cc >> Welcome everybody.
My name's Tom Zinnen. I help organize Wednesday Nite
at the Lab here at the Biotechnology Center at
UW-Madison. I also work for UW-Extension.
And Wednesday Nite at the Lab is organized by the Wisconsin
Alumni Association and UW-Madison Lifelong Learning
Institute. Tonight, I'm really delighted to
be able to introduce you to two people who you may not have
heard about before, but you've probably heard before.
That's Larry Meiller from Wisconsin Public Radio
and Steve Paulson from Wisconsin Public Radio.
I came to Wisconsin as a freshman at UW-Platteville in
the fall of 1975. And one of the things that was
really remarkable to me was Wisconsin Public Radio.
I came from Illinois, and we don't have radio in Illinois.
( laughter ) But what we don't have is
a statewide Public Broadcasting System.
We don't have anything like, or when I grew up there, we didn't
have anything like Illinois Public Broadcasting the way that
you have here, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public
Television. So for a long time now, I've had
the pleasure and opportunity to be able to enjoy Wisconsin
Public Radio. Larry Meiller, in particular,
is somebody I've listened to. I've been on his show before.
Here's his bio. After hosting a Public Radio
program for 34 years, Larry admits that the best part of his
day is the 11am to 12:30pm shift on Wisconsin Public Radio.
Larry and his producer, Jim Packard, tend to focus on
environmental issues, consumer issues and helpful how-to
topics. Larry also teaches at the
University of Wisconsin Madison.
He advises about 100 undergraduates and several
graduate students in the Department of Life Sciences
Communication. He's Assistant Dean for
Undergraduate Academic Affairs in the College of Agricultural
and Life Sciences. And he serves on several college
and department committees. Now I'm going to introduce
Steve. Steve is the executive producer,
and an interviewer with "To the Best of Our Knowledge," which is
abbreviated TTBOOK, a radio program at Wisconsin Public
Radio and syndicated nationally by Public Radio International
and XM Radio. "To the Best of Our Knowledge"
has won the George Foster Peabody Award in 2005.
Paulson has also received awards from the Northwest Broadcast
News Association and the Milwaukee Press Club.
In 2006, he was a Templeton Cambridge Journalism Fellow in
Science and Religion. What we're planning to do
tonight is to have Larry give his presentation.
That'll run three or four hours. ( laughter )
Then Steve will give a presentation.
Then we'll have combined Q&A. And as always, we're delighted
to have questions as they come to you.
Just go ahead and ask the presenter as you would like.
Please join me in welcoming Larry Meiller to the lectern for
Wednesday Nite at the Lab. ( applause )
It's really a pleasure for me to be here tonight to talk
a little about Wisconsin Public Radio, to bring science
information to the audience, and other kinds of information
as well. How many people here have heard
my daily show, which is on from 11 to 12:30 every day, Monday
through Friday? Quite a few people.
How about my show that I do with Patricia McConnell,
"Calling All Pets." A pretty good number, too.
And how about Steve Paulson's "To the Best of Our Knowledge"?
Whoa! You're the popular guy tonight,
Steve. Steve's program and my program
are two very different kinds of programs.
Steve's is, I think he would agree, very highly produced.
And I'm not going to say any more about that right now.
I'll let him talk about that. But for those of you who listen
to my show, or who have listened to my show, it's a call-in talk
show. We take great care in selecting
our guests and our topics, but our shows are not as highly
produced. These are call-in talk shows.
People call in about a topic. They ask all kinds of questions.
The questions don't come in in any logical order.
They sometimes are off-track. They aren't worded in the best
way possible sometimes. So there are some interesting
challenges that you face when you're in a position like mine,
and do a call-in talk show, to get information across to people
through the radio, particularly when it comes to science.
And actually, it's kind of a challenge to get any kind of
information across through radio.
If you think back to the, and most of you aren't old enough to
think back this far, but in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s,
radio was what you would call a family medium.
Families would literally sit around the radio and listen to
the dramas, and the adventure shows, and the soap operas.
That all changed in the '50s, when television came on.
That became the family medium. And radio had to change what it
did in kind of order to survive. And radio went from being a
family medium to being an individual medium, more music
and a lot of other changes. Who sits around the radio these
days, staring at it and sucking up information?
Nobody! Nobody does that anymore.
And in fact, you might think of a radio as kind of like your
refrigerator. I like to think about radio like
a refrigerator. It's there, but you don't pay
much attention to it until you're hungry, in the case of
the refrigerator, or until something, you know, sort of
piques your interest in the case of radio.
What are we doing when we're listening to radio?
We're always doing something else.
We never just sit and listen to radio.
We're always doing something else.
Usually, when we're listening to the radio, we're driving a car.
Or we're using it to get up in the morning, to find out, you
know, what the weather's like or what happened in the news over
the course of the evening. We might have it on when we
drive to work, usually we will, or when we come home.
