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Elise Hu
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host. Elise Hunter is back for a second season. This original series features unscripted conversations between TED speakers and experts taking on subjects at the intersection of their expertise. In today's conversation, Navid Medhavian, a New Yorker cartoonist and writer, sits down with physician Amy Baxter to answer the question.
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How do you navigate pain?
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You'll be amazed by the connections they make between telling stories on paper treating physical pain and how the act of healing manifests in unexpected ways. That's up next.
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Navid Madhavyan
Every artist will say their medium is the highest art form. But they're wrong. Because cartooning is the highest art form. Because you can say so much with so little and with just like a few lines, you can express happiness and smugness and sadness. Because every time I am drawing something, I mean, I find that I'm recreating the cartoon on my face. Like I'm trying, I'm expressing it on my face exactly, contouring my face as I'm drawing it. And there's constant, like the erasing it until I get that expression. One of the things I like about it and being here at TED next is the intersections between. Like when I was asked to sit down with you, it was like maybe talking to a doctor. I don't know, like I don't know what I'm going to be talking about. But then as I started thinking about it, like realizing that there were those overlaps.
Amy Baxter
Yeah, I think that's one of the things that the people I've met are really good at is finding threads and then sort of pulling them until you both come to the place where you're together. One thing I thought was interesting about our intersection is that I've most of my life and my scientific work has been kind of in chunks. You know, it's like I get interested in this thing and I do the thing and I publish the paper, whatever, and then I move on to the next chunk. And I wondered when you make a book or when you even make, you know, one cartoon, does that exercise whatever either demon is pushing you or whatever creative nugget? Or do you still Keep a thread that goes through all of them.
Navid Madhavyan
I was gonna make a joke about the demon where it makes it sound much more dramatic, but I think there is this. The demon is this desire to be liked and for people to laugh at what I'm doing. But the book and the cartoons are really different because the cartoons, you just like, you're just doing one after another, and you just kind of like, turn them out. You find something that's funny, and then they're inevitably going to be rejected at the end of the week after I've submitted, and then you just move on where the book is a much larger project. And so the book that I wrote, this country searching for home in very rural America, I mean, that was a project that from its inception to publication was about three years, which is a very different process than the cartoon that, you know, I think of something funny about dog butts, draw it, send it out, and then just move on to the next cartoon idea. But I don't know if there's ever this excising or, like, reaching a point of completion, like the book was finished. But even in the process of drawing it, there's the, like, getting the 10,000 hours in where the beginning of the book to the end of the book, comparing it. The drawing, like, style at the end is better. And I've spoken to other artists about this. The frustration that when you're working on something long where, like, you are just always getting better at what you're doing because it's a craft, and then wanting to go back and, like, I wish I could go back and redraw those, but then inevitably, then that would look better than the end. And I feel like that process is just. It's a constant. And so maybe that's the demon. It's just the never being satisfied with. With what you're interested.
Amy Baxter
So it's the craft. It's not the. It's not the idea or the nidus of it. It's really more the execution of it.
Navid Madhavyan
Yeah, well, then there are the idea. So most of the work that I've been doing in the past couple of years, since I finished the book, I went from the single gag cartoons to comics that are about me and like the memoir. And so using myself as a starting point to explore things that in that moment are interesting, but there are. I think they fit into. There are themes and genres. And so I think I'm just exploring those through these little nuggets. And so I don't know if that exploration is ever. So there's the Craft and then there is the idea. And, and I'm exploring the idea while refining the craft and then figuring out new ways to explore those ideas.
Amy Baxter
So you. And I'll let you ask questions too, but you have moved to a lot of different places. And one thing I find about being in foreign countries, whether it's in your own country or just difference, I think that we know who we are because the banks of our river are made up by the things and the people that keep us in place. And so when you leave those and you no longer have your banks, it can be very destabilizing.
Navid Madhavyan
Sure.
Amy Baxter
How do you get adjusted to a new environment? And are there things you do better each time or things that are always disorienting?
Navid Madhavyan
Yeah. So I think in the past I have a five year old daughter and I think within the first four years of her life she lived in four different cities in two countries. And I think we always say kids are really resilient, but then I think we're really resilient. But I don't know if that process does get easier. And I think that there's always the destabilizing and then the always. And I think like as you get older, it becomes harder to make friends and like you have the certain things that are anchoring. But one of the questions that I explore in my book is what is home? So it's like searching for home in very rural America. But I think that that's just like what we're constantly doing no matter where we are. And I think we have like those, the concentric circles where you know, you have like your immediate home, like the, your house. And then you have like your, your yard and your wider community. And I think that moving you have, there's like that inner ring and then the outer rings are the things that are constantly changing. And sometimes you're not able to find that stabilizing force. So like when I moved to rural Idaho, I tried finding like that expanding circles, those outer circles, they never really felt stabilizing. And so then there was the decision then to move. And so now I'm living in a new place and hopefully I'll, you know, find. Find that. Yeah, yeah.
