You know, I was interviewing a researcher at Columbia University. Her name is Xiaodong Lin, and she’s done a lot of work looking at trying to get children interested in science. And she finds something really fascinating that speaks to exactly what you just talked about, which is the traditional way we have of teaching science is to tell people, you know, there was this great physicist, Albert Einstein. And he was the greatest genius the world has ever known, and he came up with theories that, even today, many people struggle to understand. So that’s the classic way we tell science stories.
And what she found was that instead of doing that, if you tell a story which says something along the lines of, you know, there was a time when Einstein was working on a problem, and he got so stuck that he couldn’t figure out the math. And he needed help to figure out the math, and he reached out to somebody else, saying, I can’t figure out the math to this. Can you please help me? When you tell stories that involve struggle and obstacles and failures about scientists, not only does this hold people’s attention, but kids are now able to say, I could see myself being a scientist because I need help with math. I turn to somebody else to get help for math. And this idea that the obstacle, in some ways, is what makes the story the story is, I think, what you mean by the middle.
.. Because when I left the science show, I realized that the reason that the show worked was because we had a real connection between us. It wasn’t an ordinary interview. I never went in with a set of questions – not after the beginning. I went in just being curious and really good and ignorant. It’s good to be ignorant as long as you’re curious – not so good if you’re not curious. So I would be willing to reveal my ignorance to them, so they knew where I was in my understanding of their work. And then if I didn’t understand what they were saying, I’d grab them by the lapels and shake them. Tell me again. What do you – so they forgot about the camera. They forgot about the lectures they had given on this. They were just trying to make me understand it. And I realized that what I was doing was relating to them, and they were relating to me in the same way two actors do when they let each other in to their field of consciousness.
So I thought the best way to train people to do that is through improvisation training. And I tried it out with a group of engineers. And after three hours, they were so much better talking about their work.
.. And what this – what the improvising work does is it actually builds up your empathy. You get very good at being able to figure out what the other person is going through emotionally.
So now, this cab driver pulls over. He says, where are you going? And I start to get crazy mad. Where am I going? You’ve got to take me no matter where I’m going. But instead of that, I think, wait a minute. It’s the day – it’s the time of day when he’s switching shifts. He’s got to give the cab to somebody else. I understand why he’s saying it. And it helped me accept it.
.. And I’ve noticed that the more empathy I have, the less annoying other people are.