If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

by Alan Alda

  Including me.

  I had expected one or two of them to show a little progress. Instead, almost everyone had improved, no matter at what level they had started.

  One student who at first had been so self-conscious that she could only look over the heads of her audience could now look them in the eye. Another had started out earlier pretty confident and polished, but had been so faithfully married to his PowerPoint that he had given most of his talk facing his own slides. After improvising, he was able to put down his remote control and speak from the heart.

  Afterwards, K. C. Cole admitted to me, a little sheepishly, that she had thought it was going to be a total bust. There didn’t seem to be any way that three hours of playing games could lead to the change we had just seen in the way the engineering students were able to communicate about their work.

  I knew from experience that after just one afternoon of improv games, the students’ progress couldn’t be long-lasting. Improvising transforms you, but it does that over time. Still, we had seen something unexpectedly encouraging, and a little exciting. Even guarded, cautious engineering students could be taught to open up, to reveal their own warm humanity—to connect with their audience and speak in a way they never had before. And the flushed, happy faces of the young scientists showed that they had enjoyed doing it.

  As I got in my car and left USC, I didn’t know where all this would lead. But I had a vague, jumpy feeling that something important had happened—maybe even something that could change things in a way that up until now I had been just dreaming about.

  In those moments on Scientific American Frontiers when I had pressed scientists until they finally described their work in terms I could understand, it was always a thrilling experience. I wanted other people to have that thrill, and I wanted scientists to have the pleasure of seeing people get it; to see them be as excited as the scientists themselves were by the adventure of hunting down an understanding of nature.

  For the next couple of years, whenever I found myself at a university that taught science, I’d try to spend a few informal minutes with the president of the school and earnestly bring up my modest proposal: “Do you think it would be possible to train students in the skills of communication while they’re learning science? All kinds of communication: speaking to an audience, talking to Congress, writing books, articles, op-ed pieces for the general public. Do you think your university could turn out accomplished scientists who are also accomplished communicators?”

  One day at lunch, I pitched my idea to the president of a school that had produced some great scientists. He didn’t sound interested. “We already have a contest where we give a prize for the best presentation.”

  “That’s good,” I said, “but a prize rewards the people who are already good at communicating. Wouldn’t it be helpful to give some actual training to students who aren’t naturally good at it?” I could feel I wasn’t connecting. He seemed more interested in his salad than in rearranging his curriculum.

  “We have too much science to teach,” he said.

  I wasn’t sharp enough in that moment to ask a critical question: Isn’t communication really essential to science? Can you really do science without communication? Will science be funded if the funders can’t understand what they’re supposed to be funding? Will young people choose to study science if they don’t hear from scientists themselves how exciting it is?

  I was still new at this and wasn’t able in the wisp of a moment to raise these questions, and so we moved on to dessert.

  I couldn’t really blame him. He did have a lot of science to teach, and he seemed to feel that students would pick up the fine points of communication just by listening to good communicators. But just listening to good communicators doesn’t work. It takes training to learn how to do it. I’ve been listening to good pianists all my life and I still can’t play the piano.

  It seemed to me that he was leaving good communication to chance—although physics, math, and chemistry aren’t left to chance. But I didn’t press my point. I would save my superb rhetoric for the president of the next university.

  Then one night I was sitting at dinner next to Shirley Strum Kenny, the president of Stony Brook University on Long Island. By this time, I could make my case a little better, and more than that, she had come from a background in the humanities. She was interested in helping scientists communicate better and was sympathetic to the idea.

  A mutual friend, Liz Robbins, is a lobbyist for causes she believes in, and science communication is one of them. She set up a meeting, and a dozen or so professors and department heads gathered in rocking chairs and swings on her back porch on Long Island. Over a glass of lemonade, they listened as I made a passionate plea about communicating science. I could see by the flicker of interest in their faces that they were actually listening. One of them was Howard Schneider, the dean of the Department of Journalism. Howie is a slim, affable tornado of energy. He left the meeting and immediately began to set up the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. Howie told me recently that the Center has become known for doing such good work that many people are proud to say they were on the porch that day. “Sometimes,” Howie said, “when they weren’t actually there.”

  But we were just getting started and we needed funding. Liz Robbins set up a meeting between me and Congressman Steve Israel, in the hope that we could get a government grant to get the ball rolling.

  I sat with Steve in Liz’s wood-paneled den in Manhattan and started to pour my heart out to him about how urgent it was to help scientists to be clear. He stopped me in midsentence.

  “You have no idea how bad it is,” Steve said. “I was at a meeting where members were all lined up on one side of the table and scientists were on the other side, explaining what they needed money for. Nobody could understand them. People were passing notes to one another. Notes. ‘Do you know what this guy is saying?’ ‘No, do you?’ ”

  He didn’t need convincing. He went to work on it, and a few months later we got a much-needed grant.