Amy Baxter
We used to think that, you know, happy people can be happy anywhere. And then we went to Dallas and it was really interesting because the values of the people around us were so different. It really was hard to trust and feel common ground. And it turned out it was much more what mattered to people that made us feel comfortable. Not even activities or educational level or any of those things, although they helped. But what made much more of a difference was the why of the people.
Navid Madhavyan
I mean, what about for you? What is it like because you've developed, like, physical products? I mean, I really want to talk about the BARF system, but what is it like for you as you are developing these? And then, I mean, is there the moving on, excising.
Amy Baxter
So the thing you're referring to, my first grant was to make a scale for nausea. And I had the idea sitting at my desk. I'd been working with pain for so long, and so I had all of these pain scales and you know, which pain scale has better psychometrics and is valid. And I thought, you know what would be great is if we had a scale for barfing. And then the last face could be this blowing chunk space. And I thought that. So that made me chuckle. And so then I thought, you know, actually, it's worse for many people to be nauseated than it is to feel pain. So I had my brother, who's a computer programmer, make a Python program, and we had Luke Conrad, who's a cartoonist, draw a whole bunch of different faces that represented the six basic. Ekman calls them the six discussed and six universal faces or six universal emotions. So we represented, and I've read all this stuff about nausea on spacecrafts and anyway, and so we figured out which parts of a face on a cartoon made someone feel like that person had nausea. You know, was it sweat coming out? Was it a trembling lip? Was it feeling dizzy? What was it? And so we made all of those things together, and then we had 120 faces, and we just morphed them. So it was like a little animation of this, you know, neutral face going chunks. And then so the nurses would figure out where they thought each of the different intermediate places was. But the things that I'm most proud about the BARF scale are that it's been translated in three languages for kids with cancer and validated in those languages. It is.
Navid Madhavyan
Do they keep the acronym BARF in the different languages?
Amy Baxter
That's a great question. I don't know. I think they do, because I don't think they realize that the acronym stands for Baxter Animated Retching Faces Scale. But the only reason I had to have an acronym was because the journal I wanted to get in was too high brow to use the word barf. And so I snuck it in, but I was like, no, no, no, no. This is the name of the creators. This is. It came from an animation of cartoons. That's why we have to keep this name. So I got the name Barf in the. And I also. There's a little monster hidden in the last face. It's got a very dear place in my heart. But despite this whole Hero's Journey spiral concept, once I was done with it, I wasn't interested in researching Naja anymore. I did my thing. Other people can use it. I'm on to my next thing. I got so much grief from the doctor who had mentored me through it, because he was like, pain is dead. No one's pain. We've got it taken care of. Nausea is the next frontier. And I was like, well, yeah, but I'm more interested in pain, so I'm done with that part. So when I get something done, I'm much more interested in going on to the next thing. And I may bring pieces with me, but it's no longer interesting.
Navid Madhavyan
As you were talking about the development of the scale, as a cartoonist, I was getting excited, and that was the thing that I was most excited to talk to you about, because I was like, oh, what an interesting overlap. Something I talk about in my TED Talk is the power of cartoons and why every artist will say their medium is the highest art form, but they're wrong, because cartooning is the highest art form. Because you can say so much with so little, and with just, like, a few lines, you can express happiness and smugness and sadness. And so as you were talking about the developing, like, finding what the neutral is to the bar thing, but then all those in the middle, like, I didn't know, like you said, that there was the. Somebody had developed the different faces and you. Yeah. Which, I mean, as. As a cartoonist, I would have loved to have known, because every time I am drawing something, I mean, I find that I'm recreating the cartoon on my face. Like, I'm trying. I'm expressing on my face. Exactly. Contouring my face as I'm drawing. And there's constant, like, the erasing. And until I get that expression Right. And so I'm constantly recreating that in it. And so hearing the process, like. Like, how did you settle on. These are the right.
Amy Baxter
Well, that's. And that's. The thing is we. We had. We had the essences of the emotions, so we had the essence of. Of disgust, the essence of sweating, the essence of feeling nauseous and concerned. And then once those faces looked good, then everything morphed from a computer standpoint until it was incremental. And then we had real people, nurses gauge where on that spectrum, they thought 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% was. But it's interesting what you say, because I think that we've just got back from going to a bunch of different Picasso museums in a row. And so the time where he backed off from expressing everything in a face to expressing an eyebrow and a nose with one arc and finding what the most distilled essence is of something. And I think that that is a really interesting part about cartooning.
