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

by Alan Alda

  They weren’t comfortable with this. More than one teaching assistant said it would be totally inappropriate to make any kind of personal contact with the students. They wanted nothing to do with it. Yet, how could they read their students’ minds if they weren’t going to pay attention to them? And how would the students learn if they were shut out as a mere anonymous audience?

  Finally, following the lead of one of the more comfortable TAs, most of those in our class started to make contact and reach for a more personal connection with their students. For some of them, the results were memorable.

  One TA wrote a report after a class that had been a turning point for him:

  I totally switched the mood in class yesterday….As we switched gears to talk about their upcoming experiment, I told a very personal story that resonates so much with me. It was a story of an experiment I did with a beloved when my curious little scientist mind was blooming with so many creative ideas. I obtained two stethoscopes from my dad, who’s a medical doctor. Then I placed the earbuds of one of the stethoscopes in my ears and the diaphragm against her heart so that I was listening to her heartbeat. She used the second stethoscope in a similar setup on me. The goal here was to see if listening to someone else’s heartbeat would synchronize one’s heartbeat with the other person’s. We strapped a cardio-microphone to ourselves to measure the changes in heartbeat, and we closed our eyes as I held her left hand—for no particular reason. During that moment, it felt like I was feeling her being. Every heartbeat struck like the footstep of life itself. She had never been more alive to me. When we analyzed the data, we realized that our heartbeats started off as disparate rhythms but synchronized over time. But afterwards, we discussed the fact that we shouldn’t have held hands, since it introduced another variable.

  We decided to repeat the experiment. Except that we never did. And we will never repeat it, because she died in a car accident afterwards.

  I explained to the students that whenever I think about experiments and variables, this incident revives in my mind. I leveraged this story to talk about the importance of controlling variables and, of course, included a little life lesson I have learned about what it means to be alive and to be actively present in the present. The response from the class was an overwhelming somberness that zapped across the room.

  After the class, a student came to me and told me she really appreciated how much I cared about them and that she feels bad when her work is subpar because she sees the energy I put into helping them to learn. That seemingly little comment was quite helpful in evaluating the impact I’m having.

  MY FAVORITE IMAGINARY PICTURE

  We keep looking for ways to give people in our workshops an experience that helps them crash the resistance so many of us have to being personal and vulnerable with others.

  Val Lantz-Gefroh, the director of improvisation at the Center, invented an exercise for science students that she always ends her improv class with, and it almost always affects people emotionally. It’s one where, like the TA, she reveals something personal, in her case by holding up a blank piece of paper and describing an imaginary family photograph. The page is blank, but as she describes the picture in detail and tells the story behind it, the people in the room begin to see the people in the image.

  She tells the story of the day the photo was taken, and what the picture means to her emotionally. And then she goes a step further. She invites the class to describe their own imaginary pictures. And, one by one, they pick up the paper, show their picture, and open up in a way they never have before.

  One student who until then had not been especially personal when talking to a group held up the blank paper and began describing a picture of his grandfather. It was an ordinary picture of a man sitting in a chair, looking at the camera, but his description, and his story, began to move him. Before long he was choked up and couldn’t finish the description. It was a brand-new experience for the student, and it felt strange to him. After the class, Val said, “He just kept looking at me. He had discovered something in himself and he couldn’t quite articulate it. It was as though he was cracked open as a person.” Later, he wrote Val an email:

  I loved the improvisation parts of the workshop, especially the picture exercise.

  When I was a teenager I grew fast and was tall and rangy and felt out of control of my body a lot of the time. I loved swimming—especially that part after you dive in when you are flying under the water and you can turn over and look at your reflection in the surface, or curl into a ball, or flip over. You are not constrained by the usual two dimensions of land.

  The improv exercises were the emotional and intellectual equivalent of that. They made you free to get out of your own way and connect to your self.

  And by connecting to your self you can connect to your audience.

  On a personal note, I left the workshop, drove in the rain to the top of the biggest local hill, and stood on the roof of my car watching the passing storm. I don’t usually do that.

  I’m not suggesting that scientists get so moved by their own inner life that they get choked up in public, but in a controlled workshop setting, experiencing a moment of emotion in front of the class can be liberating—for the speaker and for the other people in the room as well. I walked into a workshop session once when they were halfway through the picture exercise and sat down next to a senior scientist. I asked her how it was going. She turned to me with moist eyes and said, “Great. We’re all in tears!”

  I don’t have proof of this, but I think I’ve seen that when we’re able to open up like this with people we’ve just met, it can be easier later to leap into a relationship with an audience we’ve just met. Or with a class that we see every day. We can reach more freely for emotional images, even about technical things.

  I actually do think there are times when technical descriptions can be cast in emotional terms. It has to be crafted for the right audience, of course, and it has to be accurate, but once we’ve become accustomed to brushing shoulders with the emotional, it can make a difference.

