Jowitt from The Village Voice wrote: "The piece's title, Orbo Novo, is drawn from a 1493 reference to North America by Spanish historian Pietro Martire d'Anghiera.

"[11] On May 3, 2019, on the occasion of Taylor's 60th birthday, the Cecilia Chorus of New York presented the world premiere of Fifty Trillion Molecular Geniuses at New York City's Carnegie Hall, setting text from My Stroke of Insight to the music of Johannes Brahms and Edward Elgar.