Alan Alda: The Art of Science Communication

being a scientist I think I can say that scientists are often accused correctly of taking simple things and explaining them in very complicated ways it's probably the epicenter of this and perhaps at MIT where everyone I realized have come come here it speaks in code numeric codes you don't study you don't study neuroscience you don't study engineering you take course nine you take course six you take it in building 43 and 46 and the point 9.02 listening to some students I'm not sure if I need a translator or a slide rule sometimes to figure out what they're talking about and so I stand in awe of someone like Alan Alda who takes complicated things and explains them in simple ways that everyone can understand and he given the given the state of science and the public eye in today's world I think we need a hundred Alan Alda and if he would agree at the after dinner tonight I think we will do some skin scrapings and maybe have you cloned I'm not I don't know Alan personally so I don't know how he acquired this interest in science I speculate it might have developed when he played the classic character Hawkeye on the series mash which ran for 11 seasons we all went through school watching mash rather than doing our homework he for 11 years he hosted the award-winning PBS series Scientific American frontiers and in which he interviewed hundreds of scientists around the world this year he interviewed anthropologists primatologists and neuro scientists in the PBS miniseries the human spark which raised the question what makes us human and I should say as part of that series Alan did have his brain scanned in our imaging enter downstairs in an interview with Rebecca Saxe on Broadway he played the physicist Richard Feynman and had the weird experience of then giving the commencement address at Caltech where Fineman had himself given the commencement address in the past in 2006 for his elf efforts to help broaden the public's understanding of science who is presented with the National Science Board's public service award for the last two years Allen has been working with physicist Brian Greene in presenting the world science festival in New York City which was attended last year by 160,000 people it is a privilege to welcome al Allen to the podium thank you very much thank you I have no I have my own personal microphone thank you it comes in handy on the train you know I'd like a beer please thank you very much for anybody who knows what I actually looked like ordinarily I guess I should explain the hair in my face I'm making a movie right now in Georgia where I have to be bearded and scruffy I'm playing the founder of a free love commune and it's fun to play then the research is exhausting killing me I couple of days ago I said to one of my daughters I'm a little nervous I'm going to go up to Boston and speak and and she and I said I'm usually not nervous like that anything she said were you talking to and I said a lot of neuroscientists and she said what are you going to talk about and I said neuroscience and there was this little pause and then she said don't they already know about that I said no no I'm not going to tell them anything I'm going to ask them something when I ask them a question and I just want to make sure I frame the question right you know I mean and and this is this is the place to ask a question about neuroscience of course than McGovern the neuroscience is is probably the new frontier and the McGovern Institute the researchers here are pioneers on that new frontier and it's interesting like Jane I have a personal reason for wanting the McGovern Institute to be successful and the things it does to understand the brain and then to do something about those people who suffer from brain problems my mom very very close to me as it was with Jane is the is the question of mental illness my my mother was schizophrenic and paranoid and I'll my whole childhood was filled with an association within a confront confrontation with with that kind of mental illness and then by the time she died she died in some form of dementia and I I have this personal hope that you'll be among the people who who break down those those walls of not understanding that kind of that kind of very painful life that is of course visited not only on the person who suffers but on the family of the of the person who suffers and that pain can be transmitted the pain itself can be transmitted for her sometimes generations and and and as as Bob said earlier when he showed us the picture of the the universe inside the brain all of those billions of neurons in there that you're able to make sense of that here is an extraordinary an amazing thing Einstein said words to the effect that the amazing thing about the universe is that we can understand it well the amazing thing about the universe inside this 3 pounds of jell-o that we have is is that it can understand its own universe not all at once not right away not now not yet fully but you people are taking us there and it's for people like like Jane and I have a personal stake in it it's a it's a beautiful thing to see the brain is an amazing thing and everybody even before you began to understand the things about it you understand everybody has always been fascinated with the brain I don't know if you remember those of you who are old enough to remember Raquel Welch when she was a great sex symbol she said because she had over buddy had always talked to her and about her about sex you know so she turned the tables on them at one point she said you know the most erogenous zone is the brain and it's true I know from a kind of personal experience with that I was having my brain scanned once and that one of the first times it was scanned and and that was a kind of an attractive researcher scanning my brain and I don't know she could tell what I was thinking but when I came out I came out from my firm the tube you know they came into that woman she was intently looking at the screen at a picture of my brain and she turned to me and she said you have a plump hippocampus wish I got me right there I'll tell you and and and that was I was being scanned as part of scientific American frontiers which I did for 11 years so happily and it was produced much of it was produced by my friend Graham shed and I