Alan Alda || The Art and Science of Relating and Communicating

for listening and enjoy the podcast. Today's episode of the Psychology Podcast is brought to you by the number one fresh and greeting and recipe delivery service in the nation, Blue Apron. Later in the show, I'm going to talk a little bit about my home cooking experience with Blue Apron, but you can try it yourself now and receive your first three meals for free along with free shipping to

sign up a blue Apron dot com slash TPP. Again, that's three free meals including free shipping when you sign up through our exclusive discount website blue Apron dot com slash TPP. And now I'm really excited to be speaking with my guest today, Alan Alda Allan has earned international recognition as an actor, writer, and director. He has won seven Emmy Awards, has received three Tony nominations. Is an inductee of the Television Hall Fame and was nominated for

an Academy Award for his role in The Aviator. Alda played Hawkeye Pierce on the classic television series mash and as many films include Crimes and Misdemeanors, Everyone Says, I Love You, Manhattan, Murder Mystery, and Bridge of Spies. Alda is an active member of the science community, having hosted the award winning series Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years and founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stonybrook University. His latest book is called If I Understood

You would I have this look on my face? My adventures in the art and science of relating and communicating. What an honored is to have Alan Alda on the podcast today. Congrats on your new book. Thank you very much. It's very exciting. I enjoyed reading it very much. Well, I want to just jump in here and I want

to start off by asking how you got into science communication. Well, it began because since I was so interested in science in general, I really left at the chance to do the series on public television called Scientific American Frontiers, and I realized while we were doing that that we were doing it in a kind of unusual way. It was

just a conversation between us. It wasn't a list of questions that I came in with, because that list of questions, if you stick to a list of questions, you're not really listening to the answer, and you're not probing the

answer for more information or more understanding. But a conversation goes wherever it goes, and the focuses on the contact between the two people, and the information that comes out comes out as a function of that contact, which is a much more human way to get information in my opinion anyway. So I realized it might be possible to train scientists to communicate in that personal way, and we actually used improvisation exercises to do it, and I've seen

it work. We've trained over over eight thousand scientists and doctors in the past almost eight years, and we've seen remarkable results. So it's very exciting for me. At what point in your career, like when you made the transition from acting and all and getting all these acting awards into like being fascinated with science, Like were you always fascinated with science? Like as a kid. Oh, even as a kid. Although I never studied it in school, I

did very badly in a chemistry exam once. I never went beyond geometry and math, but it all interested me tremendously. When in my early twenties, that became pretty much all I read. I didn't read novels my friends. I belonged to a book club now that only reads novels, so I can force myself to read novels. And the people in the club say, what do you have against novels? And I say, you can just tell they're making it up. Well, do you like science fiction? Not too much? Too much?

You know this idea of being able to transport your mind to the minds of others. You know the research shows about reading fiction action increases those capacities. Well, I know that's why I'm trying my damns. So you have this quote in your book. You say people are dying because we can't communicate in ways that allow us to understand one another. Can you elaborate on that, like, how are people dying? I think people are dying in a number of ways. It sounds like an exaggeration, I know,

but I don't think it is. Certainly, when One study showed that when patients rated their doctors as empathic, they were nineteen percent more likely to follow their doctor's recommendations and to take their prescriptions and do the regimens and all of that. That sounds like that's a high number to me. It's high percentage, and it sounds to me like that must certainly include people who are in danger of their lives by not following their doctor's advice. That's

one way. Another way is people don't communicate and then they start shooting each other. That happens from the bedroom to the boardroom, to theah to the world table where the peace conferences are supposed to take place. That's a really good point. There's a deeper, richer, more inclusive way that people could be dying by virtue of a lack of good communication. We're getting more and more scientific breakthroughs because of collaboration. Collaboration is boosted so much by good communication.

