- Thank you very much for coming.
It is a great pleasure for me to introduce
Dr. Indre Viskontas here to our seminar
series at the University of Wisconsin.
And you know,
I'm gonna just make a few brief comments.
One of the things that I think is fascinating
about neuroscience is it really distills
the essence of what it means to be interdisciplinary.
And I can think of no better example than this,
than Dr. Viskontas.
So this is an individual who studied as
an undergraduate at the University of Toronto,
getting degrees in French and in psychology,
and then went on to get degrees in
music and vocal performance from the
San Francisco Conservatory of Music
and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience
from UCLA.
So this is a fantastically rich and diverse
compliment of different disciplines
and what we're gonna hear today
is how these can all come together.
Because really when we study the brain,
we have to study it in all of its aspects,
and whether we approach it
from the standpoint of biology, computer science,
computer modeling,
if we look at single cells or entire organisms,
if we study simple reflexes
or higher cognitive processes,
the essence is we need to use a very widely
interdisciplinary approach and I think we're
gonna hear a beautiful example of that today.
We're gonna hear a talk about how
our brain is "hooked on stories"
and we're gonna hear a narrative
on how to understand a fundamental way
how human beings think at the highest cognitive level,
but interwoven with a story about how the brain works.
And with no further adieu,
I will turn it over to Dr. Viskontas.
- Thank you.
- Thank you very much.
(audience applause)
- Thank you, and thanks again for coming.
Thank you to the public policy
and neuroscience program for inviting me
and Tara for organizing this visit so beautifully.
So as you already know I wear two hats.
On the one hand I'm an artist, an opera singer,
I perform and I tell stories in that way.
And on the other hand I'm also a neuroscientist.
I do research, I do science communication,
and often people say to me,
well those are such distinct careers,
such distinct paths.
How can you possibly do both?
But ultimately both are after the same thing
which is understanding what it means to be human.
The difference is simply in the techniques
that we use.
So as artists we use our individual experience
to illuminate what's universal.
As scientists we extract general principles
that apply to everyone,
but ultimately the goal is the same,
to understand ourselves and our place
in this universe just a little bit better.
So without further adieu then,
let's talk about how the brain actually works
and how it accomplishes this very important
and yet fundamental aspect of understanding ourselves.
One of the foundational principles of brain function
is that the brain is interested in searching for patterns.
We want to see regularities in the environment
so that we can make sense of our chaotic world.
It doesn't matter if that means how the climate is changing
or how we interact with each other.
We're looking for regularities.
And in fact, our brain is adapted to err
on the side of seeing a pattern where there
isn't one rather than missing something meaningful.
So for example,
anything that looks remotely like a face
we will instantly see a face.
We'll even see grumpy cat in the core of an apple,
or a drunk octopus who wants to fight in a coat hanger,
an owl in another fruit or any kind of face.
Faces are extremely meaningful to us.
They're extremely important to us
and that's why our brain errs on the side
of seeing a face when there really isn't one.
We do the same thing when we're trying
to understand how different consequences
happen from different causes.
This, of course,
is looking at stimuli as they pass through time.
What causes one thing to do another thing.
And just to illustrate this,
I'm gonna show you a little video of shapes
going around a screen.
They're just shapes, I promise you.
And yet within a minute,
you'll have constructed a story with a beginning,
a middle, and an end,
and some pretty distinctive characters.
(audience laughter)
So in a minute we have a very simple animation,
but we already have a bully.
We have characters that cooperate and protect each other.
We have a good guy and a bad guy and so forth.
And it's just a series of shapes.
We can't help but see the narrative
in this sequence of events.
So this brings me to another fundamental principle
about the brain,
which is how our memory works.
Most of us like to think of our memory
as an accurate, vertical representation
of what's happened in the past.
But in fact that couldn't be further from the truth.
We think about memory as
say some kind of a file that gets written
through encoding and then stored through some
process of filing into the brain,
and then when we want to get that memory back
we just open the file and look at it and read it again.
That's how we retrieve the memory.
But in fact, what's happening is that every single time
we open that file and take out that folder,
we have to rewrite it from scratch.
