by Alan Alda
The one thing I had going for me that night at Rockefeller University was that I was completely out of my element. I could come in on an angle they might not have thought of.
Here’s what I think we have to do to get past our blind date with science: I think we have to go through the three stages of love.
People have been trying to map the stages of love for two or three thousand years now. Some people claim there are eight stages of love; some say six. I’ll say there are three because three is easier to remember. Here’s what I think they are:
The first stage of love is lust. That’s certainly easy to remember.
The second stage is infatuation.
And the third is commitment.
The feeling of lust is what takes place during the blind date, if the date is at all successful.
It’s simple, reptile-brain, animal attraction. It’s our genes telling us they want to live forever. I may be stretching it a little, but when we first hear some news about science, I think we have a similar reaction: Our eyes dilating with pleasure, our pulse quickening, we sense that someone has something to tell us that could make us a little smarter or give us some little edge for survival. We listen for an extra second, our eyes locked on the source of our bounty. Just as with the object of our lust, our genes are telling us they want to live forever and this is just another way to do it.
But for this kind of attraction to take place between humans on a blind date—and, by analogy, between the public and science—there’s an interesting dynamic that has to take place. Researchers have found that this attraction can happen in the first couple of minutes of an encounter, and it’s not so much what’s said as the way we present ourselves. Body language and tone of voice account for ninety-three percent of the attraction. What’s actually said, only seven percent.
This is something I began to understand when I started interviewing scientists on Scientific American Frontiers. During the eleven years I did the show, I spoke with hundreds of scientists. What I found was that their work became clear–and interesting to a lay audience—to the extent that I could help keep them from sliding into lecture mode. I remember an interview with a scientist in Boston who was an engaging person and whose work was fascinating. I was very curious about it, and I kept asking questions, which she would begin answering in a conversational way and then, I guess realizing that this was part of her regular line of talk, she would slowly turn away from me, face the camera, and go into deep lecture mode. Her voice changed, her face changed—her vocabulary changed. She became almost instantaneously unintelligible. I would tempt her back to me with a passionate display of curiosity. And as soon as she turned toward me, her entire affect became human and warm again. This happened two or three times during our talk, and each time the difference was startling.
This was one of the main reasons the show was successful: We allowed scientists to speak in their own voices. They had the texture and temperature of humanity. They didn’t sound like gods from Olympus. They sounded like very, very smart humans.
I think human warmth is vital in establishing instantaneous attraction. But that’s just the first stage of love.
To get beyond lust, which tends to be a passing interest, we have to move to the next stage: infatuation.
Here’s where emotion comes in. If people are going to remember what they hear, they’ll need to have their emotions touched. Research has shown that emotion is what makes us remember, and I think it helps us pay attention, too.
If we tell it right, the story of science can not only arouse our emotions, it can be a great detective story. It’s fascinating to hear about a breakthrough as a mystery getting solved. Too often, I think, we hear about the results of the search, without the drama of the search itself. Please don’t leave out your mistakes. That’s the most dramatic part of the story. Invite us to solve the puzzle along with you, with all its emotional ups and downs.
And give us context. Tell us why this breakthrough needed to take place. What was tried by others? Why did it fail? What did you try along the way? How did you fail, and how did you succeed? Don’t leave out the blind alleys and the mistakes. They’re fascinating to us. They make what you do a human enterprise.
But then I thought of my professor a half century ago in the well of that amphitheater, trying as hard as he could to drill the hard stuff of science into our heads. Maybe I was asking too much of him to think he could make chemical bonds and valences as emotional as the chemistry of Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca.
Science is hard to understand and, clearly, it can’t all be absorbed through interesting stories.
There are technical terms that have to be understood, and they have to be introduced with a sensitivity to the mind that’s trying to grasp them. When I was a boy, about nine, I sat and looked at a flame for an hour. I wondered what it was. It was too hot to touch, but even if you could, it had no body to it, no weight. I asked my teacher, and she said, “It’s oxidation.” Ah, I said. Oxidation. I didn’t want to offend her, but I thought this was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. I didn’t need another name for it; I needed to know what it was. I needed to hear in the simplest terms what was going on at the end of the candle. I needed her to understand where I was in my mind.
This brings us to the third stage of love: commitment. I’d say that the heart of commitment is finding actual value in the other person. Not the simple attraction of lust or casual interest; not the head-turning fantasies of infatuation—but, rather, both of you finding a real and deep value in the other. This is probably the only stage of love where you actually have to listen to the other person. And because of that, it’s when you understand what’s going on in that person’s mind.
I think the listener can grasp the tough part of science critically and intelligently if it’s presented in a way that’s both personal and accurate. I think this is possible, as long as we remember that dumbing down is not the goal; clarity is the goal.