have to correct Bob DeSimone who so generously said that I take complex things and make them simple I don't that's Graham sheds research and writing so that when I would read the narrations I was I was talking as though I understood this so deeply I have a general knowledge of some of these things because I'm very curious about science and I like to read about it all the time that's all I read but but to be able to synthesize it like that was was Graham sheds great ability now I also have a great ability I'll tell you about in a second my great ability is to exercise my curiosity I love to talk to scientists and when Graham called me up and said you want to do this show I thought I bet he only wants me to read the narration and I said I'd love to do it if you'd let me talk to the sciences not just interview them but talk to them and we discovered when he was brave enough to say yes we discovered a new kind of science program I don't think it had been done if ever not much like this where I just asked them questions and eventually I understood that the more naive the questions were the more I started at the bottom what are you what are you what do you do how do you do it well what does that mean I don't understand that phrase and I would keep after them until they made it clear to me to me personally what they were saying I never asked the question they knew the answer so I was always trying to understand them and this amazing thing happened on their end they came out the real them came out they weren't lecturing me they were really connecting with me and trying to get me to understand this and these conversational modes brought out not only their own personality but brought out the science through their personality so when I understood it the audience had a chance to understand it there was a kind of a television event that took place when I got it you know it's a historic event when I get some of these things so we went from that we did we did the human spark and in each one of these situations more and more we were talking about the brain many many of our stories in Scientific American frontiers centered on the brain when we did the human spark was three hour miniseries we we had to devote at least a third of it to the brain and now a Graham Graham and I are going to be working on a miniseries called the brains brains on trial and and some of the advice we're getting is coming from the McGovern Institute and and the Mike Gazzaniga and what we're doing is exploring this new interface that's brought about between the justice system and what's now understood about the brain and what's continuing to be understood and how do they fit together is that going to change anything about the way we think about justice or punishment or rehabilitation and that kind of thing so this it's continents constant movement toward more and more concentration on the brain it's happening all over the world and and it's reflected in the work we're doing with Graham and I have gone around the world talking to scientists as as Bob mentioned to you Graham is a very kind gentle person but he's nearly killed me several times in doing the show we were doing we were doing a story on Mount Vesuvius and he said he said that we're just going to have to climb up to the top of Mount Vesuvius and talk to the scientists up there I said I don't I don't think we should climb to the top of Mount Hood he said why oh and he has this innocent tone of voice he uses oh really why not I said because the story were doing is how it could blow at any moment he said no no no there's a scientist up there she has this monitoring equipment there's no problem she could she'll tell us if there's a problem so I climb all the way up to the top of Mount Vesuvius and I sit down next to this big hole you know that the crater with with steam Jets coming up out of it you know and I'm sitting next to the scientist and we're looking down into the crater and I say so so tell me about this monitoring monitoring equipment what do you learn from it and she says well not too much he took me to Pisa on that same trip we go to Pisa and the guy who ran the who is like the curator of the Tower of Pisa is taking me through and he's hadn't seen me on television and he was he was very kind to me and he was telling me all about the towers as you know this tower it's leaning so badly that if it finally goes it won't just fall over it'll explode right in the middle because of all the pressure on and as we're talking we walk over to the stairs and there's a sign there that says no one permitted beyond this point we're walking right past the sign I said do you still let people up here 'yes at all no but in your case we made an exception but the but the one show we did where Graham made up for all those dangerous things he put me through was when he actually saved my life we were doing a program about astronomy and we were in an Observatory in Chile about 8,000 feet up and I got this incredible cramp in my intestines and it turned out to be an obstructed intestine we're 8,000 feet up and there was this this medic they had up there and I don't think he had ever been asked to do anything medical he I was doubled over in pain lying on a couch he said are you all right I said no I'm in a lot of pain here he said I said that it was over here now I did pains down over here I think maybe I have appendicitis and he said yeah I think so too so they happen to have an ambulance there one of these old boxy things that look like one of the ambulances we had on mash it was that old they put me in it and they took me down in an hour and a half down this bumpy road and got me to a hospital where there was this wonderful surgeon in the middle of the night in this relatively small town called Lhasa Tama and he he knew right away what it was he had been trained in Japan and Santiago and he was really really up to it and he he he leaned into me and by now I'm like groggy on morphine which was very nice I had never had I don't take aspirin that the most in it and and he and so he leaned into me and he said now here's what's happened some of your intestine has gone bad and we have to cut out the bad part and so the two good ends together and I said oh you're going to do an end-to-end anastomosis and he said how do you know that I said all we did many of them on