Paige Desorba
Yeah.
Navid Madhavyan
And that's what makes this apparent. It's that distillation of what are complex emotions but into just a few lines, and we're immediately able to recognize those emotions through those lines.
Amy Baxter
Do you know if that transcends cultures?
Navid Madhavyan
Well, I mean, there's the. It's the phenomenon of face pareidolia, where we see faces in inanimate objects.
Amy Baxter
Oh, that's cool. What's that word again? No, that's pareidolia. Okay.
Navid Madhavyan
I should know this.
Amy Baxter
I was called idols.
Navid Madhavyan
Major show. The Greek for it. But, yeah, I mean, we. It's. I don't know, the. I mean, there's something evolutionary about it, but that we see faces in, like, sort of happy. Like the front of a car will see a smiley face or whatever. We see faces everywhere. And so I think that the. The ability to recognize smiley face as a smiley face is. Whatever that is hardwired.
Amy Baxter
It makes it. Because the. Developmentally, for children, they are only able to see black and white early on. But one of the reasons why you actually can tell autism very, very early is because they're not making the eye contact or they're not seeing the face shapes. That's not where their attention is. And as kids get older, 18 months, their attention is not at the interaction between people. Their attention is at a spot on the distance or a tree or something like that. So for most people, I think you're right. It's just universal, and it probably is part of that hardwiring in for how we're born. Things that we may also overlap on. Pain is interestingly very cultural. It is very different in different cultures. Go on, go on. Well, yeah, so there are different cultures where letting it out is more what you're supposed to do.
Navid Madhavyan
So there are the culture of my parents. Household.
Amy Baxter
Yeah, cultural. So it is much more permissible to not be stoic. It is much more permissible just to say, to really lean into how you're feeling or letting people know. And then there are cultures that are very stoic, and male and female feel pain differently. So it's interesting to me that cartooning or that expressions could be so symmetric amongst different cultures when one of the most basic self protection techniques we have is actually represented in very different ways in different cultures.
Navid Madhavyan
Yeah. Which also, I mean I've. I thought about this after having my daughter where the ways that we even within like American culture, the way that we express happiness or sadness, the sort of smiley face, the up and the down, like we don't actually frown, but we recognize the frown as being sad. But then I saw with my daughter when she was a toddler, she actually would frown and she actually would. So there was something that was much more representative of our pictorial representations of happiness and sadness and whatever else in her face and for whatever reason, like adults don't do that anymore. And I wondered if like are all kids like that? At what point do we lose that? Because she would definitely frown.
Amy Baxter
Do you have a full on palate?
Navid Madhavyan
It's exactly the full on pal. But we don't actually see adults do with it. Sort of like often with the downturn, it's usually the comical, the expression of that. But not actually because I think with our expressions and how we, our feelings and how we express them, I mean often it's not really in the face that we're representing how we're feeling. Right. It's what makes it so difficult to know like you're speaking to somebody, like how are they actually feeling? Because we can mask it so well where little kids they, they don't do that.
Amy Baxter
Nor do people with visual impairments. My son doesn't has a visual impairment and so he has often arresting superiority face or arresting hungry. I mean it doesn't, you know, many things will come across his face that he doesn't hide. It is also getting back to the genetic hardwiring ideas. This concept that if you make yourself smile, even holding a pencilly, holding a pencil in between it. Yeah. That it becomes so ingrained in such a repetitive thing that you will feel happier, you'll feel more joyful. And so I wonder if we also negatively reinforce ourselves and don't frown because it does make us feel worse.
Navid Madhavyan
Oh, that's interesting.
Amy Baxter
I don't know. When you're drawing something that is about your own family or about something that's really personal to you and grief, how does that change how you approach drawing it?
Navid Madhavyan
So I wrote a piece about the first P. I've done a couple of pieces related to grief. One about accompanying my dad to dialysis for the first time and another about my grandmother. The last time I Got to see her before she. She passed. And in each of those, I mean, like, grief is complicated. So my approach to both of them was to try to take something big and to make it simple. And I did that by focusing on certain things. So one was going to dialysis with my dad. He's slowly dying of kidney failure. And then for my grandmother, it was focusing on her hands. One of my earliest memories is of her hands. And I think that when we're trying to dodge grief, like, not deal with our grief, we tend to caricature the person that we've lost. And cartooning's allowed me to, like, focus on certain details, which then I think opens up into, like, the. This complex person and to my complicated relationship with them. So, like, with my grandmother, like, focusing on her hands was just this, like, focal point. And because there's so much that I could have written about her, but, like, focusing on that allowed me to sort of explore certain memories that were related to that and to also keep it in this very personal realm because my grandmother's not here. So I'm like, in some. Some ways, like, speaking for her and on her behalf, but keeping it firmly rooted in my experience of her. That makes sense.
