Ben Lillie
Peter Linett interviewed me for the journal Curator: The Museum Journal. It’s part of a special issue of communicating science, which was just published and seems to be entirely free at the moment.
Peter is a very interesting guy. He’s worked for years with arts institutions, and recently became very interested in the problems of communicating science in the modern world. He wanted to do a piece for the curator issue on how storytelling fits into that, and the conversation ended up being a fantastic way for me to get down some ideas that have been kicking around, but I’d never written down. We got to talk about how storytelling works, how people learn science facts, how emotion fits into lectures, and much more.
Peter also did a fantastic job with the editing, which means I sound way better than I did on the phone. Here’s a short excerpt:
Q. [Using emotion is] such a contrast to the lecture, which is a form that has traditionally downplayed telling the audience how you felt. It would get in the way of the facts, the subject matter you’re lecturing about.
A. That’s what’s revelatory to a lot of people in the Story Collider context—to the scientists who tell stories as well as the audience. They’re talking about neuroscience or chemistry or whatever, and at the same time they’re talking about a personal experience and how it felt. That’s just not done in most science settings.
That’s not strictly true about lectures, either. I think the magic of TED talks, and the reason many, many people want to watch them, is that they’re building in an emotional component. This is a big lesson for people who want to do science communication, or any sort of communication: you’ve got to engage the audience at some deeper level, you can’t just give a recitation of facts. In the storytelling world we make a strong distinction between a story and an anecdote. An anecdote is something that happened. A story is something that happened and it meant something, it changed you. What I think we find is that a lot of what’s going on in science communication is more anecdote-ish. We haven’t conveyed why it matters and who changed.
And by far my favorite question that he asked:
Q. That reminds me how many four-letter words I’ve heard from your storytellers, which is par for the course in storytelling but less so in science communication. Is that part of how science can be pitched to grownups?
Fuck yeah, it is.
OK, I gave a longer and better answer in the interview. Read it here (or the PDF if you prefer).
“Your book got a huge reception. Your TEDTalk got a huge reception. Which makes me wonder, What is it about now? Why are we just having someone spread this idea now? What was it that kept it from coming out before?”
That was my biggest question for Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. It’s part of my general obsession with the question of how technology is changing us. Cain writes and talks about introverts, and in particular how our culture is structured around the habits and strengths of extroverts to the point where the kinds of contributions introverts can make are minimized or missed altogether. As I say in the question, the response has been overwhelming.
But why now? Introverts have been around for a long time, and the social pressures to be extroverted are at least 20 years old, if not 200. Cain’s take:
“I would say this about now: We have a mania for all things collaborative. The word collaboration has taken on a kind of sacred dimension. Collaboration can be a wonderful thing, obviously; I just think we’ve gone crazy with it, we’ve gotten lopsided with it, so we’re at this moment when many people are working in open-plan offices. They’re spending all their days in meetings. You can’t pick up a business magazine ever without seeing the word collaborate splashed all over it. I think people are probably feeling assaulted by the need to always be on and always be interacting. So people are seizing anything that gives them permission to say, “No, I actually want to off by myself. And that’s okay, and that’s going to benefit everybody.”’
What sparked this crazy for collaboration? Here, a lot of people would point to technology (i.e. The Internets). Is all this collaboration because of the social nature of, well, social media and all the other interactivity that’s been enabled? It’s possible we’ve discovered a new way of interacting and went hog-wild with it, and now we’re starting to pull back and ask, “What do we really want out of all these shiny new smartphones and twitters?”
Or is it just a swing of the pendulum, and the drive to be collaborative drove the popularity of social media?
That’s a question I didn’t get to with Cain (and since the piece clocks in at 4000 words already, readers are probably glad I didn’t), but it’s something I’m obsessing about.
Anyway, there’s a lot more great stuff in the Q&A, including what it’s like to give a TEDTalk as an introvert, the problems with office and school design, and how all of this relates to the Orchid Hypothsis (subject of an upcoming book by David Dobbs, which I can’t wait to read.)
“At TEDMED 2012, Rebecca Onie stunned the audience with her blockbuster talk on a new vision for health care. She is the founder of Health Leads, an organization that brings an elite, competitive team of college volunteers into hospitals and clinics — a team that connects patients to services that help provide food, housing, insurance and other services that, for most conditions, are far more important to overall health than medications and procedures.
TED’s Ben Lillie caught up with her after the talk to learn more about the nature of Health Leads, and her optimism for the future. Watch her talk, featured today on TED.com, and read the interview below.”
That’s me! Health Leads is a fascinating project. Click through to read the Q&A and watch her talk.
