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

by Alan Alda

  Silently, the leader does simple things, like stretching out his arms or scratching his face, and the follower has to observe his slightest movement so well that she can anticipate what comes next and do it at the exact same time he does it. The motions of both of them should be so in sync that a stranger walking into the room wouldn’t be able to tell who was leading and who was the mirror.

  At first, they’re having trouble. The person playing the mirror lags behind. She’s not so much a mirror as a delayed video recording of his movements. But that’s because he’s not giving her a chance to keep up with him. He’s moving too fast. I coach from the side and explain that it’s his responsibility to help the mirror, his partner, keep up with him. This is the students’ first glimmer of the basic idea: The person who’s communicating something is responsible for how well the other person follows him.

  If I’m trying to explain something and you don’t follow me, it’s not simply your job to catch up. It’s my job to slow down. This is at the heart of communicating: If I tell you something without making sure you got it, did I really communicate anything? Was I talking to you, or was I just making noises? In the mirror exercise, is the leader enabling the follower to follow, or is he just waving his arms?

  I ask the leader to slow down and give his partner a chance to follow, to connect with him, and before long they’re actually in sync.

  Then the exercise gets a little tougher. I tell them that the follower, the mirror, is now the leader.

  They struggle a little, but after a few minutes they’re pretty good at this switch in roles. A stranger walking into the room would have a hard time knowing who is the follower and who is the leader.

  But then I throw them another curve. I give them an instruction that has been mystifying people new to improvising ever since Viola Spolin invented her “Theater Games” decades ago. I tell the players that now neither one of them is leading; they have to find the motion together. They’re both leaders and they’re both followers. This doesn’t just seem hard to do, it sounds impossible. Somehow, they have to achieve a kind of instantaneous synchrony.

  They work at it for a while, and before long the young scientists are surprised to find they can actually sync up, even if no one is leading. There is delighted laughter. An expression of surprise, even a little shock.

  They’re beginning to read each other’s bodies, learning to pick up clues that will lead eventually to reading each other’s feelings and thoughts—and in this way it will be as though they’re what’s called “reading each other’s minds.”

  We move on to something even more difficult.

  VERBAL SYNC

  Now the couple sits in chairs, facing each other. Instead of mirroring their movements, they’re going to be mirroring one another’s speech. I ask one of them to tell the other about something ordinary—what she did to start the day, or the plot of a movie she saw. She has to improvise it on the spot. With no preparation of any kind, their task is to be so in sync that they both say the exact same thing at the exact same moment.

  This isn’t easy. They begin with huge lags between leader and follower. Coaching on the side, I tell them, “Speak at the same time. You can’t be an echo. You have to be her mirror. A mirror does what you do at the exact same moment.” I urge them to slow down and give the other person a chance to keep up. You can see their frustration, but they stay focused on each other’s eyes, lips, bodies. Listening intently, they try to pick up signals of what the other might say next.

  He: This is really hard! [laughter from the class]

  She: No…

  Both: …kidding.

  She: It makes the whole…

  Both: …science…thing look really easy. [more laughter]

  And they’re in sync.

  But how can a simple game like this have anything to do with good communication when these people are out in the world? It’s a good question. Most of the scientists we work with are adventurous, but at this point, some express skepticism. “Okay, this is fun, but what is it actually doing for us?”

  It wasn’t that easy to explain at first. I assured the doubters that by trial and error we had found that it worked in real life. “It helps you connect to the other person, to truly relate to them,” I said. If the students would just stick with it, learning to soak up the clues coming to them from the other person’s body language and tone of voice, learning to read the other person, they’d see themselves becoming better communicators. I’d seen it happen. But anecdotal evidence like that is not completely satisfying to a skeptical scientist. I wondered if there was any hard evidence to support these improv games. I started reading research papers in Stony Brook’s online library catalog, and discovered that there has been scientific research on behavior similar to the kind of exercises we were doing.

  MARCHING AND TAPPING

  At Stanford University, Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath wondered why modern armies still train by marching in step and shouting cadences. Marching in step toward the enemy has long been out of style, largely because it tends to be suicidal. So why does synchronous marching persist in the training of soldiers? Is there some advantage to it?

  The answer, they found, is yes. It can strengthen cohesion and promote cooperation within a group, and here’s how they figured that out.

  In one study, they had small groups of people walk around the campus. Some groups were walking in step, while others, acting as a control, were walking normally. After the walk, the participants took part in a game that is known to test a group for trust and cooperation—and those who had marched in step scored higher on both counts.

  I had to read that result more than once. The simple act of walking in step produced greater cooperation? And more trust? It seemed hard to believe. But the tests of the groups’ cohesion were standardized. Their reliability had been verified many times over.