mash and actually that was the first the first operation I learned about on mesh was that and and he had been watching mesh as a student in school so the two of us came to this evening from a fictional background anyway he did the operation and the way the story ended was I lived but one of the things that happened on that program and right around that time was that I interviewed somebody and that that conversation I had with her changed the course of my life to a great extent and it led eventually to the question that I want to ask you tonight here's what happened I told you we had this wonderful situation this wonderful system we had arrived that were we would just have a conversation and the person would warm up to me the scientist would warm up to me and the science would come out in a conversational way that was understandable and if it wasn't they would just ask questions and would become understandable well she was fascinated he was doing really good work and we had this really good conversation that was going back and forth but I think something happened as she was talking I think she remembered that what she was saying was a lot like a lecture she was used to give it and little by little she turned away from me and looked right into the camera and started giving her lecture into the camera and almost immediately she became unintelligible she started using words that I didn't never heard before she started to hurt the Tortoni it got more regimented it didn't have that warmth of conversation so you know I brought her back a little bit I started asking her some more questions I drew her back to me she turned back to me well boom she's a human again now she's talking what happened and then all of a sudden she turned back again to the camera and this went on three or four times and and I thought about this a lot after I after I left and I thought about all the times that I've heard lectures and they they were a little stiff often and I thought what's the what what not always certainly not this one so I thought what's the difference between that that warmth that presence the connection with the people you're talking to what's the difference between that and the other thing the cold the cold version and I remembered something that I had been through as a young actor which was studying improvisation and I remembered the striking result of that that that I had become aware of that most of the people who studied improvisation long enough became very charismatic and many of them became stars of entertainment that we all know them very often you don't realize that they started as improvisers you just think of them as actors on the screen and I thought because I had taught improvisation for a while after after I studied it and I thought I wonder if that training could be helpful to scientists and it was just a an idea just a thought I didn't know I had no idea if it would work with scientists the way it can work with actors it even scientists would be interested in exploring it and the thing about improvisation is it's not just in fact it's not at all standing around making things up that's not the center central part of improvisation the most important part of improvisation is making contact with the other actor and I wondered if if scientists could be trained to make contact with another person in these exercises and games that make up this particular kind of improvising that I was teaching could they translate that to making contact with the audience because that's what's lacking is that's what we had to what I had with that that scientist when she was talking to me was contact and I lost it when she turned toward the camera so how could I get that process to work for the scientists so I decided to try an experiment I guess I was going to be interviewed or something at USC and I said while in there would you get 20 engineering students to come in and give me an afternoon to play with me and asked had them be prepared to give a little talk about their work just two minutes before we start and that's what they did and they were varying degrees of a warm to cold mostly cool they were doing using powerpoints and and they were reading the powerpoints to us you know but then we played these games for three hours these are these are improvisational exercises invented by a woman called viola Spolin about 60 years ago and she's really she's gone now but while she was doing her work she's she she changed acting in the country and possibly in the world so we played these they gave the talk we played the game the games for about three hours and they gave their talks again and there was a noticeable difference and everybody in the room was surprised including me because I was just trying it out so then a couple of years later I had been going around I was desperate to try to find some way I could be helpful in getting scientists to communicate their science with more vividness and more clarity most of all clarity not to dumb down the science but to be clear about it so that the rest of us feel that they're talking our language so Stony Brook University got interested in this and they started a Center for communicating science and I've helped them get started and I've taught a lot of workshops there to scientists to get them familiar with improvising to see if that would have enough on how how they speak to other people I'm going to show you them night I always discourage scientists from using powerpoints but I'm just going to show you a little bit of what what came up first I'll show you a part of part of this is clean a minute is this going to happen on the screen over here oh there it is it isn't that great that's my first slide I made this myself so I'll give you a little flavor of what of what the improvising games are like and then at the end of that you know like they mirror each other they get used to one another they get used to observing one another and being in one another's space they make things out of air so that they will allow themselves to get off themselves and into a common agreement with the other people about where they are what they're working with and then they eat they mirror one another's bodies and then they mirror one another's speech sometimes talking both at the same time and to see if they can anticipate what the other person is saying and