And how we feel in the moment,
what we believe politically or otherwise,
all of the things that have happened in-between
influence how we rewrite the narrative
of that particular memory.
So remembering is in fact a constructive process.
It's not simply a process that happens
passively as we record events in the past.
For a lot of people this revelation
is a little bit frightening because then they start
to worry about their memory
and how they can trust it and so forth.
But I hope to convince you by the end of this course
that maybe this isn't why we adapted
this particular way of remembering.
Maybe there's something really fundamental
and special about how we remember
that is something that gives us one
of the major advantages to being human.
So let's delve a little bit more deeply
into how this type of memory works.
Ever since I started being interested in storytelling,
from the time I was a little girl,
I was really interested in how we remember
events in our lives,
because essentially the way we identify with ourselves
is through this memory of events that have happened to us.
That's how we build our autobiography.
It's how we build who we think of as ourselves.
So for my PhD I studied the part of the brain
that lays down new long-term memories
of episodes that happen to us.
This is the medial temporal lobe,
and in particular one part of the medial temporal lobe
called the hippocampus.
So let's look at what happens in this particular
region of the brain and how it enables
the laying down of new long-term memories
for autobiographical episodes.
So let's start with what's happening right now.
You're listening to me talk and there's some
perceptions that are coming into your senses,
and of course your brain is doing a lot of stuff
to those particular perceptions to help you
understand and keep track of what's going on.
So those perceptions are going into
the middle of your brain,
for the most part into your thalamus
where there's some processing,
and then in the case of vision it's going
to the back of your brain.
And then from there it's going up into
other parallel pathways that are doing
a whole bunch of processing as you're encoding
what is happening in this very moment.
Ultimately it gets to other parts of your brain,
and eventually this neural signature
gets tracked by the hippocampus,
and the hippocampus becomes what we call
a convergence zone.
So it actually keeps track of all the different
parts of your brain that are coactive
as you're having this experience.
That's the encoding process.
The hippocampus is keeping track of that
and it's essentially drawing a little map
of the parts of the brain that are active now
as you're having these experiences.
This little map gets drawn in various ways
and that's what we call storage or consolidation.
Now let's say you've got that memory
in that file drawer and you see me on the street
sometime this weekend or in some other place.
I serve now as a cue for you to retrieve this experience,
this experience that you're having right now.
So seeing me gives you that retrieval cue.
It goes into the back of your brain
and ultimately other places,
and finally it lands back into your hippocampus
and it triggers this trace of the memory,
especially as you're actively trying to remember
where did I see that person before?
She looks so familiar. I just can't quite place it.
Let me figure this out.
Your hippocampus jumps into work
and essentially it reconstructs what was happening
in your brain while you were having this experience.
This is that rewriting part.
And then it sends signals to those parts of the brain
to become active again so you can have
the sense of re-experiencing what you're
laying down right now.
So the fact that I was talking about the brain
and it was the neuroscience and public policy seminar
and so forth.
Over time you might have this kind of re-experiencing
a number of times.
Probably not with me, but maybe with some other experiences
that you have frequently,
and so those experience can become consolidated
and possibly not even need the hippocampus
anymore to be reactivated.
But this is essentially how your new
long-term memories get laid down for episodes.
They're reconstructed and it's an active process.
So what happens to individuals who have
superior autobiographical memory?
You know sometimes you meet someone
and they say, "I can remember everything I did
"from virtually every day of my life."
It's very rare, but once in a while we meet such a person.
More often than not such a person
is overconfident in their memories.
In fact, we're not very good at understanding
the accuracy of our own memories,
and every time we get tested
we get informed that in fact our memories are much
less accurate than we think they are.
Our confidence in our memories is not
a good proxy for actually how accurately
we remember the details.
But there are a handful of documented individuals
who do have superior autobiographical memory.
So I'd like to show you a quick clip
from a 60 Minutes segment in which these
particular individuals were documented.
So let's see an example of a person
with superior autobiographical memory.
- Let me give you a date.
Let's say January 2, 1990.
- Right now I'm remembering the jogging class
that I started that morning.
- And you're actually back there.
- I'm, I'm, I can feel it.
