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

by Alan Alda

  EXPERIENCE, NOT WORDS

  Once in a while, as with this anesthesiologist, a word of advice can have a profound effect, but Evonne doesn’t rely on words alone. She and the rest of our staff have developed games and exercises that take med students step-by-step through experiences. Words can introduce you to an idea, but we think it takes an experience to transform you. It’s like the venerable and sage advice to writers: show, don’t tell. But it goes even further. Don’t just hear about; do it—and get transformed.

  TIPS

  Even though I don’t much like them, I have to admit that tips can sometimes be useful. Here are a few that have been good to me.

  The Three Rules of Three

  1. When I talk to an audience, I try to make no more than three points. (They can’t remember more than three, and neither can I.) In fact, restricting myself to one big point is even better. But three is the limit.

  2. I try to explain difficult ideas three different ways. Some people can’t understand something the first couple of ways I say it, but can if I say it another way. This lets them triangulate their way to understanding.

  3. I try to find a subtle way to make an important point three times. It sticks a little better.

  But even though I’ve discovered a few tips that have helped, for my money, tips tend to be anemic when they don’t come fortified with experience, or with a vivid story that lets you enjoy a vicarious experience.

  I was once asked to write a list of tips on how to communicate well, and I resisted. I finally hammered out three, but they were so snarky I never sent them in:

  1. Beware of tips. Tips are intellectual and often mechanical. They don’t transform you. An experience transforms you. There’s a stretch of road I’ve driven down many times where I used to ignore the speed limit sign. One afternoon, I got a speeding ticket and I never ignored the speed limit again. The sign was a tip. The ticket was the experience.

  2. Make a personal connection with your audience. Look them in the eye and speak to them as if they’re a close friend and not a multitude. This is, of course, impossible to do just by reading this tip. Experience is what transforms you. (See Tip 1.)

  3. If you can, experience improvisation. It will focus you on the other person. Improv games allow most of the tips about public speaking to become second nature, rather than forced and mechanical. A common tip advises you to vary the pace of your talk. Improv puts you so in touch with the audience that varying your pace happens automatically. You do it without thinking, which is the only way it will be effective. Trying to follow tips, rather than letting behavior emerge from the experience of improvisation, can actually make a talk more wooden. You see it in the pauses speakers take when they try to apply the tip to pause every few sentences. During these mechanical pauses, the air is dead. But when an improviser takes a pause, something meaningful is happening. She pauses because she’s watching the audience to see if they understand her, and she’s actually thinking of what she ought to say next. The pause is filled with something that’s happening between her and the audience. She’s alive.

  Not everyone, of course, has a chance to join an improvisation class or take a course in mind-reading skills. So I wondered if it might be possible to do this kind of work on one’s own. Maybe I could shore up my own feelings of connectedness when they started to lag.

  I asked myself an innocent question: Are there solitary exercises that might work? I should have known better than to ask. I have a history with this kind of thing. I soon found myself spiraling through a set of peculiar adventures.

  PART TWO

  Getting Better at Reading Others

  CHAPTER 12

  My Life As a Lab Rat

  TESTING AN EMPATHY EXERCISE

  I have a habit of experimenting on myself.

  In my twenties, I was fascinated by the notion that a person’s temperature goes up and down during the day. So, to test the idea, for several months I carried a thermometer in my pocket and took my temperature every hour. No matter where I was. Understandably, I appeared a little weird to the people I had meetings with while I had this thing sticking out of my mouth.

  I got caught up in the same kind of mania when I started looking for ways to practice mind reading on my own. I wanted to see if I could improve on my abilities at empathy and Theory of Mind, and I was searching for a kind of personal human-contact workout gym.

  I started by practicing reading the faces of strangers—people in the street, store clerks, taxi drivers—trying to get inside their heads and figure out why they were saying what they said, the meaning of their body language and tone of voice.

  I practiced listening to people, asking their opinion about things. Even in casual encounters, I tried to see things through their eyes.

  I did it everywhere I went. It was a little less obvious than walking around with a thermometer in my mouth, but no less obsessive. Surprisingly, it seemed to be having an effect on me. Maybe it was causing a change in the tone of my own voice or the look on my face. Something seemed to be changing, because the behavior of other people was becoming different.

  One day, I hailed a taxi at Columbus Circle. The cab pulled up and the driver rolled down the passenger window and called out to me, “Where are you going?” When drivers ask you this before you get in the cab, it means they won’t take the fare unless they like where you’re going. This is against the law. I drove a cab for a while in my twenties and I know how annoying it can be to have to drive to far-flung places—I once had to dig my cab out of a snowbank in the Bronx at two in the morning—but I went where the passengers wanted to go, because I knew I had to. When I get asked this question now, my usual response is not to identify compassionately with the driver, but to stoke the fire under my boiling blood. I went, pal, and so can you! is roughly my thought, and I walk away without negotiating.