And if we're having less collaboration than we could have with better communication, some of that collaboration will be over pharmaceuticals or over other advances that will clean the water, clean the air, and all of that has an effect on mortality. Don't think it's an exaggeration to say lives can be saved. No, I agree. And you had the scary situation with a dentist right where the communication really did matter. It mattered an awful lot to my face.

The dentist was poised to put the scalpel in my mouth and cut my gum because he had an invention of his procedure to get a blood supply to a socket of my front tooth. And he didn't explain what he was doing, you say. All he said was now there will be some tethering. And I didn't know what tethering was, and I said, what do you mean? What do you mean tethering? His answer was really really communicative. He said, tethering, tethering. You started screaming at me like

I should know what he meant. It's a common it's a very interesting example of a common word, not a piece of jargon, but a common word used in a special way can be totally excommunicating. Yeah, so he cut the freedom on my uppier, you know, under your lip, and I couldn't smile properly and I had to make a movie where my lip was right down't like that, you know, I sneered instead of smiled. I told him that I had a problem with it, hoping he'd know what to do about it and be careful to warn

other people. And instead of any kind of empathic reaction, he sent me a letter protecting himself against the lawsuits. And I had no intention of suing him. I was just trying to help other people's lips. He gave me a smile ectomy and didn't seem to care. And then he said there was like a second part. So did he fix this? Yeah, he said, you good. Second part to the operation, He said, I told you there was

a second part. Well, I didn't remember that. And anyway, I'm not even sure if I went back to him, because maybe I did. But I don't think I have much of a freedom anymore. No, I don't see a friendom Is that good or bad to not have much of a freedom anymore? Well, freedom is kind of important. That holds your lip or I don't know. I think that's the main purpose to hold your lip? Does other things? Strange little tissue up there? You don't need one, you know,

if I had to get something removed, it'd be that. Well, I choose. Yeah, I noticed when I see pictures of myself. If I don't concentrate on the smile, it comes out like this. So I'd say, right, it's okay. Well, you know that actually is an interesting transition. I was just thinking about, you know, how different can be cool. And you did some work with my colleague Matt Lerner on improvisation and children with autism, and you know a lot of them, you know, are treated as though they're socially

awkward in their daily lives. But what did you learn about communication from working with Matt Well, I had a wonderful experience with him. I didn't work directly with him in any autistic population, but while we were talking when I was interviewing him for the book, I mentioned that I had this sort of personal empathy workout that I

had tried to develop for myself. Because the funny thing is, we almost all of us have this innate capacity for empathy, but it goes away rapidly if we don't practice it. That's the impression I get. Anyway, I'd be interested to know what your impression is, so tell me in a second. So I was practicing noticing people on the street and in restaurants or friends while we're talking and trying to figure out what they were feeling and naming the feeling.

It seemed to me that naming the feeling would be important, so he did. He said, I'd like to study this. So he did a research project and he sent people out with an app on their cell phones. He gave them a standardized empathy test at the beginning of the project, and then at the end of a week of their recording their interactions with people, he gave them another empathy test,

and he was going to compare the two. One of the variables was just observe them, don't try to name their emotion, just see what what color their hair is. And then another one another variable was don't do anything, just tell us that you had an interaction that lasted more than five seconds. And the interesting thing is when he combined the two what do you call him two

conditions that's just sorry. Combine the two conditions of trying to read their feelings and combine that with just noticing them, there was a really clear increase in their empathy and their ability at empathy by the end of the week. If they had done it a lot of times, there was a more noticeable difference. The more times they did it. Doct right, Yes, a dose effect. Yeah. So now that's only one study and it's only with a limited population, but it seems to suggest that it's not a bad

idea to notice people. So in workshops, when we have people role playing doing trying to communicate to another person, if it's not going real, well, we stop and we have them put their chairs back to back so they can't see each other, and then I ask them what color is her hair, what color is her eyes, or what color is what she's wearing, And like four out of five times they don't know they haven't been observing. When they turn back and start observing, the communication seems