I can remember the coach saying, "Keep going."
- That was more than 20 years ago
when she was 16,
a date I picked completely at random,
as I did this one.
February 18, 1988.
- 1988, oh. (laughs)
- You're laughing. - I'm laughing.
It was a Thursday.
I had a big conversation with a friend of mine
and that's all I'm gonna say.
- Louise says she can remember every day
of her life since the age of 11.
Try to talk us through, can you do that?
- Sure. - How it works.
Out of the air, April 21, 1991.
- 1991. Okay, April 21st.
So in the moment between April 21st and 1991,
I had scrolled through 25 April 21st's
thinking which one is it gonna be?
Which one is it gonna be?
Okay, 1991, which was a Sunday,
and I was in Los Angeles and I had a concert
with the American Symphony.
- You went to the most thing that happened that day.
- Right, that was the most-- You probably don't want to hear about,
start the day, okay, I got up in the morning and got dressed.
- And you remember that? - Yeah.
- You remember what you had for lunch?
- Not what I had for lunch that day,
but I do remember what I had for dinner the night before.
- So her memory is very different from mine.
I can barely remember what I had for dinner three nights ago,
let alone 10, 20 years ago.
There's something fundamentally different
in the way that she remembers.
And the question is yeah, really,
how can we tell whether or not her memories are accurate?
Well, we can test it.
We can give her a series of dates
and we can see to what extent verifiable events
that she remembers are true.
Was that actually a Sunday?
Was the weather in Los Angeles nice that day?
Although that's kind of a trick question
'cause the weather's always nice in Los Angeles.
But you know, there are sometimes when it rains
and could she actually remember the days
in which it rains?
So when psychologists have looked at how
accurate these individuals are about their memories
they've been extremely surprised.
The dark bars there on the right show how accurate
most of us are, which is not very accurate.
On the basis of these 10 dates,
it's the 10 dates quiz.
On the first set of bars is the day of the week.
Then there's the verifiable events.
Then there's some autobiographical memories.
And then there's the total at the end.
You'll notice that we're pretty poor
at remembering 10 random dates,
and yet these individuals are really pretty accurate.
Look at just the day of the week itself.
They're almost perfect there.
But even when it comes to other verifiable events,
they're very accurate.
So they really are remembering something
very differently than we are.
The question here now is are they having
a different decoding experience?
That image that I showed you of what's happening
in the hippocampus while they're encoding,
while they're seeing the different aspects
of this event is something fundamentally
different happening.
And we can test that by looking at how well
they're able to encode information and whether
it degrades in time in a similar way as it does with us.
Do they simply have more to choose from to begin with?
Well, this next figure answers that question.
So in yellow that's the data from the individuals
with superior autobiographical memory.
In blue it's the controls.
And you'll notice that in terms of the number
of details the controls remember,
at one week they don't show any difference
in terms of the number of details compared
with individuals with superior autobiographical memory.
When we get to a month we see a stark difference.
So what's happening in these individuals
is not that they're encoding more information,
but they're simply not forgetting it.
Something different is happening in terms
of the way the information is consolidated
and how they're retrieving it,
but not how they're encoding it.
What's true for all of us is that we forget
the vast majority of details.
In fact, forgetting curves show that within 24 hours
we actually forget most of the details
of the things that happen to us.
And you know, here we are,
the predominant part of our species,
so that suggests that there's something
maybe adaptive about forgetting.
And of course a lot of psychologists
are very interested in this,
and I will tell you there are a few things at least
that are adaptive about forgetting.
But first let's keep thinking about these individuals.
So even after 10 years they do show some forgetting,
but not very much.
So can we see differences in terms of
the physical structure of their brains
or how their brains function that might give us
a clue as to what is happening,
why they aren't showing this forgetting.
Well, in order to do that I need to introduce to you
a couple of important brain regions.
So first there's the prefrontal cortex
which is the central executive.
It's the part of your brain that is involved
in planning and initiating movement
and all kinds of social interactions,
the sort of very complicated human-like
things that we do.
Then there are your temporal lobes.
That's where the hippocampus lies,
in the middle of your temporal lobe,
and the temporal lobes are really involved
in sort of storing and then eventually remembering
these details of events.
