5 Questions: Alan Alda on communicating science effectively

The actor, director and author Alan Alda recently spoke about his passion for science — and the art of communicating science — with Paul Costello, head of the Office of Communication & Public Affairs, as part of the 1:2:1 podcast series.

Alda won five Emmy Awards for his work on the TV sitcom "M*A*S*H," in which he played the character of Hawkeye Pierce. He also hosted "Scientific American Frontiers," interviewing more than 700 scientists during that PBS program's 12-year run.

Alda is now a visiting professor at the State University of New York-Stony Brook's Center for Communicating Science, which he co-founded, where he teaches science students the art of improvisation and impresses on them the importance of effective science communication. Following are edited excerpts of Alda and Costello's conversation. To hear more, visit the 1:2:1 website at http://med.stanford.edu/121.

Q: Your message, it seems to me, is pretty fundamental — specifically, that there's never been a time in our lives when we've been as touch by science and ruled by science as now.

Alda: That's a pretty good way to say how I feel about it. The things that we do in our daily lives and the decisions that are made that affect our economy and the way we live are all based in science. Yet most of us are divorced from science. We don't speak the language; we often don't understand the concepts. Science is so specialized now that sometimes scientists themselves don't understand other scientists any better than the intelligent lay public does.

Q: What did you learn about how science is communicated from working on "Scientific American Frontiers"?

Alda:  I learned early on that my ignorance was an asset, as long as I had curiosity. I was so curious that I barraged the scientists with questions, and if I didn't get it, I'd say, "No, go back over that. I don't get it." It was a very personal interaction.

What I found was that when they were engaged by that personal interaction, they were very communicative. That intimate tone, I thought, is probably the key — if we can get scientists to have the relationship with their audience that they had with me.

Getting the public to be comfortable with uncertainty in the same way that scientists are is also essential. Scientists are trained happily to be comfortable surfing the sea of uncertainty. The public is more comfortable looking for invariable truths.

I think one of the things scientists can do by communicating well is to help the public be comfortable with the idea that we make a little progress here, we make a little progress there, we understand things a little better. For instance, I just got an e-mail from a scientist who's at CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research], who said, "I hope the public is not getting the impression that with the discovery of the Higgs boson, it's all done — that cleared up the last cobweb in physics."
One of the things that the public has to get used to and excited by is the fact that every new discovery opens up a hundred other doors, each one with a question mark on it. That's wonderful.

Q: When did you get the idea to teach improvisation to scientists?

Alda: I happened to be at USC, and I said, "Would you bring in some engineering students? I want to try an experiment." I asked them to talk about their work for two minutes. Then we improvised for three hours, and then they talked about their work again. The results were astonishing. Everyone in the room was shocked at how much more communicative they were once they had experienced connectivity with another person at that level.

Everywhere I went, I tried to get universities to teach scientists communication skills, not just person to person, as I had been doing with the improv, but in writing — writing for various kinds of audiences. The only place that was really receptive to what I was trying to do was Stony Brook University, where I helped found the Center for Communicating Science.

We teach communications for credit to science students in the university, and we've begun teaching in the medical school as well, and that's been a great success.

Q: What have you found is really the central problem here? Is it the complexity of the language? Is it the lack of a common language, or is it something else?

Alda:  A couple of guys have written a very interesting book called Made to Stick. They're two brothers. They came up with a phrase that really captures the problem. They call it the "curse of knowledge," which sounds like an oxymoron, because we don't think of knowledge as a curse.

The curse, though, is that if I know something in all its complexity, and I understand it deep down, then I forget what it's like not to know it at that level. I start talking to you as if you understand some of the basic concepts, as if you've already been through the doorway — the entrance to this idea.

That's why the improvising helps. Improvising is not making things up, as many people might think it is. It's connecting with the other person. And then things you didn't know were in there start to come out.

Instead of making things up, things are allowed to come out on the basis and by virtue of the connection. That connection turns out to be a very good thing to have when you're writing, not just when you're talking. We've found that if we teach the improvising first, the writing courses are much easier.

We teach the improvising techniques of Viola Spolin. She has a book called Improvisation for the Theater. I worked with Viola 50 years ago, and her work is very rule-driven. It's not touchy-feely, and it's not "get up and do something on the spur of the moment." You have to play games, and you play games by strict rules in the same way that basketball is not just throwing a ball around.

You've got to stay within the lines. You have to observe certain cautions, and you get called out if you don't. That's how the improvising works. Every one of the games gets you more and more used to paying attention — strict, close, observational attention to the person you're working with or the people you're working with.

This is actually an easy thing for scientists to do, because we're not asking them to act. In fact, we outlaw acting, and we outlaw joke making. But scientists are really good at observing, and if you observe the other person so well that you can figure out what they're thinking by how they're behaving, then you're into it.

Q: What did you learn about communicating medicine by playing Hawkeye Pierce for 11 years?

Alda: I learned that I didn't know an awful lot. But one of the best examples of communicating science that I ever had was when I was sick on a mountaintop in Chile about eight or nine years ago. They brought me down to the bottom of the mountain to a hospital, and I had about a yard of my intestine that had gone bad, and the doctor was extremely good down there.

He leaned into my face and he said, "Here's what's gone wrong. Some of your intestine has gone bad, and we have to cut out the bad part and sew the two good ends together." You can't get clearer than that. He didn't tell me I had to have an ileoanal anastomosis, and at that moment, it wouldn't have done me much good to hear that.

I needed to hear the real story, and it was simple language, and he looked me in the eye when he told me. He even said, "If you want a bigger hospital, we can fly you to Santiago." Then he said, "But I have to tell you, the airport is fogged in, and if you wait for the fog to lift, you may not make it." He couldn't have been clearer.