to change radically. So this sounds to me like it puts us in more personal contact with the other person. Now, what I've noticed is when I do that, I think I hear my voice getting more personal, less like I'm speaking at somebody, but more communicating in an intimate way. And I think my face changes because I see changes in the other person as they sort of involuntarily respond to me. Well, how does that all sound to you? Does it sound cock eyed? It does sound a little. No, No,

it sounds good. Well, I gotta go, I'm make it sense. No, yeah, no, it's great. It leased to so much stuff. So you have your Red Bruber's like I now relationship, his ideas and a long time ago. Yeah it was a long time ago, but you know he has these beautiful stories in there about how you know. In this one instance, he was interacting with a horse and he goes in completely just focusing on the horse and its own needs,

and it's a beautiful moment. And then there's a split second, just a hair where he starts to get self conscious, Like he looks his hand and sees it shaking a little bit, and he says it that split second, the entire magic broke and the horse like suddenly ran away, you know, got angry. But it was so interesting. I

never tried talking to a horse. But scaling up you remind me of those studies that show if the owner and his or her dog stares into each other's eyes for a while there oxytocin increases in both the dog and the owner. Oh absolutely, so building up from the animal model to human model, it's as rapidly as possible.

Let's switch the humans. I think that's an interesting case of a completely nonverbal you know, but building up to other you know, because we all wear animals too, building up to children autism who can appear to have social deficits. But yeah, Matt has done this cool research with improv and showing that it's a matter of bias. It's a matter of attentional bias. There's so much wealth of information in the eyes and if you're not paying attention to it, you know, you miss out on it. And so yeah,

this model is what you're talking about. And that's the same thing that I've been you know, might I might have missed that in talking to him. That is he showing that in his studies with autistic people. Uh huh, yeah, but you do you write about in your book a little bit about the work. I haven't read the book yet. You know, there's a guy who actually said that. A basketball player said, why did you say that in your books that I haven't read that. No, maybe maybe I

forgot that sentence. I'm sorry. No, No, you talk about the improv because you put in the context you talk a lot about the important to improv the Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does seem to be a real phenomenon that as you get in. I mean, what you said is very interesting did you get so much information through your eyes? You do, not just the eyes I'm building up here,

from horses to human eye contact too, you know. And then you look it up, you think about other cues, nonverbal cues, and if you just simply not pay attention to those cues, and you're being biased by your own internal drama and distractions and you're not mindful of it, then of course interactions are going to be awkward or

not relatable. So yeah, it makes so much sense. It's so interesting to me to think about how when you go into a moment of communication with something that you are prepared to talk about, that sort of floods your consciousness and yours have to put it in personal terms.

In the past, it was almost always true for me that if I was trying to sell somebody an idea or convince them that we should see one movie instead of another, you know, I would only be thinking about what I had in mind, and I wouldn't be noticing how it was landing on the other person, where I might have missed openings that were perfect, you know, or just realize that it's a lost cause and do something more collaborative. When you're in like an acting situation. I'm

just so fascinated to hear what that's like. I imagine the best thing is to internalize the lines so much that you can be spontaneous even though it's scripted. Isn't there still a great deal of Spontaneitian nonverbal communication for my taste, to the extent that spontaneity is lacking, I'm not interested in the performance, whether it's my own or somebody else's. And the interesting thing is, here's how I would describe an ideal moment on the stage. I have

a line coming up. I don't say that line because it's in the script, and I don't say it a certain way because I've decided that's how to say it. I say it because the other actor does something or says something that makes me say the line, and that makes me say it in a certain way. And that can change from night to night, you know, in each performance. And that means I'm not responding to the words in the script. I'm responding to what's coming out of the other person as a person. So I have to be

totally engaged with that person. I have to be observing them, and I don't have to be staring them in the eye to do it. They can be on the other side of the stage with their back to me, and I can be observing the way they're occupying space and what that means to me. But I got to be like a leaf in the wind, responding in the subtlest way to the subtlest signals I'm getting from the other person.