  But this time, I looked him in the eye. I saw no hostility. It’s the end of his shift, I thought. He wants to get home. Suddenly, I was all empathized up. I gave him the address, and he let me get in the car. I was surprised I didn’t feel my usual resentment at having to audition for a cab ride, but then he said, “What’s the cross street?” This was another flash point. I’ve never been there before, I thought. How am I supposed to know the cross street? Isn’t that sort of your job? Ordinarily, I would start boiling again. Instead, I took out my iPhone and opened a map. “I’m looking it up for you,” I said. We were getting to be real teammates.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m trying to get to a bathroom. I’ve needed to go for the last half hour.”

  “So, look,” I said, “just drop me at Eighty-sixth and Broadway. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “No, no,” he said. “You’re a kind person. People get in this cab, they don’t care about other people. I’m taking you where you’re going.”

  “No, look,” I say, “it’s all right. It’s only a couple of blocks.”

  Now we were in an ecstasy of cooperation.

  “Don’t make the turn here,” I say, “you’ll have to go four blocks out of your way. You’ll waste five minutes.”

  “No! You’re a nice person. I’m taking you to the door.”

  I couldn’t stop him. This man was sacrificing his bladder for me. I wished I’d never started the whole thing.

  I stopped practicing empathy for a while; it was exhausting. But I couldn’t stay away for long. I started in again, with a slight shift. I began to look at people’s faces not only to guess what they were feeling, but to actually name it. I would mentally attach a word to what I thought was their emotion. Labeling it meant that I wasn’t just observing them; I was making a conscious effort to settle on the exact word that described what I saw. This had an interesting effect on me. First, I felt I was listening more intently to what they were saying, even if earlier I had found them somewhat boring. And secondly, I would feel a sense of comfort, almost a sense of peace, come over me. It seemed a little bizarre, but so far it wasn’t causing people t
o sacrifice their organs for me.

  The feeling of peace was probably just a sense of relaxation. Whatever it was, naming other people’s emotions seemed to help me focus on them more and it made talking to them more pleasant. I had no idea, of course, if other people who tried this would have the same experience, or if it was true that I was building up some empathy. Someone would have to do a study on it to find out. But I didn’t expect anyone to devote research time to studying such a cockeyed idea. On the other hand…

  NAMING EMOTIONS AS A WAY TO INCREASE EMPATHY?

  In a conversation with Matt Lerner, the scientist who taught improv to kids on the autistic spectrum, I told him I had been trying to find a way to get the same benefit without the person’s having to join an improv class. Some kind of solitary exercise. I told him about how I was silently labeling other people’s emotions—figuring out what I thought they were feeling and then naming it.

  “I do this all during the day,” I said. “Sometimes with strangers in the street, or sometimes a cashier in a delicatessen. I focus on what they seem to be feeling. And then I name the feeling.”

  “Silently?”

  “Right. Silently. Naming it seems to be important. Things change in my attitude toward them. I have more tolerance for boring people, or people who are bureaucratic. I try to identify what they’re feeling—not what they’re thinking, because that’s pretty obvious.”

  “Because they’re telling you.”

  “Right. Like if they say, ‘Sign the form!’ it’s pretty clear what they’re thinking. But what emotion are they going through? Identifying it doesn’t make me more sympathetic, but it does give me a chance to respond more appropriately. It kind of heads off impatience. And here’s something odd. When I do this in conversation, something must be happening on my face, because I see the expression on their face change. There’s more connection. It’s a subjective feeling, of course; there’s no way to know if this is actually happening, but it seems to make a difference.”

  Matt looked at me for a moment. “You made this up?”

  “Yeah.” Long pause. “Does it relate to anything you’ve come across?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.” Another pause. Then: “It’s related to the work we do training clinical psychologists. One of the things we talk about a lot is the therapeutic alliance. The bond between the therapist and client. Carl Rogers’s whole approach was based on empathy. Reflecting and trying to build a therapeutic bond. We identify what they’re feeling, and then respond, saying it back to them. We always assume that the stuff that matters when you’re building that alliance is the step where I say, ‘That must really be painful for you,’ or ‘Wow, that sounds really exciting.’ But actually, first I have to do that in my own head: I have to say, ‘What am I going to call this?’ So, being nonjudgmental and positive might all start with internally stating the person’s affect to yourself. I like this. I never thought of that piece of it. It’s a very clever exercise.”

  Clever. What a nice word. I started to get excited.

  Would it be possible to see if naming people’s emotions could actually increase your empathy? “How would you study something like that?” I asked.

  He briefly outlined a method where he could give people an app for their smartphones that they could tap every time they read someone’s emotion and named it. They could do this for a week, and he could use standardized tools for testing empathy before and after a run. He thought for a moment and said, “I’d love to do that study.”

  I mentally noted his emotion and labeled it enthusiastic. I labeled my own as overjoyed.

  I was eager to see if this naming game really worked. I asked Matt how much funding he might have to raise for a study like this. He thought for a second and made a rough guess. I realized I could fund it myself and save him months of writing grants. Almost immediately, though, I knew that I would want to write about the results in this book, and I wondered if my funding the study would in some way compromise it, making it seem less independent—like a drug company that advertises only its positive results. I agonized over this for a couple of weeks and finally concluded that, as a scientist, Matt would be just as interested in proving it wrong as proving it right, and that I would report on his findings no matter what they were—even if the results were totally null and my “clever exercise” failed miserably.