Amy Baxter
Did coning it down make it easier to handle?
Navid Madhavyan
Totally. Because. And particularly with. With comics, I tend to think of it as, like, I have, like, these number of panels in order to express this, like, very big experience. And so that allowed me to. Yeah, I guess just to focus in on this one specific thing and this expression of my love for my grandmother. Because otherwise, I mean, there's just, like, so much that you could explore.
Amy Baxter
It's interesting that that's really one of the best ways. The people who get through pain and don't have pain later in life is because they learn how to only focus on one thing. That meditation teaches you, how to not pay attention to extraneous things. And so to be able to just focus on hands or just focus. A rock or a breath is partially allowing you to let go of all the pain externally. And it's both physical as well as mental. If you're in one place that you can control, that filter is healing and liberating and safety.
Navid Madhavyan
So what you're saying is, I dealt with my grief in the correct way.
Amy Baxter
I think it's just interesting that it's analogous to the way we deal with physical pain. And so what you did was a visual embodiment of the same techniques that are helpful for dealing with physical pain. And I don't think there's a Correct or a right or a wrong. It's just interesting that both of them are effective. That's probably what's important for everyone. Dealing with grief is finding what works for you. And hearing about other people's mechanisms for dealing with pain or grief or anything helps you figure out which one does work for you. I don't think there's right or wrong for any of it.
Navid Madhavyan
So you're using vibration to deal with pain. What is the hardest part of that?
Amy Baxter
I think the hardest part is having people worrying. People are going to laugh at me when I'm talking about vibration or vibrators or not taking it seriously. I think that probably for me, the worst thing is not being respected, is being dismissed. I think it's feeling marginalized. And so because what we're doing is very specific with different frequencies. Frequencies. It's really easy for someone to say, oh, well, that's distraction. Or, oh, well, that's, you know, or you're dealing with vibrators. And so I think the hardest part for me has been trying to not get my emotions in the way or my fear of rejection or fear of not being taken seriously because we're working with a different kind of physics and it can be so easily reduced. Kind of like you're, you know, your work is so artistic and so deep and emotional and. And then people say, oh, but you're. You're making cartoons.
Navid Madhavyan
I do. As my. My little doodles. As people love to say.
Amy Baxter
Oh, nice.
Navid Madhavyan
Love your little doodles.
Amy Baxter
Love, love the one where your grandmother died. That was the best. It was so cute.
Navid Madhavyan
Yeah. So another commonality, the fear of rejection and not being taken seriously.
Amy Baxter
Yeah. Yeah. So much in common.
Navid Madhavyan
Yeah. Thank you for having this conversation. I'm really happy that we were able to. That you were able to inject into the conversation. What was it? Barf and vibrators.
Amy Baxter
There's so many good things. I think that this is actually the best part of this space for intellectual discourse is when you can find a commonality with things that seem so completely different and then open up these connections. Because one thing about innovation is that you're never going to innovate if you're only talking to people in your own space. So it really. The only way you can make huge leaps is by having a great conversation with someone who's in an arena and a discipline that you would not normally talk to. So this has been really great. I appreciate your having the time to talk to me.
Navid Madhavyan
Thanks for talking to me.
Elise Hu
That was a conversation between Navid Madhavyan and Amy Baxter for our original series ted intersections. Visit Ted.com to watch this conversation and others from the series. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar and Tonsika Sarmarniva. It was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.
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Podcast Summary: TED Talks Daily
Episode Title: How can creativity help us heal? A doctor and a cartoonist answer | Amy Baxter and Navid Mahdavian
Release Date: June 7, 2025
Host: TED (Elise Hu)
In this compelling episode of TED Talks Daily, hosted by Elise Hu, cartoonist Navid Mahdavian and physician Amy Baxter engage in an insightful dialogue exploring the intersection of creativity and healing. The conversation delves into how storytelling through art and innovative medical approaches can facilitate personal and emotional healing.
Navid Mahdavian opens the discussion by advocating for cartooning as the highest art form. He emphasizes the medium's ability to convey complex emotions with minimal lines, stating:
“Every artist will say their medium is the highest art form. But they're wrong. Because cartooning is the highest art form. Because you can say so much with so little and with just like a few lines, you can express happiness and smugness and sadness.”