In these individuals we see larger temporal lobes.
W also see big changes in another brain region
called the caudate.
And I want you to remember the caudate.
We're gonna talk about the caudate a little bit,
but one of the things that the caudate seems
to be involved in is in some of the symptoms
of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
and also in skill and habit learning,
it's the part of our brain that drives
skill and habit learning.
So these are the brain differences in individuals
with superior autobiographical memory and controls.
Now the question is this brain region, the caudate,
if it shows morphological differences in these individuals,
what can that tell us about how they're engaging
with their memories?
Well, neuroscience really isn't of any interest at all
unless we can see also changes in behavior.
So just if I show you what happens in the brain, that's less interesting.
But if I can show you how that brain change
actually influences or co-relates with behavioral change,
that's more interesting.
So let's see what happens in terms of the behavior
of these individuals.
- [Stahl]: And what about the fact that
the caudate nucleus is thought to be involved
in obsessive-compulsive disorder?
The scientists think there may be just a hint there
and exhibit A is Mary Lou Henner's closet.
- I love organization.
I like my shoes a certain way,
right foot going this way, left foot going that way,
so you can always see the toe and the heel on every pair.
And you'll see that things
are very color-coordinated here, but in sections.
I always hang like with like and I always have
the exact same hangers because then
everything slides more easily.
- All of them have what we think of
as OCD-like behaviors.
They like to collect things.
They have to have things in just the right order.
- What about phobias? - Does hypochondria count?
Like I hope I don't get this, I hope I don't get that disease.
- And you have a little germ thing?
- I wash hands frequently, yeah. - So do I.
In fact I dropped my keys when I was in a hurry
driving down here and I went, "All right."
So I went back in and like I wrapped,
I washed them off, I ran them off. Yeah, I do that.
- So there's some symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder
in these individuals, as well.
And in fact, if you look at how many details and how consistent
they're remembering is,
and you look at their obsessive behaviors,
there's a pretty strong correlation.
So in fact, these individuals are already
approaching their memories in a fundamental different way.
They're kind of obsessing about them.
And they talk about how they think about their
autobiography all the time.
They remember. They enjoy remembering.
They categorize their memories in the same way
that they categorize their clothing in the closet.
So if they start this behavior already at age 11 or so,
or whenever these individuals can start this remembering,
then you can see over the course of many years
how this kind of obsessive remembering
can fundamentally change a person's memory.
So what are the consequences
of this kind of obsession with remembering?
Are they just better at all kinds of memory tasks?
Well, in fact, their not.
They don't show any differences on tasks
of what we call working memory,
which is the ability to hold and manipulate
information in mind.
They don't show even changes in memory of other sorts,
of sort of this kind of like visual memory
and visual aspects and verbal aspects
of remembering lists of words, for example.
If they're not tied to their autobiography,
they don't show a boost in their ability to remember.
And where we do see a deficit is in extracting the gist,
the sort of fundamental pattern from their remembering.
So when we look at their number of peripheral detail,
so the top yellow circles are the superior
autobiographical memory individuals,
they remember more peripheral details.
But when we looked to see over time
whether they can still remember the gist,
they actually show an impairment.
So they're less able to remember the gist,
which is arguably the most important information
because that tells you what is the pattern
that sticks around.
That's the forest for the trees.
That gives you a sense of the regularities
in the environment.
And if you get too stuck up on these details,
then you don't actually get this overall gist,
this overall pattern.
Now we know in terms of our own storytelling
that what we remember is the gist,
not the details.
In fact, when we ask people to repeatedly
tell the same story again, it's the gist that remains,
but the details can change pretty drastically.
We can even see this in people's rememberings of drawings.
So here's a very famous study of an original drawing
and then all the different instantiations.
The gist is kind of there,
but even the actual subject of the drawing
is changed over time.
So our stories change with each retelling.
We can see this also in individuals who have
other kinds of memory impairments,
so one test of memory is the Rey-Osterrieth Figure.
So first what individuals have to do when given
this test is copy the figure.
So we first have to see do they have the
visual-spacial skills to do the copying.
