Dr Bessel reveals the ink blot test he accidentally discovered that changed his research. #diaryofaceo #trauma #inkblot #besselvanderkolk #podcast #ptsd #expert #behaviour #veteran #didyouknow #traumahealing #doctor #emdr

We all are living in different worlds. One of the things most profound research experience I had was purely accidental. We started to do Rorschach tests on people. What's that? Inkblot tests. So you show some formless ink picture and we showed it to people. And we saw that people had completely different interpretations of what they projected on that inkblot test. And that really brought home to me that we all are living in different worlds. Like a lot of the Vietnam veterans I saw saw bloody corpses or mutilated bodies in those cards. People who had never been in combat didn't see that. Rape victims saw torn vaginas and torn bodies. Other people didn't see this. So once that becomes lodged into your perceptual system, you continue to interpret the world in that particular way having to do with what you have the answer in the past. And an inkblot test for anyone that doesn't know is basically just a piece of paper with random ink stain. But it's been analysed on about 100,000 people over the years. So there are certain patterns you can detect in it, yeah.