Emily Holmes on how to treat trauma
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2022
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emily Holmes is a distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology at Uppsala University and a neuroscientist who struggled to learn to read and write as a child. She tells Jim Al-Khalili about her work as a mental health scientist and her life-long love of art and explains why the images we see in our mind’s eye have more of an impact on our emotions than their verbal counterpart. And describes how this fundamental insight led her to develop a simple and cost-effective treatment for the fleeting flashbacks that haunt people with post traumatic stress disorder: briefly recalling the traumatic event and playing the computer game Tetris. Producer: Anna Buckley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ever wondered what the world's wealthiest people did to get so ridiculously rich? |
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| 0:11.9 | And then we decide if they are actually good, bad or just plain wealthy. |
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| 0:24.6 | listen to Good Bad Billionaire with me, Simon Jack, and me, Zinc Zinc. |
| 0:28.5 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.4 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and welcome to the Life Scientific, |
| 0:38.7 | the podcast where I get to talk to some of our leading scientists, |
| 0:42.3 | and you get to find out what makes them get out of bed in the morning. |
| 0:45.8 | This interview is all about how to treat trauma, |
| 0:48.8 | using pictures, not words, |
| 0:51.3 | and it introduced me to the idea that flash forwards |
| 0:54.6 | that some people have to how they might commit suicide, |
| 0:58.0 | are not dissimilar to the flashbacks that haunt people with PTSD. |
| 1:02.8 | If that all sounds a bit depressing, |
| 1:04.5 | rest assured it's an incredibly positive story about how one woman, |
| 1:08.9 | thinking differently about mental health, |
| 1:11.0 | has led to some innovative new treatments. |
| 1:13.5 | I hope you enjoy listening. |
| 1:15.3 | Hello, my guest on the Life Scientific today has got me thinking about the power of our imagination, |
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