— Navid Mahdavian [03:45]
Navid explains how the act of drawing cartoons is not just a creative exercise but also a personal process of expressing and refining emotions through facial expressions and minimalistic art.
Amy Baxter introduces her innovative project, the Baxter Animated Retching Faces (BARF) Scale, designed to quantify and visualize nausea in patients. She discusses the collaborative effort between medical professionals and cartoonists to create an animated scale that accurately reflects the spectrum of nausea experiences.
“One of the things I like about it and being here at TED is the intersections between. Like when I was asked to sit down with you, it was like maybe talking to a doctor. I don't know, like I don't know what I'm going to be talking about. But then as I started thinking about it, like realizing that there were those overlaps.”
— Navid Mahdavian [03:57]
Amy elaborates on the technical aspects of the BARF Scale, including its validation across different languages and its practical applications in medical settings, particularly for children with cancer.
The conversation shifts to the broader theme of how both Navid and Amy navigate pain—physically and emotionally. Navid shares his personal experiences of grief and loss, explaining how cartooning serves as a therapeutic tool to simplify and express complex emotions associated with his family's health struggles.
“One of my earliest memories is of her hands. And I think that when we're trying to dodge grief, like, not deal with our grief, we tend to caricature the person that we've lost.”
— Navid Mahdavian [20:30]
Amy draws parallels between managing physical pain and emotional grief, highlighting the importance of focusing on specific aspects to facilitate healing.
“It's analogous to the way we deal with physical pain. And so what you did was a visual embodiment of the same techniques that are helpful for dealing with physical pain.”
— Amy Baxter [23:35]
Amy and Navid explore how cultural backgrounds influence the expression of emotions and pain. Amy discusses the variability in how different cultures allow or discourage the expression of grief and discomfort, noting:
“Pain is interestingly very cultural. It is very different in different cultures. There are different cultures where letting it out is more what you're supposed to do.”
— Amy Baxter [17:23]
Navid reflects on his observations of how cultural norms shape the way individuals express happiness and sadness, especially contrasting his experiences with his daughter.
“Because we can mask it so well where little kids they, they don't do that. Nor do people with visual impairments.”
— Navid Mahdavian [19:21]
A significant portion of the dialogue addresses the common challenge both professionals face—the fear of not being taken seriously in their respective fields. Amy discusses the societal tendency to trivialize her work with the BARF Scale, while Navid shares experiences of his artistic efforts being dismissed as mere doodles.
“The hardest part is trying not to get my emotions in the way or my fear of rejection or fear of not being taken seriously.”
— Amy Baxter [24:10]
“Another commonality, the fear of rejection and not being taken seriously.”
— Navid Mahdavian [25:33]
Both agree that resilience and finding personal validation are crucial in overcoming these professional hurdles.
The discussion culminates in the therapeutic benefits of focused creativity. Navid explains how concentrating on specific details in his cartoons helps him process grief and complex emotions, allowing him to manage and heal from personal losses.
“Grief is complicated. So my approach to both of them was to try to take something big and to make it simple.”
— Navid Mahdavian [20:10]
Amy parallels this with psychological techniques used in pain management, where focusing on a single aspect can help mitigate overwhelming feelings.
“Focusing on hands or just focus. A rock or a breath is partially allowing you to let go of all the pain externally. And it's both physical as well as mental.”
— Amy Baxter [22:20]
Navid and Amy conclude by emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary conversations in fostering innovation and healing. They highlight how bridging different fields can lead to groundbreaking approaches in both creative expression and medical practices.
“The only way you can make huge leaps is by having a great conversation with someone who's in an arena and a discipline that you would not normally talk to.”
— Amy Baxter [25:47]
This episode beautifully illustrates how creativity and science can collaborate to enhance our understanding and management of both physical and emotional pain, offering listeners a nuanced perspective on the healing power of art.
Key Takeaways:
Cartooning as Emotional Expression: Minimalistic art forms like cartooning can effectively convey complex emotions, serving as a therapeutic tool.
Innovative Medical Tools: The development of the BARF Scale exemplifies how creative collaborations can lead to practical solutions in healthcare.
Cultural Sensitivity: Understanding cultural differences is crucial in addressing how individuals express and manage pain and grief.
Overcoming Professional Challenges: Both creatives and medical professionals face similar fears of rejection, highlighting the need for resilience and interdisciplinary support.
Focused Creativity for Healing: Concentrating on specific details in creative projects can aid in processing and overcoming personal grief and pain.
This episode of TED Talks Daily offers a profound exploration of the synergy between creativity and medicine, demonstrating how innovative thinking can foster profound healing and emotional resilience.