  For instance, here are two ways to describe the hugely important moment in science when the Higgs boson was discovered. Even a very few words with an emotional tinge can make a difference.

  On the one hand, you could say it like this:

  After years of work, scientists at CERN, in Switzerland, recently made a highly important discovery: the confirmation of a particle that had been proposed theoretically decades earlier. Here’s what they found and why it was considered so important.

  Or you could say it like this:

  Scientists at CERN, in Switzerland, broke out the champagne and hugged one another in celebration. They had discovered something whose possible existence had tantalized them for decades. Here’s what they found and why it got them so excited.

  Each paragraph contains exactly the same number of words. But the second one, which is an entirely true and accurate account of what happened that day, includes just a few words that excite a little emotion in the reader: broke out champagne, hugged, celebration, tantalized, excited.

  You might feel that even this much emotion cheapens the account. I would agree if this were a technical report in a scientific journal. But for us laypeople, a couple of emotional words can often turn a recital of the facts into something more engaging that will stick in the mind. And that’s the interesting thing about emotion. It doesn’t just make what we say more engaging—it makes it more memorable, too.

  And why tell them something we think is important if we don’t want them to remember it?

  CHAPTER 17

  Emotion Makes It Memorable

  YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS…

  “…A kiss is just a kiss,” according to the chorus of the old ballad. But Herman Hupfeld, who wrote the words and music, knew better. In the verse that we seldom hear, he reminds us that it’s simple, emotional things we go to for relief from the big, heavy things.

  This day and age we’re living in

&n
bsp; Gives cause for apprehension

  With speed and new invention

  And things like fourth dimension.

  Yet we get a trifle weary

  With Mr. Einstein’s theory.

  So we must get down to earth at times

  Relax, relieve the tension

  It’s the small, emotional things that stick in the head. A kiss is just a kiss, but as one of “the fundamental things of life,” it can not only give us relief from Mr. Einstein’s theory, it’s the kind of thing, odd as it may seem, that can help us remember his theory.

  I was talking one day with the memory researcher Jim McGaugh, who turned to me and said, “I bet if I asked you to remember your first kiss, you’d be able to.” I certainly could, and did, as soon as he mentioned it. But it wasn’t some romantic moment in the amber light of the setting sun that I remembered. It was an awkward twelve-year-olds’ spin-the-bottle smooch that didn’t do much for either one of us. It was actually a little embarrassing at the time.

  And that illustrated Jim’s point: We remember things that are tied to an emotion. Any emotion, even embarrassment.

  “I’m sure,” he said, “that all Nobel Prize winners know exactly where they were and what they were doing when they got the news that they won the Nobel Prize, and they’ll never forget that. I’m equally sure that people who pick up body parts after an airplane crash will remember forever having seen that.”

  Before I met Jim McGaugh, I was aware that fear could lodge something in memory, like when we see a snake in the grass. But he’s shown that events tend to be remembered when they’re associated with any strong emotion: joy, shame, disgust—happy and unhappy emotions alike.

  “It doesn’t have to be frightening,” he said. “It can be insulting. I can say to you—which is not true, but I could say—‘You know, I read some of your stuff. It’s not as good as it used to be. You might give that some thought.’ Now, if you believed that I had said that, you’d remember that forever.”

  And I would. I can remember my first bad review as an actor, not just in general, but word for word. A bad review hangs on your brain by its pointy little claws, its stinger probing your amygdala for as long as you live. On the bright side, I also remember happy things, like almost every great dish of pasta I’ve ever eaten at home and abroad. There is, I’m certain, an evolutionary advantage in remembering a superb dish of rigatoni.

  Jim McGaugh and I were walking along the tree-lined paths of his campus at the University of California, Irvine. We stepped into his lab, where his longtime collaborator Larry Cahill was setting up an experiment that we could film for Scientific American Frontiers.

  A young woman named Malina was sitting in front of a monitor, looking at pictures that were emotionally arousing, like a gun, an injured boy, a decomposing dog, or a snake. The test was to see how many of these she would remember a week later. To help her remember, after she looked at the pictures she was asked to stick her arm in a tub of ice water. How would that help her remember? I wondered.

  “The reason we’re doing that,” Larry said, “is this is a technique that’s well known to activate the body’s stress-hormone response. And we believe that the body’s stress-hormone response acts to enhance memory.” Still, that seemed to me like an extreme way to do it. Or, as Malina said when she dipped her elbow in the tub, “Oh! Oh!!!”

  “How long can people take this?” I asked.

  “Many people, myself included,” he said, “are wimps that can take it for about a minute.”

  Malina took it for a full three minutes.

  “Right now,” Larry said, “her brain is busy storing all that information. We call it consolidating. Kind of like Jell-O setting. During the setting process, the stress hormones are working on the newly forming memory to enhance the storage of it.”

  After the three minutes were up, Malina took her arm out.

  “How did the ice water feel?” I asked.

