EMDR for PTSD: My Understanding of Why and How It Works

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a therapy for PTSD that works surprisingly well.  I will discuss here my understanding of how and why it works.

Blogging as a Journal

What do I like about One Note that I would like to be able to do online?  Freeflow of thoughts with limited semantic markup to identify units such as “To do”, “Important”, etc.

So what may be missing is a journal application that, essentially, replaces your desk, your notebook.  So when I start working, I want to know:

• What projects do I have?
• What is their relationship?
• What steps do I need to take?
• What are steps that I have taken for project X so that I can take the next step.

What seems to me to be of paramount importance is the idea that a person is working on a single item at any point in time, while the knowledgebase as a whole is really a big pile of crap.  And in this crap, you have your projects, stuff to do, phone numbers, emails, etc.  So it’s really a mix of project-management and data repository.

One way to attain this is to use little hacks.  For example, I can add things like “ToDo:” in this blog and then search the blog only for Todos.  While this will be a decent solution for simple things, it does not provide means to create the more complex structures.  For example, you can’t scope.

<time gap>

OK, enough…  time to drop this note into the abyss that is the web and pass out…

Skimming

So now I am trying to come up with ideas for the new UI for JoVE and it dawned on me that we need to enable people to skim content.  What does that mean?  Let’s define skimming as:

Skimming – quickly looking over content with the possibility of slowing down for things that are identified as interesting.

What does this mean?  This means we need to know:

How we skim: From personal experience, skimming for me is when I relax the eye and simply move it over the page.  A bit like being on the train and letting the surroundings fly by you.  This means that the “modality” of whatever you are looking at is important.  That is:

• If you skim text and images, the content may be mixed without hurting the skimming process (provided distraction is not taken into account
• Images might have lower energy of activation as they are easier to ingest

Arrangement: It is easier to skim structured content than unstructured.  That is – tabular presentation is better then freeform.

It is easier to skim content that is concentrated in the same area than spread out.  For example: consider you are looking for salt and you have 100 spices.  How would you rather perform your selection?  By:

1. Spreading them on the table in random form
2. arranging them in one line or
3. by grouping them into a 10×10 grid

Frankly, I am not sure whether 1) random placement or 3) grouping into grid would be better, but I suspect 3 would perform best as the eye quickly becomes accustomed to the structure of items on the page.

Next Step: when skimming, it is good to have an ability to see an elaboration on the content that may seem interesting.  That is, you might want to see an abstract.

Another aspect is that, when skimming, we want to be able to define what we would like to skim.  Are we looking to skim titles, keywords, authors, comments, etc.?

So, conclusions:

• Need to include pictures (they can shift to videos when the mouse is over them)
• Items need to be grouped into a grid
• No need to show abstracts when presenting for skimming (although option should remain available)
• Best to limit amount of information per item and make it customizable

Now I should run some mock-ups to see what works and what doesn’t…