  We were on our way.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Heart and Head of Communication

  EMPATHY AND THEORY OF MIND

  In 1786, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a woman he was recklessly infatuated with: Maria Cosway. He was reckless because, although she was talented, intelligent, and beautiful, he was single and she wasn’t. His letter has come to be known as Jefferson’s dialogue between Head and Heart. His head keeps explaining to his heart why this romance is impossible, while his heart has a mind of its own.

  For me, Jefferson’s dialogue between his head and his heart captures exactly what we have to be aware of when we try to communicate with someone. We have to know what they’re thinking and feeling.

  In a way, the dialogue is a charming argument between two horses, tethered to each other in Jefferson’s mind, both pulling in different directions, and each resenting the other’s influence. After Jefferson says goodbye to Maria and her husband as the couple heads back to England, the Head and Heart squabble about the pain brought on by having struck up a friendship with this charming husband and wife in the first place.

  Heart: I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings….

  Head: …This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us.

  Heart: …Sir, this acquaintance was not the consequence of my doings. It was one of your projects which threw us in the way of it.

  Like Didi and Gogo in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, these two aspects of one person’s mind bat their arguments back and forth as if working a shuttlecock, with neither wanting to lose the point.

  This interplay of the emotional and the rational, I believe, is happening in the other person’s mind when we try to explain something difficult, like science, or something that’s just difficult to absorb, like bad medical news.

  For someone to understand us, their mind and heart have to work together and resolve that inner conflict, and resolv
ing that conflict is just what Jefferson’s heart proposes to his head at the end of the dialogue. Heart is determined to continue in his affection for the couple, and if Head wants to help out in keeping the couple entertained, he’s welcome to try. And in return, Heart will help keep relations cordial with the scientists that Head values so much.” So Jefferson ends the dialogue with Heart's requesting a collaboration, saying in effect, Help me, Head, in carrying out my softer aims and I’ll help you soften the edges of your science.

  It’s not only a peace treaty between emotion and reason, it’s a good metaphor for our strategy, which enlists emotion to help communicate difficult subjects in a more human way. Attention to Head and Heart is at the very core of communication.

  Being truly connected to the other person happens when we see them in a way that’s both emotional and rational, especially if we include listening with our eyes: looking for clues in the face, in gestures—in all the nonverbal signs of a state of mind. It’s complete and total listening.

  First, it’s understanding what another person is feeling—what’s usually called empathy—and second, an awareness of what another person is thinking—what scientists call Theory of Mind.

  The two faculties are different, although sometimes they overlap, and some writers use the terms almost interchangeably. I think of them as dealing mainly with two different states of mind: one mostly emotional (empathy) and the other mostly rational (Theory of Mind).

  First the emotional:

  EMPATHY

  For years, I was a little leery of the notion of empathy. If I thought about it at all, it seemed to be a free-floating kind of sympathy. Or even a semi-fraudulent posture where you announce that you feel people’s pain but don’t necessarily feel anything. There seemed to be something slightly New Agey about it that was more rooted in a warm wish for community than in reality. And yet, we were getting these rich experiences in improv classes that seemed to stem from developing a greater awareness of the other person’s emotional state. The more I learned about what the research scientists were doing, the more I came to see empathy as a necessary part of communication.

  The other person might not give voice to their feelings—their excitement, their confusion, their disapproval—but it’s important to know what those feelings are. And I think this is true whether you’re a scientist talking to a lay audience, a doctor talking to a patient, a supervisor talking to an employee, or a parent to a child.

  But where, exactly, does this ability to read emotions (and minds, as well) come from? There’s a debate in science about that.

  In the 1980s and ’90s, scientists in Italy discovered that certain neurons were firing in the brain of a monkey when he saw another monkey grasp something. These were the same neurons that would fire if the first monkey were grasping something himself. But he wasn’t grasping anything; he was just looking at another monkey who was doing it. His neurons were acting as though he were performing the action, too. The neurons became known as mirror neurons and began to get a lot of attention. Marco Iacoboni, a friend of the Italian researchers, did a great deal of research on mirror neurons and became convinced of their importance in human empathy. Marco was at the University of California at Los Angeles when I interviewed him in 2009 for a miniseries called The Human Spark.

  As we sat near an outdoor café in the warm sun, Marco explained how he felt these special neurons make reading the minds of others possible. His research suggests that when I see you grasp something, like a cup, not only do the same neurons fire in my brain as they do in yours, I even know what you intend to do with the cup. Just by watching, he suggests, my neurons mirror yours—and I get insight into what you’re going to do next.

  The idea is that the brain can see the action in context and quickly pick out the action that’s most likely to come next. As Marco said that day, “It’s all about simulating the intentions of others. We’re imitating internally what other people are planning to do. This is important because we need to predict what other people are planning to do.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why is that so important?”