speak at exactly the same time this takes them off of themselves out of themselves and puts them in contact with the other person but when when after you see a couple of these games you'll see the difference between the talks they gave before the games and the talks they gave after we brought some scientists together for an experiment we want to see if they can improve on the way they communicate science by playing improvisational theater games the games are pretty rigorous and they take awhile to learn they also take a willingness to let yourself go in front of other people this is really hard kidding it makes sense really easy in these brief workshops the scientists first learned to be more aware of their own bodies and more observant of what others are doing they mirror one another's movements they create things out of imaginary space and with a make-believe rope they get into a real tug-of-war all to prepare them for the games to come later as antic as some of this is our goal is not to dumb down the science on the contrary we're hoping these participants will find greater clarity in presenting science clarity and a vividness that will make their presentations tick in the listeners head so after a few hours of these games was there in fact a noticeable difference in these scientists presentations take a look at these clips that were shot before a workshop and then after we shoot neutral items at a sample the neutral items deposit their internal energy onto the sample changing sample and then allowing it again to be developed much in the same way as photography you expose film and then develop it neutral atoms have to be well they can't be controlled by electric fields because they're neutral so they actually get controlled by light pretty much no they don't they're they don't interact with a lot of things because they don't have a charge and the biggest thing we have floating around is electric fields it's electric fields are again this particle feel wave particle duality the the wave part is typically an electric field and so it's what we use to run our radios it's what the what current runs through the wall and so these neutral atoms don't interact with the current in the wall so it's really nice you can have a very very tight control over what they do because they don't interact with everything else that's going on the one thing that they do interact with is a specific kind of light that's tuned exactly to the atom and what's really elegant about this neutral atom lithography is that instead of so with photography and with photo lithography or shooting light matter to make a pattern and here we're shooting matter through light and ultimately making a pattern anything that's in the soil as it's filtering through can get mobilized into the groundwater things like fertilizers or pesticides or leaky sewage pipes all of that gets into the groundwater and moves along down through the aquifer beaches I like to go to personally I don't like to swim in anything that I can't see the bottom of and part of that is you know part of what makes it difficult to see the bottom of the sea floor is that all of the things that are growing that's not the end of it but it's not okay okay so I I don't know if you see it but I see a real difference in their energy in their presence the ease their mouths don't get dry as much they they're actually talking to somebody and the interesting thing about this to me is just as Jerry was talking about mirror neurons there's there seems to be an elevated ability to understand what the people they're talking to are thinking you know it was very touching when Jerry said imagine what it's like what is it like what would it be like to live a life where you didn't know what other people were thinking and what we heard over and over again when we talked to scientists about what is it that makes us human when we were doing the human spark over and over we heard it's this incredible ability humans have to socialize and the theory of mind plays a big part in that where we are looking all the time to find out what's going on in this other person's head this person who were talking to do they understand us are they honest can we trust them what are they thinking what did they think of the people that we're thinking about what are they thinking about the people they're thinking about all of this in a way what's been described as reading of minds is going on but it's all picking up cues and processing those cues until we can make use of this connection but the connection doesn't take place unless you can be tuned into the people you're talking to you can't get anything at them how can you actually talk to them my question that these young scientists was how can you tell them something if you don't know where they are while you're telling them so just as you were aware of your partner on stage where you could see where their arms are moving you could read their thoughts as they were playing the game with you if you can translate that to the audience and when you tell them something understand or imagine where they are in their minds at that point so that they're prepared for the next thing you tell them and you're only going to get that if you look in their faces often that these these kids would tell me that in order not to be nervous they look over their heads and it's a common way to handle it but you're not talking to the ceiling you're talking to these people and they're the ones you want to want to connect with now in the process of this they they got much warmer and I'm getting closer to the question now isn't this exciting so in the process of getting them warmer like this getting them more spontaneous I I rely you know all along I've thought it's not just a question of getting scientists to present things in person you know in a more spontaneous way I want I want to see everybody's ability to communicate in all the ways improve of writing you know writing op-eds writing articles that kind of thing so I wondered if this improvising was helping them be more creative in their writing so I said instead of talking to us for two minutes about your work just write a couple of paragraphs about your work and we'll see if the writing has changed in it and so we'll all get to share it come up and read it to us this was a very interesting experience the