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

by Alan Alda

  I could have told her instead about the young medical student who helped a woman actually understand her diagnosis, and even sat and cried with her. Then after my dinner partner asks me how in the world we had been able to help a young doctor learn to do that, I could tell her a couple of facts. Because now she’d want to know. As Steve Strogatz told me, the trouble with a lecture is that it answers questions that haven’t been asked.

  STORYTELLING AND MATH

  I talked to Steve just as he was about to start a course he had never taught before in an area of math called analysis. It’s a challenge for many students, he said, because it involves a shift in their thinking. Instead of just solving equations, as the students have been doing since high school, they’ll now be required to come up with proofs—proofs of the algebraic process itself. And, according to Steve, students find this both boring and hard, “a double whammy.” Their frustration is fueled by the thought that they have been solving equations successfully all this time and suddenly they have to start proving that the very basis of their mathematical reasoning is valid. But learning to do that will prepare them for the rigors of advanced mathematics, where they will come up with conjectures that then have to be proved.

  “The way it’s usually taught is you go to the end of the story and teach the end first. Because by the end, everything has been figured out. The mysteries have been solved.” But the question Steve is exploring is this: Should you tell the story of trial and error that led to progress in math, or teach the math as though each new discovery logically follows what came before? In other words, should you communicate things historically or logically? The difference between these two approaches is dramatic.

  As Steve described it, “The historical way is a tale of confusion and intrigue and rivalry and argument—and all that human, bloody stuff. Whereas the logical tale takes out all the blood and all the mystery, and everything is nice and organized and tidy. Mathematicians think that’s the way you should teach. But I think that’s exactly backwards.”

  The way he decided to teach the math course was, instead, to start with the human side of the story. “Who are the people who were confused in 1750 and why were they confused? And who corrected them—except those corrections were a little bit wrong, too. And then who improved on them?” He would boil 150 years of math down to a one-semester course. The hope was to convey, not just the mechanics of math, but the excitement of it. “I think it’s a very thrilling adventure story,” he said.

  This is about teaching math to people who have been studying it for years. What hope is there for engaging laypeople without the human, bloody part of the story? Maybe not much.

  The renowned physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson has said, “It is impossible to write a readable book about real mathematics for nonmathematical readers. The best anybody can do is to write about a real mathematician.”

  It seems that our greatest hope in introducing us to the hard stuff lies in some kind of story.

  THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF A STORY

  So, what is a story? Aristotle is often quoted as saying that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s true, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. After all, a dead cat has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  He meant, I think, that the middle section has to go into a different gear.

  Interestingly, this is what happens in a good 60 Minutes piece. About a third of the way through, the story deepens, or takes a turn that surprises, and you’re engaged a little more fully.

  Without going into second gear, a story is liable to be a simple chronological ordering of events: This happened, and then that happened, and then this other thing happened. It might make you wonder idly about what’s going to happen next, but it doesn’t grab you and deposit you into a state of suspense.

  What does do that, I think, is what Aristotle came up with when he was figuring out what made Oedipus Rex a good play: the idea of dramatic action. The hero is trying to achieve something of (to him) great importance, but suddenly there are obstacles in the way. Those obstacles have to be overcome before the objective can be achieved. There’s suddenly tension because everything could fall apart and end in disaster. If the audience has identified with the character, it’s hard not to have an active response, like “What’s he going to do about this?”

  I guess it’s because I come from the theater that I have a special fondness for dramatic stories. All my life, night after night, I’ve sensed the engagement of the audience as they followed the action and rooted for the hero to win the struggle. It didn’t matter if it was a serious drama or a trivial comedy; as long as someone wanted something desperately and had obstacles thrown in his path, the audience was engaged.

  I try to make this idea vivid, as I’ve described in another book, whenever I speak to an audience about communicating. I ask for a volunteer from the audience and ask her to carry an empty water glass across the stage. This usually evokes a few giggles, because it’s hard to do without being a little self-conscious. Carrying an empty glass doesn’t have much meaning.

  But then I fill the glass with water—so full that if I poured even one more drop it would spill over the top. I ask her to carry the glass back across the stage and put it down on a table. “But be careful,” I say. “If you spill even one drop, your entire village will die.”

  Everyone in the hall knows there’s no village and no one’s going to die. But that imaginary obstacle is powerful enough to rivet the audience’s attention on the glass. If even a bead of water runs down the side of the glass, you can hear them gasp.

  After an agonizingly careful walk to the table where she puts the glass down, I ask the audience, “So, which trip across the stage was more engaging?” Their laughter is the answer. We can identify with someone who has a goal, but we root for someone with both a goal and an obstacle.

  Having a goal in the first place is crucially important. What does the hero or heroine want? What has she set out to achieve that is, at this moment, the most important thing in her life?