And that's where the spontaneity comes from. You can't decide to be spontaneous nearly as well as you can be spontaneous in reaction to another person. I love that. And you know, there's this research showing that there's no glow co orla between social knowledge and social spontaneity. So you can means yeah, yeah, absolutely well. So they have these tests of like what is the right thing to say

in this situation? So if you want to make friends, if someone says, hi, how are you, you would score very high if you respond I'm fine, thank you, and how are you. But actually, there are these tests of social creativity that say, come up with as many possible responses as you can to this certain situation, and some of the responses can be so creative, like you know, I want to play with a friend, I would you know, have an alien come from outer space and do a

mind meld too. I don't know. You could be very that would score very low in social knowledge, right, But it turns out that even though those two things are not related to each other, so you can score very high. You could know what to do but not actually be socially skilled at all. You can know the right things to do but not actually be social skilled, or you could be social skilled and not know the right answer. It turns out it's the spontaneity, the social creativity, that

predicts autistic symptoms. It's the social creativity that predicts actual social interactions. Like most of us don't want to be friends with someone who's just a robot who just is like, how are you? I'm fine, thank you, how are you? Most people don't want that in their social interactions. Yeah, that's something that I've independently found just through experience, and that's why when we teach communication, we strenuously avoid giving tips.

Here's what remember to do this when you're communicating. Whatever that is. That would be a tip. But it's an intellectualization. It's a mechanization of an encounter, which is dynamic. A real communication encounter is dynamic. It goes back and forth rapidly between two people, even what you imagine the other person is thinking, if the person's not even there. If you're writing for a person, you're writing for a large audience, and you sort of can figure out roughly what the

audience is as you write for them. If you're thinking about this is all my opinion. By the way, if you're thinking about how they're getting it, sentence by sentence, I think you have a greater chance of being clear to them instead of just formulating in your mind the perfect way to say it, which is a good idea. You have to think about what you're going to say, but as you put it out with each sentence, you're

changing their brain in a certain way. You're making them expect something that's coming next, fulfill that expectation, carry on, pick up where you left off, and carry them through the thought. Because you're responsible for how they're understanding it. It's not their job to take your dense prose and decode it. If they have to go back in a sentence to figure out what the sentence is really about,

it's not their failure. Yeah, that relates so much to the psychology of writing, Like writer, do there should be courses in creative writing programs that teach you theory of mind? I think I think so too. I think it's really that's short of the It's the key, because what are you writing for? What's the real goal of writing? Is it just to leave your mark on a tree, regardless if anybody can understand it or not, or is the goal to get something from inside my head inside your head?

That seems to me what communication is about. I mean, I guess if you leave your mark on a tree, you may not be trying to communicate. Yeah, I don't know what you're trying to do. There exactly a lot of things potentially, but not communication. You know. I was thinking when I was reading your book about this research that comes out recently. I just I'm trying to link some things that I see in my own field with

what I was reading your book. And there's interesting study on how contagious the state of mind of inspiration is. Todd Thrash has done this research showing that people tend to like parts of stories better when but they don't know this, but when the actual writer that themselves was more inspired and feeling like an all state of awe like some of these positive emotions while they were writing it.

While they were writing it, Oh, that's interesting. That's very interesting because that relates to a real experience I had, So it's hitting me in a special way. I was writing an episode of Mash and I was in my home in New Jersey at the time, and in the middle of the night, we heard a noise. Somebody had broken into the house, stolen the keys to the car.