writing had not improved terribly much but what was amazing was the spontaneity evaporated and it evaporates when they read this it turns out I believe is true for everybody on the planet whenever you hear somebody reading you get some typical characteristics there's a cadence that's that's typical of often lower lower reading in the lower grades you know like third grade reading this but this is true for most people and sometimes is even true for trained readers people people who read in public sometimes actors and other people they the cadence they go the sounds of the to the caves it goes and I'm gonna but I'm gonna I'm gonna this is downward inflection at the end of the sentences they're not communicating with anybody they're processing words that are coming off the page hitting the back of their brain and going so I don't know where they're going that's part of the question so they mispronounce words more frequently when they're reading is a it's a mechanical process they're going through it's not a communicative process and I believe you can tell that just by listening to it I see if you can figure out what the difference is when I play you this little this little audio thing this is a this is from a video that was shown on public television by the author of a very important book and it's very very good documentary he is interviewed at some point in the in the in the film and he's speaking spontaneously and answered in answering questions of the interviewer in other parts of the film he's narrating which means he's reading what he's saying just listen to see if you can tell when he's speaking spontaneously and see if you can pick up the point where he starts to narrate well they're two different issues why does that keep happening again and why doesn't anybody do anything to stop it from happening again and it keeps happening because there are political regimes to find it useful to deal with their self defined problems and it's very useful tool they do it because they know they have basically impunity and there has been very little calling to account and they get away with it time and time again so quite clearly the status quo is catastrophic and when I say catastrophic I mean literally catastrophic because it takes the lives of tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions upon millions of people and so never again is a hollow phrase it's well meant but in the world of what actually happens it's been a hollow phrase a mockery of itself what must it feel like for a ten-year-old boy to contemplate his own imminent violent death or a sixteen-year-old girl or a 19-year old man what must it feel like to be imprisoned in a rape camp or to watch helplessly as members of your family are killed or as your people are decimated difference right it's in the to me it's an amazing difference the things he's saying when he's speaking spontaneously are less by far less horrendous than the things he's describing when he's reading and yet there's less life when he's reading he's not somehow not inspired by the very words and the lifetime he's put into studying this horrible problem of genocide he's not inspired by that and this is no fault of his this is a problem the reading process that we have to find the solution to here's my question we've we've been told so many times about as Jerry described earlier the social networks in the brain how they differentiate us from the other animals how important they are for our survival is a species now we've been doing that we've been speaking spontaneously for a long time I mean how long probably more than two hundred thousand years probably a lot longer than that how long have we been reading less than five thousand years so my question is these circuits in the brain that are devoted to socialization to understanding reading faces understanding those faces speaking in a tone of voice that carries emotion with it that carries meaning above and beyond the very words themselves to be able to interpret what we see of that in other people and hear in other people that surely happens I would think during spontaneous speech and when spontaneous speech occurs I would think there's a lot that those circuits of the brain have to say before the motor cortex gets busy and the jaws and the tongue start producing words that spontaneous speech seems to be intimately tied in with those circuits I'm imagining from everything I've heard my question is are the circuits in the brain that are active in reading are they bypassing or short circuiting the social parts of the brain the networks and maps that make up what makes us most human and what's amazing to me is when we when we talk in a way that just reflects words on a page whether we've memorized them or were actually reading them we're giving up the very thing that makes us human we're giving up that connection and I want to see that connection reestablished I'm hoping that eventually all the skills of communication will be part of every scientific education and I'm hoping that the the goals of this Center for communicating science at Stony Brook will spread because we're that's what we're trying to work on there and I'm hoping that scientists all over our culture will be speaking in their own voices can you help me with that if you have any ideas oh that's what that the slide was up women where now I've lost it completely oh this is good this is why I tell people not to do slideshows now go bump bump bump bump on there right me at brain speech at gmail.com okay if anybody's anybody has pictures or some ideas about those circuits that are devoted to spontaneous speech which I think from the impression the impression I get from reading is that there's been less attention paid to that than there is to the reading brain there's a lot of work on that so does anybody have any ideas about what's happening in the spontaneous speech part of the brain and can and because what we can do maybe is figure out how to make up for the gap that's occurred how we can bridge that gap can you help me if you can drop me a line thank you

Channel: mittechtv

Views: 32,404

Rating: 4.931232 out of 5

Keywords: mit, mittechtv, alan, alda, brain, mcgovern, institute, spontaneity, science, communication

Id: UGo6pTcTgVw

Length: 39min 56sec (2396 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2010