Da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.” But, of course, we should make sure we’re not painting a false picture through oversimplification. Einstein said it very well: “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
On the other hand, Big Al—as one astronomer I interviewed called Einstein—Big Al shouldn’t get a totally free pass in the metaphor department. Once reporters were hounding him for a simple explanation of relativity, and finally, in exasperation, he gave a statement to his secretary to pass on to them. He said:
“An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
That certainly has simplicity going for it—and I guess it’s true, as far as it goes—but I have this funny feeling that’s not the kind of insight they gave him the Nobel Prize for.
So, if the Great One could get frustrated occasionally, and oversimplify, the rest of us will certainly not find it easy. There are some real problems in making science clear. For instance, I do believe that the more personal it is, the more vivid it will be…and the more it’s expressed in the scientist’s own voice, the better. But to some extent, this goes against the very nature of science: There’s common agreement that the cult of personality should not outweigh the evidence. I think this is one reason that some scientists tend to regard as slightly less scientific those colleagues who achieve great popular fame.
But I believe that in presenting science, if you can bring about a balance of personal energy and scientific rigor, you can accomplish several things at once: You can make the work of the scientist more accessible, and you can help science itself to be seen as the exciting, fun, human thing it is. Any bright kid can see it as something he or she could pursue. You can even introduce a whole new way of thinking to many people—one based on evidence rather than opinion or magic.
But to do this, we have to be aware of what’s going on in the listener’s head.
I’m sure this is what every good teacher
does. I do something like this in my work, too. Probably all of us who put ourselves in front of an audience have to learn to be aware of what’s going on in the mind of the listener. When I write, when I act, or when I just tell a funny story, I’m constantly working on setting up expectations in the mind of the audience. And then messing up those expectations, and eventually resolving them in a pleasurable way.
It’s like the older couple who went to court to get a divorce. And the judge just couldn’t understand why they were divorcing. He said to the man, “You’re ninety-eight years old, your wife is ninety-six. You’ve been married for seventy years. Why would you want to get a divorce now?” And the man said, “We’ve been waiting for the children to die.”
If you track what you’re thinking, when you hear that trivial little story, it has almost the same structure as Oedipus Rex.
It does.
Someone is trying to figure something out. Why do you want a divorce? This doesn’t make sense. We identify with the task. Look at the length of time you waited. We agree. We press for an answer with the judge. Then the husband gives the answer, and the result is both inevitable and surprising. As soon as he says it, you track back and you realize that the length of time they were married was the deciding factor. During such a long marriage, things happen, conversations take place, decisions are made that wouldn’t have taken place in a marriage of normal length. You’ve been led down a path that quickly, surprisingly, doubles back on itself. An expectation has been set up in your mind; then it’s been played with, and then resolved, in an unexpected way.
In Oedipus Rex, the city is cursed, and Oedipus has to find who’s responsible. Years earlier, he had a standoff on a narrow road with a man going the opposite way and, rashly, killed him. As it turns out, the man was his own father. The surprise is that Oedipus himself is the culprit he’s been searching for. With the elderly couple, the surprise is that they’ve been waiting for the kids to die. One’s tragic and the other is funny, but I think most good stories contain this play on expectations.
This kind of thing doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but it can be taught systematically.
The word systematic is terrifically important in all of this. Good communication can be taught. But for it to have a lasting effect—for it to become a part of someone’s core—I think it has to be taught systematically, and over time.
Here’s the model. In my field, a hundred years ago in Russia, Konstantin Stanislavsky showed that the art of acting could be taught systematically. He called it the System, and it was later renamed the Method in the American version. Until then, acting was a mysterious process in which only a talented few could shine. He didn’t make every student a genius, but he found he could elevate many to a higher standard of ability. It wasn’t that ordinary people selected at random became geniuses. But what did happen was that even minimally talented people could become proficient. The level of everyone rose significantly. Geniuses still stood out. But through study, you could become competent. I think this model can be used to inspire a course of study in communication for scientists. But it has to take place over time; it can’t be a crash course of a few hours or a few weeks.
What I would love to see is scientists learning the skills of communication throughout their science education; and all forms of communication–written and verbal. But I’m not talking about a crash course in speaking in sound bites. I’m talking about developing scientists’ ability to speak accurately about their work, but in a personal, vivid way that makes the listeners’ brains light up with pleasure and excitement.
I realize that science is an endlessly vast and difficult set of subjects to teach, and I’m sure there’s hardly time in the curriculum now to get in all the science students need. So how can you squeeze in communication? That’s an important objection. But look at the inefficiencies in the system we have now. How much better and faster would things go if undergraduates were being taught by graduate students who had been trained, themselves, in the skills of communication?
The problem now is that only people who are naturally talented with words rise to the top as communicators. We’ve accepted a system in which scientists are trained rigorously in science, but the communication of science has been left completely to chance.