They drove away with the car and took a big television set, and it was frightening that people had been in the house, and at four o'clock in the morning, I couldn't sleep. So I've worked on the scene for Mash, a very very emotional scene where a soldier had died and the character Radar was writing a letter to the soldier's parents. That turned out to be an especially effective scene because I was in such a state of agitation

and I wasn't moved by the soldier's story. I was moved by having been burgled, but I was in a state of rapport with my own inspiration, and it turned the scene into one of the more affecting scenes that we've ever shown. That's what came to mind I'm wondering if it's an example of what you're talking about, how were these pieces of writing rated as being inspiration or deriving from inspiration? Well, there were poems, and people simply read various passages from the poems and just rated from

a scale one to ten. How inspired were they by the writing? What sort of feelings did they feel while they were reading it? And there's a whole list of pause emotions. Elation was one of them. You know, how much do you feel elated? What I want to make sure I understand in that story is, so are you saying that there was a burglar came and that inspired you. Well, it's probably different from what you were describing. Somehow I seem to be inspired to get into the minds of

the people in the scene. I see the agitated position I was in emotionally, that makes a lot of sense, totally unrelated to the subject of the scene. It was just that my emotions were churned by having my house broken into, and that somehow that seemed to help me to write this very deeply emotional scene. Look, I have to say, you just proposed a new theory that I

want to test. Now. The idea there is that if you can induce a mood that is in line with what you're trying to get at in your writing, Like, if you can induce that mood in some way that you know is a good match to the content of the story, does the reader respond better to it? That's a great idea. And there's also this other weird thing about my experience, which was that the feeling I had of being violated by the burglar didn't have anything to

do with the writing of the story. And the script write where the characters writing a letter to the parents of the dead kid, they're unrelated. So I wonder if it's interesting to explore, does any kind of emotional turbulence or emotional strong emotional affect Does that enable you to write any kind of emotional thing or affecting thing That would be kind of interesting to know too. Yeah, it sounds like there's almost like emotional the complexity there, mixing

a blending of things. And yes, I wonder if it's that you open a channel you get more Vulnerability seems to be really important to communication as far as I can tell. When I come out on stage to talk to sometimes two thousand people ever stand behind the podium I expose myself in a vulnerable way out in front of them, and I looked them in the face. I don't have notes or anything, and that I think that vulnerability has an effect on me and it has an

effect on them. Yeah. I've started to go completely naked in some of my talks, and I find great. I find it really leaves me vulnerable, but I feel like I can handle any Now I'm choking. Can bring your notes out and hold them in front of you. Yeah, well, yeah, I've started having to do that because I would get arrested. I want to ask out of concern. Though for a second, are you like the burglar situation? Were you okay? Like, was it actually a burglar? Thank you? Yeah, well, we

never came in contact with him. We were oh my gosh, let's sleep. Well it happened, which made us feel even more vulnerable. Oh my gosh. Okay, Well, I'm very sorry to hear about that. I mean that I didn't want to like closs over that. That sounds horrible. Thank you. So I want to be respectful of your time here. Just I guess just a couple more minutes because I know you had to go soon. Let's just talk about this idea which I think kind of together so much

of your book. I'm quickly in my head. You see what I'm doing. I'm trying to say, well, can I ask a grand question that can get seven questions in one year? Right? Okay, here's here's the one that'll get in seven at one The improvisation of daily life, that notion, right, whether it's like you said, the boardroom or the workplace, or being a medical doctor, et cetera, et cetera, personal relations,

just just everyday personal relations. Right. So what has your wealth of experience and science communication as well as theater and acting taught you about, you know, any tips for anyone on how to you know, kind of treat your life as a social improv Well. The funny thing is that working on this book for the last couple of years has changed me a little bit, maybe a lot. I'm much more tuned into other people, and I'm much more able to find out what's under the surface, or

to sort of figure out what's under the surface. And the amazing thing is I find people less annoying they you know, a sharp tone from somebody or forgetting something or being slightly rude, and I think what's that coming from? I think I see clues on their face or in their voice about where it's coming from, And that little spurt of empathy probably puts me in a position that I think some studies have shown that with more empathy