And then we have them do something else for about 10 minutes,
and ask them what they remember about this figure.
And for the most part, most of us who don't have a memory impairment
will remember not all the details,
but certainly at least some aspects
of the particular figure.
But what if you have Alzheimer's Disease?
And now you have trouble turning short-term
memories into long-term memories,
so you don't really remember much
about this particular figure 10 minutes later.
What you remember is the gist.
And the question is how do you then categorize that gist?
What do you do?
Well, in some patients with Alzheimer's Disease,
they'll actually make something meaningful out of it.
So you'll see at the top rows in both sides
you'll see their copying.
So they do show some visual-spacial problems,
but they're still in this early stage of Alzheimer's okay.
But what they remember is something meaningful to them,
often faces or houses from this figure.
They extract this meaning and that's what remains.
So what can we learn from the fact
that our memory is shaped to remember
the gist rather than the details,
that we reconstruct it every time to remember.
Well, putting a memory into the framework
of a meaningful story helps us understand
what is happening and it helps us extract this gist.
And we can even watch this particular process
happen in the brain as a story unfolds.
So what is one of the sort of most basic
aspects of a story?
It's to build tension, right?
So if I told you in this particular picture
there's an individual who's fishing on a lake, well that's okay,
it's a nice picture if not an interesting story.
But if I set this up by telling you that in this
particular town there's been a serial murderer
that has been out,
and all of a sudden sometime around dusk when the light goes,
all of a sudden you're more interested, right?
The stakes are higher.
I'm building suspense, but the picture is the same.
But how you interact with the picture has changed
because you're putting it into the context of the story.
And all great performers tend to understand this.
They know that we need to set up the framework.
We need to guide people in terms of
how they interact with us from between
the audience and whosever on stage.
We need to build that tension
and if we can appropriately build that tension,
then we can give an effective performance
and people will stay engaged.
That's one of the main benefits of storytelling.
Now as a musician I'm really interested
in keeping people engaged, of course,
because that's what pays my bills.
As a performer I want the audience to continue to come back.
And one of the most sublime experiences
that you can have as you listen
to an engaging piece of music is the chills.
You might have experienced this kind of shiver
that goes through your body,
especially when it's a piece that you really love
and you know well.
And what's interesting about the chills
is that it's actually pretty predictable.
If you get the chills in one particular
performance of a piece, chances are when, about 77%,
that next time you listen to it you're gonna get
the chills in that same part of the piece again.
They're predictable and they're reliable.
And there are certain aspects of the piece
that make it more likely to give you the chills.
So for example, when you have the return of the melody,
that often gives people the chills.
When you have a big crescendo and a climax
and then another sort of pianissimo line coming in, that gives people the chills.
When you have a solo instrument coming out
of a cacophony, that gives people the chills.
Think Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You"
or the guitar solo in "Hotel California."
Now one reason scientists love the chills--
The artists love the chills because it keeps
their audiences coming back.
Why scientists love the chills? Because we can measure them.
We don't need you to tell us that you're enjoying it.
We can see it. We can see it in your bodies.
We can see it in your respiration change.
We can see it in your heart rate change.
We can see it in how sweaty your palms are.
We can measure it. So we don't need you to tell us.
We can actually look at the time course
and quickly pinpoint exactly where you got the chills.
Well that's great because now we can look
to see what in the brain was leading us
to that particular moment.
So now that we've talked about the hippocampus,
I'm gonna have to introduce to you
two more brain regions that are important
in understanding the chills.
But you know, it's after 4 o'clock on a Friday.
It's almost happy hour,
so I'm gonna try to simplify this as much as possible.
Okay.
Just kidding.
Okay, so here's the caudate.
The caudate is like a little scientist.
She's looking at the environment and tracking
down the things that might predict something good
or potentially something bad.
This is the part of your brain that if you
are addicted to a drug,
knows what aspects of the environment
might predict this drug,
and therefore can allow the brain to prepare for it.
This is why rock stars tend to overdose in hotel rooms,
not at home.
Because the caudate in the hotel room
doesn't know that the drug is coming,
so in turn the brain doesn't do this kind of
homeostatic preparation for the drug
and the same dosage of the drug can now be fatal,
whereas before the person developed a tolerance
because the caudate told them to expect the drug,
and therefore they were able to prepare accordingly.
