TED Talks Daily How can creativity help us heal? A doctor and a cartoonist answer | Amy Baxter and Navied Mahdavian
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Jun 7, 2025 
Amy Baxter, a physician renowned for her innovative pain treatment methods, teams up with Navied Mahdavian, a New Yorker cartoonist known for exploring identity through humor. They discuss the healing potential of creativity, showcasing how storytelling can serve as therapy. Amy shares insights on her unique B.A.R.F. scale for assessing nausea, while Navied highlights the emotional depth that cartooning can convey. Their conversation reveals that mixing medicine with art can produce powerful healing outcomes, blending complexity with whimsy.
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BARF Scale: Animated Nausea Measuring
- Amy Baxter developed the BARF scale using animated faces to measure nausea severity.
- This scale has been validated for kids with cancer in multiple languages and has a hidden playful element.
Cartooning's Universal Emotional Power
- Cartooning distills complex emotions into minimal lines, capturing feelings recognized universally.
- Face pareidolia shows that humans are evolutionarily wired to see and interpret facial expressions.
Facial Recognition Is Hardwired
- Early childhood attention to faces is crucial for development; lack of it can indicate autism.
- Facial recognition and emotional expression are hardwired, supporting universal understanding of cartoons.