by Alan Alda
Copyright © 2017 by Mayflower Productions, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Publishing LLC and Bienstock Music Publishing Company on behalf of Redwood Music Ltd c/o Carlin America, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from “As Time Goes By” (from Casablanca), words and music by Herman Huffeld, copyright © 1931 (renewed) WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing LLC and Bienstock Music Publishing Company on behalf of Redwood Music Ltd.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
NAMES: Alda, Alan, author.
TITLE: If I understood you, would I have this look on my face? : my adventures in the art and science of relating and communicating / Alan Alda.
DESCRIPTION: New York : Random House, 2017.
IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2016045922 | ISBN 9780812989144 | ISBN 9780812989168 (ebook)
SUBJECTS: LCSH: Interpersonal communication. | Interpersonal relations.
CLASSIFICATION: LCC BF637.C45 A424 2017 | DDC 153.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045922
Ebook ISBN 9780812989168
randomhousebooks.com
Cover and frontispiece illustration: Barry Blitt
Book design by Carole Lowenstein, adapted for ebook
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
Part One: Relating Is Everything
Chapter 1: Relating: It’s the Cake
Chapter 2: Theater Games with Engineers
Chapter 3: The Heart and Head of Communication
Chapter 4: The Mirror Exercise
Chapter 5: Observation Games
Chapter 6: Making It Clear and Vivid
Chapter 7: Reading Minds: Helen Riess and Matt Lerner
Chapter 8: Teams
Chapter 9: Total Listening Starts with Where They Are
Chapter 10: Listening, from the Boardroom to the Bedroom
Chapter 11: Training Doctors to Have More Empathy
Part Two: Getting Better at Reading Others
Chapter 12: My Life as a Lab Rat
Chapter 13: Working Alone on Building Empathy
Chapter 14: Dark Empathy
Chapter 15: Reading the Mind of the Reader
Chapter 16: Teaching and the Flame Challenge
Chapter 17: Emotion Makes It Memorable
Chapter 18: Story and the Brain
Chapter 19: Commonality
Chapter 20: Jargon and the Curse of Knowledge
Chapter 21: The Improvisation of Daily Life
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Alan Alda
About the Author
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
—often attributed to
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW.
Although it’s doubtful
he ever said it.
INTRODUCTION
When it finally became clear to me that I often didn’t understand what people were telling me, I was on the road to somewhere good.
Some of the things they were trying to communicate were complicated, but that didn’t seem like a good reason why I didn’t understand them. If they could understand these things, why couldn’t I? An accountant would tell me about the tax code in a way that made no sense. A salesman would explain an insurance policy that didn’t seem to have a basis in reality. It wasn’t any consolation when I came to realize that pretty much everybody misunderstands everybody else. Maybe not all the time, and not totally, but just enough to seriously mess things up.
People are dying because we can’t communicate in ways that allow us to understand one another.
That sounds like an exaggeration, but I don’t think it is.
When patients can’t relate to their doctors and don’t follow their orders, when engineers can’t convince a town that the dam could break, when a parent can’t win the trust of a child enough to warn her off a lethal drug, they can all be headed for a serious ending.
This book is about what we can do about that; about how I learned what I believe is the essential key to good communication, and to relating to one another in a more powerful way. Surprisingly, I found that key in my training and experience as an actor, and it’s helped me teach others how to communicate better, especially about things that are difficult to talk about or hard to grasp.
IT ALL BEGAN WITH MY TOOTH
The dentist had the sharp end of the blade inches from my face.
It was only then that he chose to tell me what he was seconds away from doing to my mouth. “There will be some tethering,” he said.
I froze. Tethering? My mind was racing. What does he mean? How could the word tethering apply to my mouth? He seemed impatient and I didn’t want to annoy him, but he was, after all, about to put a scalpel in my mouth. I asked him what he meant by tethering. He looked surprised, as if I should know the meaning of a simple word. He began barking at me. “Tethering, tethering!” he said.
I was well over the age of fifty, and certainly old enough to ask him to put the knife down and answer a few questions. But there he was in his priestly surgeon’s gown, and getting increasingly impatient. “Okay,” I said, a little too accommodatingly. Then he put the scalpel into my mouth and cut.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a watershed moment for me.
For the rest of my life, I would be living with the results of these few seconds of poor communication—in ways that were both good and bad.
First the bad: A few weeks later, I was acting in a movie. The camera was in close on me as I smiled. A relaxed, happy smile. After the take, the director of photography came over, looking puzzled, and said, “Why were you sneering? I thought you were supposed to smile.”
“I was smiling,” I said.
“Nooo. Sneering,” he said.