So the caudate is the part of your brain
that tracks the regulators in the environment
that predict reward or something salient.
Then there's the nucleus accumbens.
This is the party region.
This is the region that spikes when you get
that hit of pleasure,
or when something really terrible happens,
but usually it's pleasurable, right?
So we can track dopamine,
which is the neurotransmitter involved in both
of these brain regions for the most part
and we know that when we see a big spike
in the nucleus accumbens,
the individual perhaps is feeling something great.
We know this because if we insert
a stimulating electrode into a rodent,
into the nucleus accumbens,
and we let the rodent press a lever,
and that would self-stimulate into that
particular brain region,
the rodent will do everything it can to keep stimulating.
It will die of starvation before it stops pressing that lever.
It is that rewarding.
All right, so, here is dopamine
for the chemists in the room.
So what happens when you're getting the chills?
Well, it turns out,
and let's just focus on these two regions,
'cause of course there are other regions involved,
but it's Friday afternoon.
So let's look at how dopaminergic neurons
are activated and sending signals to
these particular regions.
while a person is listening to music
that will eventually give them the chills.
During the part of the music in which
the tension is building,
the anticipation of the chills is building.
The caudate is more active.
Don't take my word for it. You can see some data.
The light blue line in the top in the anticipation phase
is where the caudate is being activated.
When we get to the actual experience of the chills,
the caudate activation goes down
and the nucleus accumbens goes up.
And here we are.
So from the perspective of the performer
these two regions act in concert
and if you don't have this anticipation phase,
it's likely that you're not gonna get this
nucleus accumbens boost.
This is why in a performance if someone
just surprises you with a big, beautiful high note
it's really not that pleasurable.
But if the person has built up your expectation
of this big climax and stretches out that tension,
every great composer knows this,
every great performer has learned this,
that if you can set that up,
boy does that release that climax,
have a much bigger impact.
It's essentially what's happening when we're telling stories.
We're setting up this climax.
We're setting up this expectation.
We're drawing an individual's attention
and then ultimately we get this beautiful release.
So it's not just all about the release.
There is this important anticipatory phase.
And this is why often when I hear people say
I'm not gonna go on Twitter while you're
talking about that show that I haven't watched.
I don't know how House of Cards ends.
I don't know what's gonna happen at the last episode of Game of Thrones,
so don't tell me.
Don't spoil the ending.
We hear these spoiler alerts all the time.
Don't spoil it for me.
People are so emotional about these spoilers.
Well, this is why I also love psychologists,
because we don't take your word for it.
We're actually gonna track whether or not
spoilers do spoil stories.
And I'm here to tell you that, in fact, they don't.
Well, actually Jonathan and Nicholas
are telling me from Psych Science 2011.
What they did is they had individuals
read a whole bunch of stories,
different stories, ironic twists, mysteries,
just other kinds of nice narratives,
and the stories were either spoiled or unspoiled.
So they actually were told the ending or they weren't.
And it turns out that not only did people not
find the spoiled stories less pleasurable,
but possibly there's even a hint of something else.
So let's look at the data.
The dark bars are the spoiled stories
and the mean hedonic rating is scientist speak
for how much you liked it.
Then we have all these kinds of different stories.
Literary stories, mysteries, ironic twist stories.
And the white bars or the open bars
are the unspoiled stories.
Now notice that in almost every case
the dark bars are higher than the white bars.
And in fact, some cases those little bars
that show the standard error don't overlap,
which means that statistically speaking,
people are actually rating the spoiled stories
as significantly more pleasurable
than the unspoiled stories,
not the other way around.
Well, this explains why we go to the opera
over and over and over again even though we know the ending.
This is why we still read Shakespeare.
This is why we read our favorite novels over and over and over again.
This is why just because you read Game of Thrones
doesn't mean you're not gonna watch
the HBO show, right?
We actually enjoy the process of the storytelling.
We like the anticipation phase.
We like to be able to predict what's gonna
happen next because we don't remember
the details from one story to another.
