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Emily Holmes on how to treat trauma

Why images are more powerful than words in shaping how we think and feel.

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

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31 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Tue 20 Sep 2022 09:00
  • Tue 20 Sep 2022 21:30

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