Within the liberal arts educated, NPR listening, New Yorker reading academic subculture exists a movement toward promoting science education and awareness to people who, like me, are not scientists. In the last four years, the NPR program Radio Lab has grown in popularity and established itself as a leading force in this movement. The show covers big topics like music, sleep, laughter, language and many others in an attempt to better understand the current research going on and the implications it can have on the daily lives of ordinary, non-scientist people. Recently, one of Radio Lab’s hosts, Robert Krulwich, addressed the graduates of California Institute of Technology, a premier institution in math and science. His speech touched on ways in which the scientists themselves can make their research more accessible to those outside the elite world of academics.
His speech, titled “Tell Me a Story,” argued that science is actually more likely to be well-received and believed when it is told through narrative prose rather than lofty, fact-and number-filled science-speak. In the address, he told a story about a Turkish man who is publishing creationist literature that is amazingly accessible, relying on pictures, metaphors and very little on facts and numbers. His arsenal includes DVDs, books, posters and other typical classroom materials that he can easily distribute throughout the secular, public Turkish school system. The upshot of his materials, and what makes it more popular and acceptable than the more scientific materials supporting evolution, is that they are accessible. As Krulwich explains, people can read, watch or otherwise consume his material and walk away feeling as though they have learned something.
This particular example illustrates how the presentation of an idea is key to its success. This is nothing new, and something that scientists have struggled with for a long time. Krulwich explains that Sir Isaac Newton wrote his Principia Mathematica in Latin and highly technical academic writing to ensure that only other academics could work with it and learn from his theories.
The whole speech reminded me of an example of how scientific data was recently presented to American audiences effectively. “Scientist” Al Gore recently produced the popular movie An Inconvenient Truth which captivated the minds of American audiences, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary (even though by both documentary filmmaking and scientific standards the movie was not particularly earth shattering) and put global climate change on the national agenda.
Though climate change is a topic that was studied and published on decades before Gore became interested in it, it was his documentary that started the broader conversation and excited the debate that forced some people to learn more and take a side.
Gore’s documentary points to an important principle in human behavior that is, ironically, part of why he lost the 2000 election, and why John Kerry lost the 2004 election. Human beings are more prone to respond to emotional appeals than to factual, or logical appeals.
This has been a popular topic in neuroscience recently, and the subject of the book The Political Mind by George Lakoff. The reason that progressives are losing elections, according to Lakoff, and failing to sustain large scale movements, is partly because they are relying too heavily on the logic of their arguments to win supporters. Audiences with no scientific or mathematical expertise will not respond to specialized terms, numbers and data unless the data are presented in a way that escapes the technical jargon. In short, we need to be persuaded that the science is correct, or at least worth believing.
One of the ways that the scientific community may be able to persuade general audiences is through what author and neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer calls a fourth culture, where the sciences and arts come together to promote and learn from one another. His book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, presents several case studies of artists-like Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Paul Cezanne and others-who paid close attention to the work of their contemporaries in the hard sciences and used their combined knowledge to think creatively about the science of consciousness and human perception long before the scientific community could empirically test, let alone give any amount of empiric validity, to the same theories.
These artists worked as the storytellers for the sciences and drove scientific curiosity to explain the phenomena presented in their art. Lehrer keeps a blog called the “Frontal Cortex,” where he tells stories about artists and scientists using each other’s work, in an attempt to cultivate his fourth culture. Until this fourth culture is more widely accepted outside of the liberal arts educated, NPR listening, New Yorker reading academic subculture, the scientific research, which is so crucial to resolving the energy situation and the reality of global climate change, might not survive popular scrutiny. The numbers will not speak for themselves, and the research that wins out will continue to be whatever tells the most compelling story.