  In other studies, simply tapping in sync, like tapping on a table, produced the same results. After they had spent some time tapping in sync, the subjects paid more attention to the good of the group, and they made fewer selfish choices.

  Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno found that synchronous tapping gave participants an increased sense of similarity with the person they were syncing up with. The researchers reported that with that feeling of similarity, the subjects were more likely to have compassion for their tapping partners and to behave more altruistically toward them.

  I want to be cautious and not regard these, or any of the studies I write about in this book, as the last word in understanding human interactions. Most research, I think, can only suggest, or point toward, an insight of some kind. One thing you can say for sure about most studies is that they leave you with the suggestion to do more studies. But the research I’ve read does seem to throw light on what I’ve experienced many times in improv sessions.

  For instance, marching and tapping in sync is very similar to what we do in the mirroring exercises. And the scientists who did these studies found some of the same bonding of the participants that I had observed in our improv classes.

  As a young actor, when I worked with Paul Sills for six months on Theater Games, I felt a sense of camaraderie I hadn’t known before. Now I was seeing controlled studies that suggested this feeling had come from syncing up with the other players.

  LEADERLESS SYNC

  Right around the time our grad students were trying to sync up without a leader on a stage at Stony Brook, a team of scientists in Israel was doing experiments to see if such a thing was actually possible.

  Uri Alon, along with Lior Noy and Erez Dekel, at the Weizmann Institute of Science, had worked out a method to test how well people could mirror one another.

  Uri is a scientist who, in addition to his research, also runs workshops for younger scientists. He works with people who are just making a big transition in their lives, where they go from postdoc to running their own labs and becoming group leaders. “It’s a time,” he says, “when they’re most panicked. Th
ey need to do things they’ve never been trained to do, and they make many basic mistakes in communication.”

  They’re sometimes uncomfortable being the boss; they have trouble figuring out how to guide people and often don’t know how to listen.

  Uri has a background in theater and has taught improvisation. He was sure that Theater Games could help the scientists open up and connect to the teams they’d be building. But he hit a snag when he asked fellow scientists to do leaderless mirroring.

  The exercise has been practiced by actors since Viola Spolin created her Theater Games many years ago, but the scientists hadn’t heard of it and didn’t believe that leaderless mirroring was possible. They thought that somebody had to be leading at each moment. And even when there appeared to be no leader, they were sure that, imperceptibly, the players were probably taking turns.

  Curious, Uri set up a study to see if something, in fact, does happen in mirroring that can bring two people so close mentally that they can anticipate each other’s movements spontaneously, apparently without either person’s leading—and within milliseconds.

  He set up his study with the subjects facing one another, but instead of moving their bodies, which would have been difficult to measure, he asked them each to move a handle along a track. If one of them pushed his handle forward or backward, the other person would try to mimic the movement with her handle in the same direction and in the same moment. The movements would be recorded on a graph, and in this way Uri could measure any lags in mirroring in milliseconds.

  They found distinct patterns in the way the participants moved the handles, and among experienced improvisers these patterns showed a striking result. When they engaged in a purely joint improvisation with no leader, their mirroring was more synchronized and more rapid than when one of them led and the other followed. They were actually more in sync when there was no leader.

  So, I was beginning to glimpse something at the heart of improv—why it creates such a strong group experience. Everyone who has improvised for a while senses it: Synchrony brings us together.

  CHAPTER 5

  Observation Games

  Synchrony can’t occur without acute observation—which is why improv training often begins with games and exercises that enable people to see and respond to the slightest shift in another person’s behavior.

  For instance, once people are used to the idea of working with the imaginary substance of space—walking around in it and building sculptures out of pure air—they’ll stand in a circle and one person will shape an object in her hands and pass it to the person next to her. He has to observe how she handles the object to know what it is. She’ll use an egg beater differently from a golf club, but his only clue is observing her motions as she uses it. When he takes it from her, he has to handle it in a way that shows he knows exactly what it is, including its size and weight. Because it’s invisible, it exists only by common agreement. Suddenly, everyone is seeing things that weren’t there before. It’s sort of like what democracy could be if we actually paid attention to one another.

  You see this when they toss imaginary balls back and forth. When someone receives a ball with the same force with which it was thrown, and with the same weight and size it had when it left the other person’s hand, you can actually see a ball going back and forth.

  I’ve seen astonishment on people’s faces as they watch a volleyball game with five people on each side of a net that isn’t there. They’re batting a nonexistent ball back and forth and yet they can keep score. They’re absolutely clear about who won or lost a point, because they can see precisely where the imaginary ball is at every moment.

  It’s just as surprising to see two opposing teams pick up an imaginary rope and have a tug-of-war with it.