  I don’t step out on a stage as a character in a play without reminding myself of what I as a character am going out there to accomplish. It’s vital to drama. I’ve often thought there ought to be a sign in the wings that says, “No one permitted beyond this point unless you know what you want with all your heart, and you know how you’re going to get it.”

  It’s such a useful thing to remember that I keep it in mind even when I’m going out to speak to an audience as myself: Why am I here? Who am I talking to? What do I want to accomplish? What’s my mission?

  And then I tell stories. Stories with obstacles in them.

  As important as the goal is, it’s not until the obstacle shows up that the story gains tension; the obstacle kicks us into second gear and raises the stakes. It’s not just that we might not achieve our goal; we might lose everything. The whole village could die.

  Suddenly, the middle has meaning and Aristotle’s dead cat comes to life.

  You can see this at work in the graphic Christine O’Connell created to teach storytelling in our writing classes.

  The arc of a story starts on the left of the drawing, with a “question.” For Christine, this is where you let the listener in on what the leading character is trying to achieve, or, as she says, “What’s the story going to be about?” Christine is herself a scientist and she sees the beginning of a story as something close to the scientific process. “The question is the hypothesis,” she says. “What are you setting out to figure out?” But in an experiment, you don’t always figure out in the end what you had hoped to figure out. In an experiment, in life, and in a good story, obstacles get in the way.

  Here’s where the importance of the middle comes in. If an obstacle complicates the story and puts everything in doubt, then we have suspense and at the height of that suspense there’s going to be a turning point, where things are either going to get a lot better or a lot worse.

  There’s something very
engaging about this because it’s difficult not to be caught up in someone’s struggle to achieve something. Seeing someone take a stroll on a mild day doesn’t capture our attention the way watching him leaning into a gale force wind does.

  THE OPPOSING THOUGHT

  I may be overly enthusiastic about it, but I think this kind of oppositional force can even liven up an essay. If you propose an idea and then let it be countered by an opposing idea, it’s like wind in the face.

  I see it in that glorious essay Lincoln spoke: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

  Opposing thought: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

  We’re moving forward and suddenly there’s an obstacle in our path. Can we long endure? We’re paying attention in a way we weren’t before. Now the trip across the stage isn’t so smooth; there’s water in the glass that could disastrously spill. We want to see how this struggle to move forward will turn out.

  In this way, I think, an essay can become a dynamic conversation with the self. It has the chance of being a little less didactic, less like the tiresome uncle at the Thanksgiving table who has the answer to his own questions and doesn’t consider the possibility of opposing thoughts.

  It’s even broader than that.

  For me, the acknowledgment of an opposing thought is one of the things that makes science such a dramatic thing to watch. The scientist says, in effect, “It looks like something is happening here—but am I wrong?” And then that opposing thought, that courageous application of doubt, takes us on an adventure of risk, tension, suspense—the emotional turmoil of experiment. And finally, we reach a turning point where, identifying with the scientist, we either achieve new understanding or we don’t. And that leads to the story’s resolution—a new way of seeing, a sense of meaning, that we didn’t have before.

  This struggle to resolve an opposing force can lift us out of the technical and plant us in the emotional, where we’re engaged and root for the outcome.

  An Olympic record can be decided by a fraction of an inch or the tick of a second, but the victory is far more thrilling if we know that this will be an athlete’s triumph over setbacks.

  And just as every scientific experiment and every scientist’s life has a vivid story at its core, with built-in, inevitable setbacks, so does every business struggling to make it to the top.

  GLASSBABIES: CONNECTING WITH CUSTOMERS

  When I read about one relatively small business in the New York Times, I couldn’t resist clipping it out. Lee Rhodes had a shop in Seattle that did a thriving business selling candleholders she called Glassbabies. Business was so good she decided to expand to New York City, but things didn’t go so well there. Her prices seemed too high, the customers didn’t drop in the way she had hoped, and when they did, the glass candleholders seemed too heavy to lug home. (Unlike in Seattle, her customers hadn’t pulled up to the store in their cars.) And the high rent she had to pay for the store wasn’t helping. It just wasn’t working, and after a year or so, she closed the shop. When she thought about what had led to the failure in New York, she realized she hadn’t planned well enough. She regretted not having done a foot-traffic study, and not having realized that the habits of New Yorkers didn’t include the ability to put a sack of the heavy candleholders in the “back of their Volvos.” She also realized something maybe even more important: She hadn’t told her story.