  “Let’s take the two of us. We’re having a conversation about the brain. And I can see all your body language. I have a lot of information that allows me to predict what you’re going to do next. If I’m unable to read you, this conversation would be much more unsettling to me, because I’ll never know if you’re about to slap me in the face.”

  According to Iacoboni, the work of these mirror neurons doesn’t stop with reading the actions and intentions of others, but also extends to reading their emotions. He’s written that mirror neurons send signals to the emotional centers of the brain, and that’s why we react to the facial expressions of others in an appropriate way—“the happiness associated with a smile, the sadness associated with a frown. Only after we feel the emotions internally are we able to explicitly recognize them.”

  He says, “When we see someone else suffering or experiencing pain, mirror neurons help us to read her or his facial expression and make us viscerally feel the suffering or the pain of the other person.” According to Iacoboni, those moments “are the foundation of empathy.”

  This all sounded exciting when Marco and I were having an animated conversation at UCLA, but since then, some clouds have drifted over the subject of mirror neurons. There are neuroscientists now who are not convinced that mirror neurons enable us to predict what a person’s intention is, or even if they exist in humans. According to them, seeing an action and then figuring out what’s coming next may be the work of other networks in the brain.

  This is clearly not a debate I’m qualified to weigh in on. But I’m not unhappy to see it happening, because it shows how science works. Somebody observes something that hasn’t been seen before and draws a conclusion about what’s actually going on. Somebody else isn’t convinced and they argue about it. But instead of arguing endlessly, they continue to do research, hoping to find out what’s really happening. While they might sound antagonistic, they’re actually involved in a kind of messy collaboration to understand something fundamental about nature. They may very well find that neither side is right and instead discover another mechanism that no one had yet thought of.

  Whatever it is, it would be good to know what’s causing empathy. As one scientist said to me, “Certainly, we must have some system in our brain for creating empathy. Because we do it.”

  Empathy gives us a sense of what’s going on in what Jefferson called Heart, but we also need to be aware of what Head is up to—what the other person is thinking.

  THEORY OF MIND

  When I first heard the term Theory of Mind, the idea was a little difficult to grasp. I had always thought, naïvely I guess, that we all realize everyone else has their own private thoughts, which are different from ours. But in talking to scientists on an episode of Scientific American Frontiers, I learned that young children don’t think that way. I watched experiment after experiment with children below the age of four and a half or five in which they were sure that what they knew was also known by everyone else. For instance, if a very young child watches a cartoon in which a woman enters a room, puts a cookie on a table, and leaves, the child clearly understands that the woman knows she left the cookie on the table. But if, while the woman is gone, a man enters the room, picks up the cookie, hides it in a cupboard, and leaves, the child suddenly changes her understanding of what the woman knows. Now the child thinks the woman knows what the child knows: that the cookie has been moved.

  If the woman comes back into the room and you ask the child, “Where does the lady think the cookie is?” the child will point to the cupboard. The child saw the cookie go into the cupboard, and it doesn’t occur to her that the woman doesn’t know what the child herself knows. The child has no theory of what’s going on in the other person’s mind, other than that it must be the same as what’s going on in hers.

  This is a natural stage in a child’s development. In fact, it’s not until about the ag
e of four or five that it even occurs to children that deception is possible. There’s no point in lying if everybody knows what you’re thinking!

  But once Theory of Mind develops in a child, it also becomes clear that others might be lying to you, and it’s kind of important to know what’s going on inside these other people’s heads. So once we have Theory of Mind, it’s a tool we rely on all our lives. We wouldn’t fork over money on a used-car lot without trying to figure out what the salesman is thinking. Is this person hiding something about the mileage gauge? What’s his agenda? Is my welfare at stake here?

  In a situation like this, our understanding of what’s going on in the other person’s mind is the result of several kinds of listening. We put together all the clues we can—facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, and any telling words they let drop.

  This is exactly what we do in the improv classes: observe the other person, track their body language and tone of voice, intuit their thoughts and feelings.

  And suddenly, we’re reading minds.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Mirror Exercise

  Two people are standing face-to-face. They look intently into each other’s eyes.

  Very slowly, one of them starts to move, and immediately the other moves as if she were his mirror. Soon they’re in a kind of slow-motion dance, in which the motions of each one are an exact mirror image of the motions of the other, with no lag time: a perfect mirror.

  These two young scientists have agreed, along with a dozen others, to take part in another informal experiment, this time at Stony Brook University. I want to see what effect three hours of playing improv games once a week for six weeks will have on them. Will they become better at relating to others and therefore better communicators? If so, will it stick?

  As they do this mirroring exercise, they’ll each learn to observe the other person so closely that eventually, almost without thinking about it, they’ll be able to predict what that person will do next.