  In fact, I’d be happy to report on a failure, I thought. I have a lot of respect for failed experiments. It’s how scientists know what doesn’t work. I wish more so-called failures in research got attention. It would save others from going down the same dead-end alleys. It could be helpful to report on this if it didn’t pan out.

  I was starting to think of the possible failure of the study as a public service, and we hadn’t even begun it yet. In science, as in art, I thought, you only arrive at success after you run the gauntlet of failures. People should be aware of that. I’d be glad to write about the failure of this idea.

  Anyway, that’s how it seemed at the time.

  LENDING MY BRAIN TO SCIENCE

  I pulled into the Stony Brook garage a half hour early. I stood in the shade of a tree and waited for Matt to meet me and lead me to the lab.

  He and his research team had worked out rigorous protocols, and I was here to see what it would be like for someone to go through their study. I was going to be a mock subject. Whatever my result turned out to be, it would be excluded from the study, because I was, after all, not a naïve subject.

  I knew, for instance, that I was not being put into a control group. But just to make sure I’d be as ordinary a subject as possible, I had stopped labeling other people’s emotions for the previous two weeks, so I’d have a fresh start.

  After a couple of minutes, I saw Matt waving as he came down the path. He introduced me to Tammy Rosen, a doctoral student who had helped design the study. As we walked to the lab, I wanted to find out as much as they could tell me without spoiling the experience of being an ordinary subject.

  “How many people have been through the study so far?” I asked Matt.

  “So far, twenty. Out of forty-five. Then we have the autistic population after that.”

  “So, how’s it going?”

  “It’s very interesting.”

  “Really?” That word interesting could be positive or negative.

  “I guess I shouldn’t tell you too much, but it’s exciting.”

  Exciting. That was definitely a positive word. I didn’t ask any more questions, but I felt a little excitement myself. I realized, of course, that he might be so rigorous he’d be excited even by negative results, as long as they were definitive. But I hung on to my positive interpretation of the word. Not very scientific of me, but I couldn’t resist.

  We got to the lab and Tammy took me into a small room, where I filled out papers outlining my medical history, and then she started me on the pretrial tests. A is to B as C is to what? or, What’s missing from this pattern? I love tests like this. I love them too much. I get competitive and want to ace them. I wound up taking twice as long as it usually takes to finish the session.

  Next, they fitted me with an EEG cap, which involves a certain amount of poking at your scalp with a blunt object to ensure good electrical contact, and eventually leaves you looking like a robot with wires sprouting from your head. Scientists had recorded my brain waves with EEG machines many times during the days of Scientific American Frontiers, but never to test for empathy. This would be a new experience. I was helped across the room—we were trying not to detach my wires—and seated in a soundproof booth. There, I listened to recordings of the same phrase spoken happily, angrily, sadly, and in a few other ways I couldn’t distinguish. My task was to name the emotions. Later, I saw pictures of people’s faces displaying the same range of emotions, which I had to identify. It was fun, but occasionally confusing. How did these people feel? I was thinking maybe I wasn’t as empathic as I thought I was.

  I was exhausted by now. And this was jus
t the pretrial run. I’d have to go through the same thing again the following week to see if my empathy had improved after seven days of reading and naming other people’s emotions.

  Tammy programmed my smartphone so I could send back a report every time I had an interaction with someone that lasted more than five seconds. I would have to silently figure out what emotion they were feeling, and then choose from a number of possible emotions on the phone’s screen, or type in a more specific one of my own.

  As soon as I got home, I started reading my wife, Arlene’s face while we talked. After a while, she got used to my whipping out the phone while she was midsentence. The next day at lunch, I practiced on one of our daughters and her family. They asked questions about the study, and were amused when I’d pick up the phone and tell them, “I’m giving you a ‘curious’ for that.” I was immersed in it.

  The night of the second day, I had one of those dreams that seem so real you remember every word spoken by the dream’s characters. More than that, while I was still asleep I could reflect on my behavior, as if I were inside the mind of the person in the dream, who was, after all, me inside my own mind. When I told Arlene about the dream, she smiled and said, “You’re totally caught up in reading emotions, aren’t you?” She was right. I was monitoring people’s emotions in my sleep. Even my own emotions.

  In my dream, I was visiting a mathematician I didn’t know very well, who joked that we held different political opinions and we were probably headed for a good argument. “No, no,” I told him. “I value the opinions of people I disagree with. It’s the yin and yang of understanding. Reality is made up of opposing ideas.” I even tried to explain all this using an equation. After a long and nonsensical tirade, I could see that his face had fallen. I could hear what the me in the dream was thinking: You didn’t show him how open you were. You lectured him. All this attention to other people’s emotions wasn’t having much of an effect in my dream. I began to suspect that my unconscious was warning me not to get too excited. Things might not turn out so well with this study.