you have more patience. And I don't know why that is exactly, but knowing the source of behavior may dilute some of the response you have to it in a defensive way or an aggressive way. You know, when a baby is crying, you could say I can't stand that noise, or you can say is the baby hungry? What's going on there? And then that if you have any response to babies at all, I think it diminishes your annoyance at the sound of the cry. But I find it

easier to relate to people. And at one big point that it would be fun to get into is that empathy I don't think makes you a good person automatically. The definition I like of empathy is that it's just being aware of what the other person is feeling. It doesn't mean that you have compassion for the person. It might give you more patience, but that doesn't mean that you're not sinking into the quicksand of the emotion that

you're feeling. I mean, the notion about empathy, apparently accepted by most people is that, and you can check me out on this, is that I'm aware of what you're feeling because I experience that feeling myself, and the trick is not to drown in that feeling, but to control it.

Because I think empathy is just a tool. And while it doesn't automatically make you a good person, because bullies use empathy really well, I think they have plenty of them, right, Torturers use empathy interrogators taking your feelings and putting you in a position where you feel helpless. They deliberately do that, so they're monitoring your feelings. So that doesn't make you a good person, but it's a terrific tool if you want to do something positive with another person, like communicate.

Oh well, thank you for bringing up the most interesting topic in the last two seconds, because I could talk to you all day about this. It's such a cool topic. So yeah, like the difference between cognitive empathy and effective empathy. You know that, Like psychopaths are really good at cognitive empathy, but they don't actually value it's a value system as well. They don't value emotions, so they in others or it turns out even in themselves as well, so they don't

listen to their own emotional information as much. You know. But effective empathy actually feeling what other people feel. And then that's different than capassion, like you said, which is actually a feeling of love, like you want to reduce someone suffering. So when someone is in pain, you know a lot of people have empathy burnout because effective empathy burnout that we're in the helping professions because they're feeling.

I think empathy gives you a position from which you can make a decision about your actions, yes, assuming you're not psychopathic, where you're going to make the decision regardless of what they're feeling. If you want to do something positive, something compassionate, the empathy can help you do it. Absolutely. I love that way of framing it. So empathy and even the emotional empathy gives you that information to then

reflect on. But then maybe compassion is this more higher level thing where you know, some of these people, like these Buddhists like Matu Ricard who practices loving. He's considered the happiest man alive. If you google, if you google have you heard of mat too ricard? Like other people call him that other people because they scan his braid and they find it it approximates, you know, everything, all

the happy correlated brain areas. But he says that when he sees someone suffering, he doesn't feel like what they're feeling. He feels just a warm sense of love of wanting to help. So maybe the empathy is like having that information, But then the capassion is actually the action of being able to really help and not be hindered by your overwhelming emotions of what they're feeling. If that makes sense, right. Yeah.

I have a sort of a thought experiment in the book that kind of deals with exactly what you're talking about. It's after midnight, a man's wife is already asleep, and he passes the kitchen sink and he sees it's full of dishes, and he thinks, I ought to do something about that, I guess, and maybe he does something about it, and maybe he doesn't, But the chances of his doing something about cleaning up the dishes probably on my mind lower unless he has a little glimmer of empathy and thinks,

what will she feel when she sees this tomorrow? Morning. Yeah, and he has already the impulse to do something, but maybe that little glimmer of empathy can help kick him over into making the decision to actually do it. Well, that advice just helped millions of my Psychology podcast listeners help them in the bedroom so that this man finds out that doing the dishes is for play, oh right, for play, for doing like more complex things like watching like the stove, or for play for second into the

next room. I know, I'm I'm just being lacky. I want to thank you so much for being so gracious to chat and come on the podcast today. You know, as someone who deeply respects public science communication, thanks for the amazing work you've done for our field. It has certainly not gone unnoticed and it's been much appreciated. I appreciate that very much. It's really fun talking. I'm talking you to all the best to you and with the book.

Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barrik Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought for booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology podcast dot com