We just remember the gist.
And yet we continue to enjoy that process.
It's rewarding to go through it again.
Okay, so now I've hopefully convinced you
that storytelling is rewarding,
that there's some relationship between
storytelling and how we remember.
That we can even look at parts of the brain
that are involved in pleasure and reward
and see changes, track them as stories move on.
But the question really for an individual
who's interested in public policy
is can stories actually change behavior?
Are stories an effective way of changing public policy?
Changing people's minds?
So let me tell you about a study that compared
narrative and informational fact-based videos
to increase mammography rates in
low income African American women.
So in this population there's essentially two,
well in every population,
but in this particular study they looked at two
types of subpopulations within low income
African American women.
There are some women who were very trusting
of the medical establishment
and then there's some women who are skeptical
of the medical establishment.
And to see whether or not stories versus facts
could influence their behavior,
the behavior being will they go and get
a mammogram if they were told that they should?
How does watching a video when one domain
or another make a difference?
So stories versus statistics.
One video was called "Living Proof"
and it was a series of excerpts from testimonials
by local African American women about
their survival cancer and mammogram stories.
Another video was called "Facts for Life."
It was the facts from the "Living Proof" video
narrated by an African American woman.
Here are the key findings of the study.
Individuals who watched "Living Proof" as compared
to those who watched "Facts for Life"
found the video more likable.
They were more likely to discuss it with their family.
They put up fewer counter-arguments
to what they had heard.
They demonstrated a higher fear of cancer ultimately.
And a greater intention to get a mammogram.
And finally they remembered the facts
better at the six-month follow-up appointment.
What about the actual behavior of getting mammograms?
Well it turns out that for those individuals
who were skeptical of the medical establishment,
they were much more likely to go
and get a mammogram after watching
the narrative focused video rather than simply
the narrated version.
That wasn't true of the individuals who were
trusting of the medical establishment.
But this is a way perhaps of us targeting
those populations that generally don't want
or not as interested in what we have to say as scientists.
So we now can see that there are benefits
to telling stories even when it comes to public policy.
So I just want to end the talk by giving you
a little bit more about my own personal experience
and how I have found storytelling to be
an effective way of disseminating scientific information.
It's extremely effective for me as an opera singer,
but let's put that hat aside for a moment.
What about in terms of disseminating science?
Well, how do you gauge your,
I would say, your popularity in the world as a scientist?
Well, you look at how many people have
read your papers and cited them.
Citation index, it's a pretty measurable way.
It has its flaws, but it's one way of looking at
how much influence you've had.
Okay, so if you go to Google Scholar
and you type in my name.
My first publication was in 2000.
First citation was in 2001.
Total citations, about 1000.
My age index, which is a kind of measure of
how many papers I have and how cited they are is 17.
Now let me tell you that a good citation index
for an individual who has 20 years of research is 20.
So I have four more years to get there
and maybe I'll get to good.
An excellent one is 40,
and an outstanding one is 60.
So I have 32 papers that were at least cited once,
according to Google 47 papers total,
but I think that there's some error there.
But that's sort of my reach.
Okay, so let's say that out of those 1000 citations
I hope at least 1000 people have read those papers,
but maybe there's an overlap,
but let's give me the benefit of the doubt
and say that for each individual citation
there's an extra 10 people that have read that paper.
So say my total reach is about maybe 10,000 individuals.
Well, a couple years ago I co-created a podcast
in which I had scientists come on the show.
We sort of like to call it the Terry Gross of science.
They're long form interviews in which we
interview scientists primarily,
but also other public intellectuals.
It's called Inquiring Minds
and in 127 episodes we have almost 4.5 million downloads.
So the reach of one episode,
which now is about 30,000 individuals,
is more than all of my citations of all the papers
that I've ever written.
And even if I still quadruple my output as a scientist
I still won't reach more than two weeks of my podcast.
People are much more interested in hearing
those stories than necessarily reading
at least my papers.
So when it comes to reaching the lay field,
when it comes to disseminating science,
it is a key importance that we put things
into a way that people find engaging.
And what I found most engaging
is to tell your story and to tell it effectively.
Thank you.
(audience applause)