  What Seattle knew and New York didn’t was that Lee Rhodes was a survivor of three bouts of cancer who had had an experience during her illness that she felt helped in her recovery. A small votive candle she had placed in a cup soothed her. She hired artists to design candleholders, and started giving the results to friends. Then, calling them Glassbabies, she began selling them out of her garage. She remembered the people she had met in doctors’ waiting rooms, many of whom, as she says on her website, “could not afford day-to-day costs like bus fare, childcare, and groceries during chemotherapy,” so she put aside 10 percent of her profits for charities that offered help to people suffering from cancer.

  “It’s more than a candleholder,” she told the Times, “but we didn’t do a good job explaining that and training our employees in New York to communicate that with customers.”

  A year later, she opened another branch store—in San Francisco. This time, she researched the neighborhood and was thousands of miles closer to her staff to train and manage them.

  And, crucially, now she tells her story. On her website, she lists the dozens of projects to which she donates 10 percent of her profits.

  The profits are mounting. As of this writing, she’s given over three and a half million dollars to charities that offer “financial and emotional assistance to those in need.” Using foot-traffic studies and being close enough geographically to train her workers was probably essential to her success. But, it seems, so was telling her story.

  When a scientist needs funding, or a business needs to capture the imagination of the public, or a parent just wants to impart wisdom to a child, it seems to me that the most vivid way to do it is with a good, dramatic story. We just have to remember that when we tell the story we can’t make the trip our leading character makes across the stage too easy.

  It’s not dramatic to carry an empty glass. We have to fill it to the brim.

  CHAPTER 19

  Commonality

  Story may be the royal road to communication, but according to Uri Hasson, the neuroscientist at Princeton, there’s a crucial component to storytelling that can’t be ignored, or it will be a bumpy road.

  People’s minds will sync up in the presence of story, but the process relies heavily on there being some similarity between the storyteller and the listener. “The more commonalities you have with the speaker,” he told me, “the better the understanding.”

  “What kind of commonality?” I asked. “Is it education? Is it geographical? Upbringing? Culture? What kind of commonalities are critical?”

  “I think all of the above.”

  The more commonality between the storyteller and the listener, the more an MRI will show their brains in sync. Uri figures this is because the speaker is making use of what the listener already knows about various elements of the story, and is putting them together in a new way. But I wasn’t quite sure how this worked.

  Uri said, “When I’m remembering, over dinner, the movie I saw last night, I have a memory of the movie. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You, listening to me describing the movie, have no memory of the movie because you never watched it. Right? Let’s say it was about a detective in a murder story and it’s happening in New York City. I need to activate my memory [of the movie], and you need to take your knowledge of what a detective is, and a murder, and driving in a cab in New York City, in order to understand what I’m saying. Right? There is no memory of the movie, but still you’re understanding it and it looks like you’ve watched the movie. Right?”

  “So, in a way,” I said, “you’re helping me put together parts of my memories, and creating a context for me for the story and the things that happen in it.”

  “Exactly. If you have no clue what a murder is, you’re completely lost. Right? There’s something interesting about communication. Communication works only in cases when you understand something about what I’m going to say to you.”

  “Which is probably why teachers make sure they know what the student already knows so they can build on that.”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  But there’s a catch. For the best communication to take place, it may be that we can’t just be alike; we may have to be aware we’re alike.

  MAKING US AWARE OF OUR FAMILIARITY

  Jessica Lahey is a writer and a teacher. She told me she became aware of how important familiarity can b
e when she was denied it.

  She was teaching writing at an inpatient drug and alcohol rehab center and was frustrated because she wasn’t getting through to her students. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt as if she were teaching in a “hermetically sealed bubble.” She was on the inside and they were on the outside.

  Her frustration mounted until, by chance, she met someone at a conference who could analyze the problem. Hunter Gehlbach had done a study on the effect of familiarity in teaching, and after speaking with him she realized why she had felt hermetically sealed.

  Unlike with her other teaching experiences, at the rehab center she had to adhere to strict rules on confidentiality that kept her from knowing anything about her students’ lives and kept them from knowing anything about hers. She and her students had no way of knowing if they shared any points of commonality.

  Gehlbach told her that “figuring out the thoughts and feelings of others seems key.” And that teachers need to be able to “figure out the thought processes of students as much as possible, in order to understand where and why they’re making mistakes.”

  He looked at learning as a social process, an interaction, and explored the relationships between students and teachers.

  Gehlbach studied hundreds of ninth-grade students and their teachers, giving both the students and teachers a questionnaire at the beginning of the school year. He asked them to list their preferences about things in their lives—like hobbies or what they thought characterized a good friend. After five weeks, he gave the teachers and students another questionnaire and found that those teachers who saw that there were five points of commonality with students tended to regard those students as more familiar—and to feel they had a better relationship with them than with others. And that feeling of commonality had an impact on learning. As a result, Gehlbach says, “those randomly selected students earned higher grades in the class.”