And it’s not just ability with words that will make science vivid to us. It’s the ability to let the person you are inside you, the authentic you, come out: to be able to express not just what you know, but who you are. This doesn’t have to diminish the hard science, but it can go a long way toward making the science clear and available.
When I talked to the graduating class at Caltech, I asked them to devote a significant part of their lives to figuring out how to share their love of science with the rest of us. And I’m asking the scientists here tonight the same thing.
Be personal about science; arouse our lust for it. Tell us a story and make our hearts quicken.
Let’s listen to one another, let’s commit to one another.
Let’s fall in love.
After the talk, as we walked to the president’s house for dinner, Paul Nurse told me he had been interested for some time in this problem. He said that for several years in England, he had run training programs to help scientists improve their communication skills, and in one he had even brought in actors to work with them. I knew Paul was naturally talented at holding an audience, but I could see now that he had been methodical about it, too. He had worked at it systematically, the way he had worked at science.
Fifty years earlier, I had thought I couldn’t stay in that dim amphitheater if I wanted to be an actor. But Paul had brought actors into the amphitheater. He was reconnecting the cord between the hemispheres. He was pulling the continents back together.
It was a while before I began to see what I was telling myself in this talk: to listen. I was asking scientists to listen to what their audience was thinking, but really I was telling myself to listen, too. To not think that my present interests defined all there was to me. To move outside myself to what was in the other person’s mind, no matter how alien it seemed. To find what was interesting and valuable in their strangeness.
I could see now that my father wasn’t asking me to follow his dream, but to find my own and not limit myself only to what interested me then.
Pushing past our fathers, like Oedipus on the narrow road, is one of the ways we move on into adulthood, and I had pushed mine aside. I had undervalued him. I had thought of my father as a vain actor with few interests. But, in fact, he was curious and, in a way, even studious. He was excited by the land when we moved to the country, and he sent away for pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture. He studied them at night and transplanted olive trees by day. He had gone to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, where you had to be good at math just to get in. He told me often that his favorite book was about the scientists who had discovered microbes. He did have interests outside himself, but I didn’t listen for them. He might have been vain, but he was far less of a show-off about his curiosity than I was about mine, and I mistook that for a lack of interest. I mistook his gentleness for passivity. How could he urge me to find my own way if he insisted on the road I take? He gave me the freedom to discover it for myself. It was the way he taught me to act in the burlesque sketches we did together: “Say that line a few times. As many as you feel is good. Usually three is good, but whatever you feel.” And it was the way he pointed me toward the chemistry class. “Just give it a try,” he said.
In gently urging me to explore, he gave meaning to my life that I think neither of us expected. I might not have responded at that very moment, but eventually I did, and it gave me the nerve to go places that scare me, but where I find excitement and adventure. I’ve wound up going where he wanted me to go: toward all the things that could interest me, if I’d let them.
Long after we had gone our separate ways, I met my father on the road again–and this time I let him pass.
Chapter 15
&n
bsp; * * *
Celebrity and Its Discontents
While I was playing on television in M*A*S*H, a poll was taken of schoolchildren, and the appalling finding was that my face was more recognizable to them than Abraham Lincoln’s. Lincoln: the man who freed the slaves, who wrote the Gettysburg Address, whose face is on the penny; if only he could have appeared weekly in prime time, he could have been somebody.
A delegation from the magazine that did the poll came to the set and took my picture, and we had lunch under a tent in the Malibu mountains where we shot the exteriors. There was a lot of laughing and joking. They were delighted to be on the set of a popular show, and I think they expected me to be delighted by how well known my face was. I was amazed, but I was a little uneasy, too. That afternoon captured what all of us feel about celebrity. We don’t understand it. We chuckle at it, even as it touches us in countless ways. But what exactly is it? Three decades later, I was thinking about it again in the middle of the night.
I couldn’t sleep. I got up three times during the night to sit at the computer and fix a word or straighten a twisted metaphor. The next day, I would be giving one of those talks that I had no business delivering. My friend Mike, the psychoanalyst, had asked if I’d give a talk at his hospital. At first I’d said no, and then I thought maybe I did have something to talk about. I had been thinking for a while that one of the ways people have of looking for meaning in their lives is celebrity. It’s one of the ways we hope to live forever. Maybe by talking with Mike’s group about this, I could understand it better. I said yes.
Amazingly, I had agreed to give the Grand Rounds lecture at the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University. The audacity of this didn’t really hit me until the night before the talk. Why had I thought I could say anything to a hundred psychiatrists that they would find remotely interesting? How could their response be anything but one that ranged from condescension to outrage? I had to stop this thing of testing myself all the time. It was getting ridiculous. There was enough adrenaline in my bloodstream to get a herd of cattle across a river. I took a pill and drifted off.