  When one team pulls on the rope, the other team has to know exactly how much force is applied, and how much resistance their own team is coming up with. Above all, they have to make sure that the rope between them stays the same length. It can’t suddenly be made of rubber and get longer or shorter. They do this by watching for the slightest movement in the other team’s bodies, but also in the bodies of their own team; how much are they countering the efforts of the other team? Each person has to sense where they are in a complicated mix of forces. Somehow, they have to add their own force to it, but they can’t control the outcome all by themselves. It’s a large group responding to subtle changes, and it’s leaderless.

  First, the team on the left is pulling so hard that the one on the right starts being moved across the floor. Then the players on the right dig in their heels. After a moment, the tide turns. The team on the right is able to pull the opposing team toward them. They’re all straining against the taut rope until, finally, one team can’t resist anymore and they fall over one another, collapsing on the floor.

  And there was no rope. It only became real because they were observing one another and accepting the dynamics of how the group handled it. As soon as they let go and collapsed on the floor in laughter, the rope disappeared.

  GIBBERISH

  Observation games prepare the players for more complicated games, where words are used to communicate something, but they’re not always words found in the English language. If you walked into the room during one of our workshops, you’d see some weird things.

  Someone might be selling a product to the class, but the class has to work hard to guess what the product is, because the sales pitch is entirely in gibberish—nonsense sounds that sound like a language but have no meaning.

  It takes a while to figure out your own version of gibberish. At first, some people are intimidated by trying to speak gibberish, because it feels strange to make garbled utterances when you’re really trying to express a thought; you want the actual words of your native language to come out, not these strange sounds. But here you are selling us a product and you have to show us why we should buy it—not through words, but through body language, through the way you demonstrate it, and how emotional you are about it.

  Before you know it, you’re communicating with your whole body. And in that moment, you have the pleasurable experience of making contact with people, not by spraying words at them, but by using your whole expressive self. After a while, we actually see what you’re trying to sell us. And we buy it.

  WHAT’S THE RELATIONSHIP?

  In another game, someone sits in a chair, waiting. After a moment, someone enters the room and begins explaining something to the person in the chair. Without any clues—just by observing her manner in how she relates to him—he has to figure out what the emotional relationship is that he shares with her. Is he her beloved little brother? Her strict father? Her overbearing boss? If she’s a scientist, she might tell him about her work in the lab, or she might tell him the plot of a movie she’s seen. It doesn’t matter what she talks about. Her job is to convey their relationship, not through what she says, but only through her manner, through how she relates to him.

  This is a variation of Viola Spolin’s intriguing game called Who Am I? In our version, a researcher might be telling someone about her work in science but, as in Spolin’s game, through her tone of voice, her body language, and the way she phrases her statements, she’ll be trying to let him know who he is in relation to her. She would talk to her boss with different words and a different tone than she would use with a child. If she’s trying to convey to the other person that he’s playing the part of her nine-year-old brother, she’ll have a hard time doing it if she rattles off a couple of minutes of jargon. But it’s against the rules of the game to use hints. For example, she can’t mention “our mom” or ask, “How was school today?”

  As she launches into the conversation, she’s faced with the realization that her usual way of talking about her research is probably not going to convey to him who he is. One thing she’ll learn from this is that there are many different ways to express the same thought, depending on whom you’re talking with. This can help if one day a member of Congress doesn’t
get it the first way a scientist explains her work and she has to come up with another way to say it.

  More importantly, she’ll learn that a lot of communication takes place in ways that don’t use words. The scientist is talking to the other player about her day in the lab, but what she’s really trying to communicate to him is their relationship—that he’s her little brother. He’s completely in the dark until he picks up the right clues, not from any hints she’s dropping, but from the way she relates to him. He’s learning to read her behavior. And she’s learning to express herself through her behavior.

  It sounds like you might need actors to do this well, but I’ve been surprised to see how vivid people can be when they simply focus on the person in front of them.

  I once saw Dr. Martha Furie, a professor of pathology, come through the door and brusquely confront another woman. As Furie began talking about her work on Lyme disease, everyone in the room could tell, judging by the sight of her angry face and the cold tone of her voice, that something big was at stake. It certainly was: The imaginary relationship I had given Martha was that the other player was her estranged sister who was having an affair with Martha’s husband. It was a pretty fraught relationship, but the training she had had, the games she had already played, enabled her now to abandon herself to this bizarre imaginary situation. She was even able to do it knowing that a reporter from the New York Times happened to be watching the session that day. “That was crazy,” Dr. Furie said later to the reporter. “I’m actually not a person who puts myself out there. I can’t believe I did that.”

  This kind of thing happens often in improv training. People open up in ways they never expected.