I looked in a mirror and smiled. I was sneering.
My upper lip drooped lazily over my teeth, and no matter how I tried I couldn’t form an actual smile. The problem was my frenum. I no longer had one.
In case you’re not familiar with your frenum, it’s just above your front teeth, between the gum and the inside of the upper lip. If you put your tongue at the top of your gums above your front teeth, you’ll feel a slim bit of connective tissue, or at least you will if a barking dentist hasn’t been in your mouth. The tissue is called the maxillary labial frenum, and he had severed mine.
The procedure was one he had invented. It enabled him to pull a flap of gum tissue down over the socket of the front tooth he had extracted. The idea was to give the socket a fresh blood supply while it healed. He was proud of his invention and it seemed perfectly suitable for the gum’s blood supply, but not so good for using my face in movies. Without my frenum, my upper lip just hung there like a scalloped drape in the window of an old hotel.
After the movie shoot, I called him and explained with saintly patience that I made a living with my face and sometimes I needed one that could smile.
His response was curt. “I told you there were two steps to the procedure. I haven’t done the second step yet.” I was a little reluctant to let him do the second step. Maybe this time he’d have a go at the frenum under my tongue. I didn’t have many frena l
eft, and he seemed to have an unnatural attraction to them.
A couple of weeks later, I got a letter from him that was formal and cold. No hint that he was anything like sorry that I was feeling a little mutilated. It was clear that the point of the letter was to lay out his defense and discourage a possible lawsuit. Until I saw the tone of his letter, I hadn’t even thought of suing (and I never did)—but if he wanted to avoid a suit, he was going about it in exactly the wrong way.
The experience wasn’t all bad, though. For one thing, I learned to work around my frenum-less smile, and my new, slightly off-kilter grin enabled me to play a whole new set of villains. Even better, that moment in the dentist’s chair was useful in ways I wouldn’t understand at the time.
I’ve come to see my exchange with the dentist that day as something that happens frequently in life—a brief encounter that threatens a relationship’s delicate tissue, the tender frenum of friendship. I wasn’t looking for friendship that day, but at least I wanted the feeling that I was actually being seen by him. Even though his gaze was intense, I realized that as far as he was concerned I wasn’t really there—not as a person. If I was there at all, I was something on his checklist. He was speaking into the vague mist of interpersonal nothingness.
Those few minutes I spent in his chair have become a symbol for me of really, really poor communication and of what causes it: disengagement from the person we hope will understand us. That disengagement can stand in the way of all kinds of happiness and success, from the world of business to the business of love.
Not being truly engaged with the people we’re trying to communicate with, and then suffering the snags of misunderstanding, is the grit in the gears of daily life.
It jams our relations with others when people don’t “get it,” when they don’t understand what we think is the simplest of statements.
You run a company and you think you are relating to your customers and employees, and that they understand what you’re saying, but they don’t, and both customers and employees are leaving you. You’re a scientist who can’t get funded because the people with the money just can’t figure out what you’re telling them. You’re a doctor who reacts to a needy patient with annoyance; or you love someone who finds you annoying, because they just don’t get what you’re trying to say.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
For the last twenty years, I’ve been trying to understand why communicating seems so hard—especially when we’re trying to communicate something weighty and complicated. I started with how scientists explain their work to the public: I helped found the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York, and we’ve spread what we learned to universities and medical schools across the country and overseas.
But as we helped scientists be clear to the rest of us, I realized we were teaching something so fundamental to communication that it affects not just how scientists communicate, but the way all of us relate to one another.
We were developing empathy and the ability to be aware of what was happening in the mind of another person.
This, we realized, is the key, the fundamental ingredient without which real communication can’t happen. Developing empathy and learning to recognize what the other person is thinking are both essential to good communication, and are what this book is about.
This is a personal story, too. It’s about what I’ve learned over the years as an actor that can help us all be clearer with one another, including about complicated things. Some of what I’ve learned has come from talking to smart people about their research, but much of it stems from the experience of standing face-to-face on stage with another actor. It’s changed the way I engage with other people in my daily life. And it can be learned by anyone, not just by those touched with a talent for acting. It’s an amazingly simple thing, a power we’re built to use, and yet too often ignore.
In acting, we call it relating.
PART ONE
Relating Is Everything
CHAPTER 1
Relating: It’s the Cake
A couple of decades ago, a letter came in the mail that set me on a path that would not only bring me to a deeper understanding of that day with the dentist, but would actually change the direction of my life.
The letter was from a television producer, asking if I would be interested in hosting a show on PBS called Scientific American Frontiers. I was in love with science and had read every issue of the magazine Scientific American since I was a young man. It had been my only education in the subject. I was so excited I had to read the invitation twice. Scientific American! My alma mater! This would be a chance to actually learn from scientists themselves.