  “Horrible. Absolutely horrible.”

  A week after the test, subjects like Malina who had the ice water treatment remembered the emotionally charged pictures better than those who hadn’t plunged their arms in cold water. The stress hormones had helped solidify their memories.

  This process of solidifying, or consolidating, their memories is necessary because without it, we’d all remember—with equal importance—everything we ever saw, heard, or dreamed. This would probably make it impossible to get through the day.

  So, emotion helps us remember. That was clear. But this was new to me: that a bit of stress can help make that memory stick and feel more important than other memories.

  This combination of emotion and stress may be why I can’t forget a certain November day in Chicago. It’s engraved on my memory.

  I was getting ready to give a talk about communication at the annual meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges. I had been looking forward to this. Hundreds of deans of medical schools would be there, and it would be a chance to tell them about the Center for Communicating Science. The stress, and the drama, started when acting commitments suddenly showed up. I’d been asked to do the play Love Letters on Broadway with Candice Bergen. I love the play and wanted very much to act with Candy Bergen, but now I was told that we were to open the same day that I was supposed to be in Chicago. I asked if we could open a day later. They said yes. Then the next complication arrived in my inbox. I had been playing a villain on the television series The Blacklist, and they were scheduling me for two shows to be shot while I was doing Love Letters. This wasn’t going to be possible, so they asked me to please come in on the day I was flying to Chicago to shoot a scene where they would kill off my character.

  So the schedule I had got myself into was to go to the studio in Brooklyn, have my head blown off by a pipe bomb, fly to Chicago, give a talk in front of twenty-eight hundred people, fly back to New York, and the next day open on Broadway. But the drama hadn’t really started yet.

  When I got to the hotel in Chicago, I asked for a wake-up call. The talk was early the next morning. I couldn’t be late. “Right! Seven A.M.,” the operator said. “We’ll give you a call at seven sharp.” At 8:00 A.M. I was awakened by a wave of panic. The phone hadn’t rung. I threw on my clothes. No time to shower. And there was no deodorant in my suitcase. I have a pathological fear of smelling bad, especially in front of twenty-eight hundred people. I rushed downstairs and into the holding room next to the stage, where I noticed a cache of soft drinks and lemon slices. I put a lemon slice under each arm and went on stage. Filled with the spirit of improvisation, I gave the talk, and it went well. Five more medical schools affiliated with the Center, which thrilled me. I flew back to New York and twenty-four hours later walked out on stage with Candy Bergen.

  This isn’t a story that ranks with the discovery of penicillin or the moment that Einstein first thought of curved space, but for me, it couldn’t have been more emotional, or more stressful, and I won’t ever forget it.

  Should we add a little stress when we tell stories about science, in order to lock them in our audience’s memories?

  —

  I wondered what Larry Cahill would think about all that. It had been ten years since we filmed him demonstrating the ice water experiment. He might have come up with some new ideas since then.

  I called Larry and asked if that extra bit of vicarious stress would help an audience store a memory better. He didn’t think you had to go that far to prompt a memory. He said, “If you go from not very emotional to just slightly emotional in a story, you can see an enhancement of memory.” So, the stress of putting your elbow in ice water helps form a memory, but Larry felt you don’t have to put ice cubes in your story. You just need emotion.

  But in the past ten years, Larry has found that there are differences in how effective some emotions are. “Emotion is not a broad-brush amplifier of all things,” he told me. “It doesn’t simply turn up the volume knob. The kind of emotion matters.” Laughter, he’s found, is far bett
er than anger. And not just as an aid to memory, but as a way to connect. He’s especially aware of this when he teaches.

  Larry has twice won an award as the best teacher on his campus. I wondered if he had a deliberate strategy.

  “Engagement. I engage them. I get them to care.” And he has what he calls a secret weapon. “When I teach—it’s almost an unfair advantage if you can get people laughing. It disarms them. It puts everybody in the same tribe. It gets their guard down for little while—and then you can slip something in.”

  “How do you know when you’ve got them engaged?”

  “Well, you can see it in their eyes. They’re focused. Paying attention, They’re not checking their insta-twaddle accounts.”

  I think he’s right about laughter, as long as it’s unforced and comes naturally. (I have a painful set of memories of after-dinner speakers who were “reminded of a humorous story.”)

  But genuine humor and true, open laughter almost always lead to engagement. As Larry said, quoting the great Danish comedian Victor Borge, “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”

  LORNA ROLE

  Someone who I assume doesn’t have much trouble keeping her students engaged is Lorna Role. Lorna chairs the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Stony Brook University. I went to her office to talk about memory and emotion, and I found her to be a scientist with an unusual combination of deep knowledge and playful spontaneity.

  When we talked about Jim McGaugh and his maxim, “Everybody remembers where they were when they had their first kiss,” she remembered her own first kiss: “It wasn’t very successful. We both had braces….We locked.”