美国国家公共电台 NPR Alan Alda's Experiment: Helping Scientists Learn To Talk To The Rest Of Us

(SOUNDBITE OF POEM, "IF I UNDERSTOOD YOU, WOULD I HAVE THIS LOOK ON MY FACE?")

ALAN ALDA: (Reading) People are dying because we can't communicate in ways that allow us to understand one another. That sounds like an exaggeration, but I don't think it is.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

You may recognize that voice. That's Alan Alda, and this is from his forthcoming book, "If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face?" on the importance of making science understandable.

(SOUNDBITE OF POEM, "IF I UNDERSTOOD YOU, WOULD I HAVE THIS LOOK ON MY FACE?")

ALDA: (Reading) When patients can't relate to their doctors and don't follow their orders, when engineers can't convince a town that the dam could break, when a parent can't win the trust of a child enough to warn her off a lethal 1 drug, they can all be headed for a serious ending.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Alan Alda, welcome to the program.

ALDA: Thank you. Nice to be here, Lulu.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You write in your book that for communication, it's important to start with a personal story so that you can form a connection with the listener. So I'm going to ask you to tell me the story that inspired this book. You were at a dentist, I think.

ALDA: I was at a dentist's office in the chair, ready to have him start an operation on my gum. So he's got the scalpel ready to poke 2 me in the face with it.

(LAUGHTER)

ALDA: He says, now there'll be some tethering. And I said, what? Pardon me. He said, tethering. They'll be tethering. I said, what do you mean - he said, tethering - tethering. He started barking at me. I was too impressed by his surgical 3 gown to say, put the knife down, and tell me what you mean by tethering.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yes, please, sir.

ALDA: And I let him go ahead with the operation. And it turned out that it changed my smile because he cut the little tissue between the upper part of your gum and the - your upper lip. And I was making a movie a couple of weeks later, and the cameraman said, what are you sneering 4 about? I thought you were supposed to smile.

But turned out when I told the dentist that it maybe would be a better idea to tell people what was going on with this, firstly he said, I told you there were two steps to the operation. And then he sent me a letter trying to maneuver 5 me off of a lawsuit 6. And I had no interest in a lawsuit; I just wanted him to communicate better with his patients.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You've made this concept of training scientists and doctors on how to communicate to regular people a mission. You now have the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. One of the educational techniques you teach involves making scientists do improv, improvisational 7 theater. How does that work? Run us through it.

ALDA: Well, first of all, it's not to encourage them to be funny.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I was about to say (laughter).

ALDA: Yeah. It doesn't make them comedians 8. It doesn't make them actors. The reason for the improv exercises is to really get everybody accustomed to the idea that contact with the other person is essential. It's the first step toward good communication because if you are thinking only about communication as having the perfect message, regardless of how it lands on your audience, then you're likely just to be spraying information at them and not really saying something to them that sticks.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You are not a scientist by training.

ALDA: No, not at all.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You failed chemistry, (unintelligible).

ALDA: I failed chemistry really disastrously 9. Kind of tellingly, my father wanted me to take it because he wanted me to be a doctor. And I really didn't want to be a doctor. I wanted to be a writer and an actor. You know, a lot of people don't know how to break into show business.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) But failing chemistry is the way.

ALDA: First way.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) So what prompted you to pick up science journals and read them later on?

ALDA: I followed the same path that humanity did, which was to start with superstition 10. I was interested in things like spiritualism and astrology. And I was - one of the books I was reading was supposedly written by someone who had been dead for a couple of hundred years but written recently through a medium. And I thought, if any of this is true, the physicist 11 who lives across the street would probably know the answer. And I asked him about it, and he said well, I don't know. It doesn't sound familiar to me.

So I said, maybe it's - maybe the answer's in the magazine Scientific American. And I started reading that, and I think one of the things that attracted me, engaged me right away was that I saw there was a completely different way to think and to weigh things, which was on the basis of observation and evidence. And there's something deeply moving about it and entertaining at the same time. And that's what I'm trying to get scientists to do, to share that excitement and passion that they have with those of us who don't do that for a living.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, let me ask you - this has been described as an age of hostility 12 to science. We have segments of the population who don't believe in science, who don't trust it. Is that just a communication issue?

ALDA: Well, I think it's at least partly a communication issue. Trust is really important because not only don't we have the time in our ordinary lives to get up to speed on basic physics, let's say. To get up to speed on a particular specialty 13 in physics, like nano science, it's kind of important to have trust that we feel toward those people who have spent their lives doing that. Science and the public have separated so much that many people in the public consider science just another opinion.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Isn't there another issue, though? You know, I've noticed in my reporting - whenever I talk to scientists, they don't like to use declarative sentences (laughter). The whole ethos, you know, of science is exploration and discovery. The way people may hear that is that scientists aren't sure about stuff.

ALDA: Yeah. I think many of us feel - wait a minute, you told me a year ago red wine was good for me. Now you're telling me...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Exactly.

ALDA: ...It's not. You told me coffee was no good; now I should drink coffee. What's going on here? Can't you make up your mind?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I look at the red wine changes very, very closely, let me tell you.

(LAUGHTER)

ALDA: Well, just keep experimenting on your own.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Exactly.

(LAUGHTER)

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh, I do.

ALDA: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

ALDA: That's also a communication question. I think there are basic things about science that people should be helped to understand. For instance, any one study is not supposed to arrive at the truth for all time. It gets us a little closer to truth. Almost every research paper that I read says, at the end, more research is called for.

(LAUGHTER)

ALDA: I wish articles about science would include that more. This is not the final word.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, that it's an evolving thing as opposed to - you know, you haven't arrived at the destination yet. You're on your way there.

ALDA: Yeah. And there may not be a destination. It just may be nice scenery until you drop off.

(LAUGHTER)

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, that's a very happy thought (laughter).

ALDA: Yeah (laughter).

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Alan Alda - his book is "If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face?: My Adventures In The Art And Science Of Relating And Communicating."

Thank you so very much.

ALDA: Thank you. That was fun.