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 most of my life and my scientific work has been kind of in chunks.

It's like I get interested in this thing and I do the thing and I publish the paper or whatever and then I move on to the next chunk.

And I wondered when you make a book or when you even make 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?

So it's the craft.

It's not the idea or the nidus of it.

It's really more the execution of it.

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.

Sure.

How do you get adjusted to a new environment?

And are there things you do better each time or things that are always disorienting?

Yeah, we used to think that...

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.

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 which pain scale has better psychometrics and is valid.

And I thought, you know, it would be great as if we had a scale for barfing.

And then the last...

face could be this blowing chunks face.

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 ill nauseated than it is to feel pain.

So I, I had my brother who's a computer programmer, um,

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... Six universal faces, or six universal emotions.

So we represented... And I've read all this stuff about nausea on spacecrafts.

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 phase going chunks.

And 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.

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 into was too highbrow 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, and 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 nausea 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 pain is dead.

No one's pain.

We've got 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 I I've it's no longer interesting.

And that's the thing is we had the essences of the emotions.

So we had the essence 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.

Oh, that's cool.

What's that?

What is it now?

Okay.

Like idols?

Yeah.

Because 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.

Yeah.

And as kids get older, you know, 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.

So there are... It's the culture of my parents' household.

Yeah, cultural.

So it is much more permissible to not be stoic.

It is much more permissible just to say, you know, 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.

Nor do people with visual impairments.

My son doesn't – has a visual impairment, and so he has often a resting superiority face or a resting –

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 pencil in between, yeah, that it becomes so ingrained and 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.

Oh, that's interesting.

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?

Did coning it down make it easier to handle?

It's interesting that that's really one of the best ways that 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 on 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 pain.

If you're in one place that you can control, that filter is healing and liberating and safety.

So what you're saying is I dealt with my grief in the correct way?

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.

I think the hardest part is having people – worrying that 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 having is having is being dismissed.

I think it's feeling marginalized.

And so because what we're doing is very specific with different frequencies, it it's really easy for someone to say, oh, well, that's distraction or oh, 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 your work is so artistic and so deep and emotional and then people say, oh, but you're

Oh, nice.

Love your little doodles.

Love the one where your grandmother died.

That was so cute.

Yeah, yeah.

So much in common.

Yeah.

I think that this is actually the best part of this conversation.

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.

Talk to me.