After a few minutes, though, I realized that the producers were probably only looking for someone well known to appear at the beginning of the show to introduce that week’s topic and then disappear to read an off-camera narration. That sounded like a lot less fun than talking to scientists, so I asked them if, instead, I could interview the scientists on camera. I knew if we’d be shooting interviews I’d spend the whole day with them—not just on camera but during the hours of setting up, having lunch, and wandering around their labs. I’d have a chance to learn something.
There was one minor hitch. I didn’t have much experience interviewing anybody, let alone scientists, so if the producers agreed, they’d be taking something of a chance on me.
I was, however, blissfully confident. I had taken over as guest host on talk shows a few times, but more than that, I thought that one of the tools of my profession ought to help: the ability to listen and react. Plus, I had been trained in improvisation, a particular kind of theater training—games and exercises that enable you to open up to another person, to tune in to them, to engage with them in a dance of ideas and feelings, and to go anywhere it takes you, together.
I’m sure the producers of Scientific American Frontiers weren’t as confident of all this as I was, but they decided to take a chance on me. We began shooting the series in 1993.
The first story we shot featured racing cars powered only by solar energy. We went out to the California State University, Los Angeles, and set up in a workshop where a scientist was working on a large solar panel. This would be my first actual science interview. John Angier, one of the producers, called me over and nodded in the direction of the scientist. Peter Hoving, the cameraman, lifted his camera and started rolling.
As I entered the room, I didn’t realize that this would be the beginning of more than twenty years of trying to figure out what makes communication work, getting beyond the impoverished ways of the barking dentist, looking for empathy and a deeper kind of listening in almost every part of my life. This moment would begin it all. But not only didn’t I realize this, I was vaguely aware that I didn’t really know what I was doing. I hesitated for a moment.
John Angier nodded toward the scientist again and, with just a slight air of Well, this is what you wanted, he said, “Go on. Go in there and start talking.”
I walked over to the scientist, smiled confidently—and immediately made three huge blunders.
LISTENING WITH EYES, EARS, AND FEELINGS
My first blunder was assuming that I knew more than I did.
After a brief hello and a quick glance at his solar panel, I told the scientist how amazing it was that he had put all this together just using parts off the shelf. I saw his face tighten a little. “They’re not off the shelf,” he said, slightly offended. “We had to make a lot of them.” I saw the anxiety in his face, but I didn’t respond to it. I experienced a little anxiety of my own, but I ignored both his and mine. Instead, I made the next blunder with my body.
I reached out to the solar panel and laid my hand on it, assuming a bit of unearned familiarity. I saw something happen to his face again, but I kept going. Not content with touching the panel, I gave the thing an affectionate pat. “Amazing,” I said, hoping that time would pass more comfortably if I showed a measure of awe.
/> “Please don’t touch the panel,” he said. “You could ruin it.” The distress in his face was now very clear to me. I had seen it earlier, but somehow I had ignored it. I hadn’t been listening with my eyes.
I lurched through a couple of questions about solar panels, but the interview was lame and halting. I was well into my third blunder: Just as I hadn’t been really relating to him in not responding to the look on his face, none of my responses grew out of what he was telling me. I wasn’t really listening to him when he answered my questions.
In fact, I hadn’t been listening in three different ways. When I’d told him he had made the panel with parts off the shelf, I was paying more attention to my own assumptions than I was to him. When I didn’t read his face, I wasn’t listening to his body language. And when my questions didn’t spring from what he was saying, I was disconnected from him. I was alone. How could the conversation have been anything but strained when I had shut myself up in my own head?
I was a little downcast by the experience. Where was the improvisational ability to listen and react that I knew how to do onstage, that I had been trained in and was so proud of? I cherished my experiences in improvising with other actors. Why wasn’t I doing it now?
IMPROVISING
Improvising on the stage is usually thought of as creating funny sketches on the spot, with no preparation. Most improvisation that audiences are exposed to is comedy improv, and that was my first experience with improvisation.
One summer in my early twenties, I was performing in a cabaret show, sunk in the basement of a hotel in Hyannis Port. The first act of our show was a set of sketches we had created in rehearsal through improvisation. There was no writing of funny lines; it was all developed through the spontaneous interactions of the actors. The only preparation beforehand was thinking about characters we could play, and figuring out the quirks they had that could be relied on no matter what the other actor tossed our way. We worked these sketches over many times in rehearsal, and, although they were derived through improvisation, we knew we had these surefire set pieces for the first half of the show.