Sometimes we'll be able to have it on while we're at work.
So the challenge for somebody like me is that the audience are
never paying full attention to what they're hearing on the
radio, because they're always otherwise engaged.
It's also interesting that radio is hampered in getting
information out to people because of the way we are
trained to learn. There have been a lot of studies
done on how much people learn through their various senses
that they have. And I want to give you a little
test right now on that, on how much we learn through our
various senses. And if you think about 100% of
all we learn, what percent would be learned, do you think,
through touch? How much?
Two percent, three percent? It's about 1-1/2 percent.
How about taste? Well, you're way off.
It's one percent. ( light laughter )
How about smell? Five percent?
It's about 1-1/2 percent. That's about four percent, which
leaves 96% for the rest. And let's take sight.
Of all you learn, what percentage do you think you
learn through sight? I heard 60%, 50%.
You know what? It's about 85%.
85% of what we learn, we learn through our eyes.
Only 11% we learn through our ears.
And that is radio. Radio is a hearing medium.
So we have to do things creatively in radio to get
people's attention, and to get that information across to them
so that they actually get it. Now, thinking about Public
Radio, and just thinking back a little bit, Public Radio was
known for years as a place to go to hear lectures and long-form
interviews. We also carry entire courses
taught by university professors. We went into the classroom and
taped them while they were doing their lectures, then we played
those tapes back. And we often, repeated those.
And there were a couple professors who had been dead for
many years, but were still being heard on Wisconsin Public Radio.
Well, we don't do that anymore. But it was a popular format.
And I think we had kind of a reputation of being a little bit
high brow at the time. Jack Mitchell was our station
manager. He came to me one day back in
the 1970s, and he asked me if I'd be interested in doing a
call-in talk show on Wisconsin Public Radio.
Well, never done a call-in talk show on Wisconsin Public Radio.
I kind of liked the idea. There were some staff people at
the time who weren't too much in favor of it.
They questioned whether or not people could actually learn
anything from a call-in talk show.
But we went ahead and did it anyway.
I had the first call-in talk show on Public Radio, and I'm
still doing it after all these years.
It wasn't too long after we started these shows that
Margaret Andreas, who was also on the air then, some of you I
see shaking your heads yes, you recognize her name.
She's a great person, a very effective interviewer.
And she thought up a research project to test whether the
call-in talk show would be an effective way to learn, maybe
even better than the long-form interview.
And here's what she did. She recorded an interview that
she did with a doctor about a health issue.
It was very well done. The questions were great
questions. They were in a very logical
order. And the doctor gave some great
answers. So she had recorded that.
She made a copy of that report. Then she wrote down the
questions. She listened back and wrote down
the questions exactly as she had asked them.
She put them on individual slips of paper.
Then she put those individual slips of paper into a hat.
She had somebody else draw those questions out one at a time.
And so they came out in not a logical order at all.
So question one turned out to be the fifth question.
Question five was number one, and so forth and so on.
Then she had some confederates, friends from the office mostly,
call in to a recording. She recorded them asking the
questions that she had written down, as she had written them
down. And she recorded those.
She used a mixture of men and women, young and old.
She had some students call in and ask those questions, too.
And then she took their questions, and the new order of
questions, and put them on a tape.
Then she put the appropriate answers from the doctor in that
order. So now we have two recordings.
One with her logical, one, two, three, four, five, and so forth,
set of questions. The other a call-in talk show
kind of format, where the questions were sort of jumbled
up, to be perfectly honest. And then we've got some groups
of students involved. At the university, we tend to
use a lot of students for research purposes.
And we told the students that they would be participating in
an experiment. We asked them to come in to a
room on campus. And we asked them, once they got
there, and there were many groups that came in over time.
But we asked them to fill out a form.
And later on, after they filled out this questionnaire, we'd be
giving them an experiment. So while they were filling out
the form, I came wandering into the room.
And I turned on the radio, except it clearly wasn't a
radio. It was a tape recorder.
And it played one or the other of the interviews.
So we didn't say anything about them listening to the radio.
In fact, we wanted them doing something else.
That's why we had them filling out the questionnaire.
And after the recording was played, a little bit after, we
gave them a test. We gave them a test on the
information that was in the interview.
And there were several groups that heard the one version, and
there were several groups that heard the other version.
Then we compared those results between those who heard the
standard interview against those who had heard the same
information in a talk show format.
It turns out, based on our testing, that the people who
heard the call-in format actually could answer
significantly more questions. They had more knowledge about
the topic from the radio than those who had heard the
long-form interview. And they also found it more
entertaining. There were some questions asked
about how entertaining they thought it was.
That was a significant difference, as well.
Why would you think that would be the case?
Why would they learn more from a disjointed interview as opposed
to a more logical approach? Mm-hmm?
( inaudible ) They would have to listen
more intently. >> I think because of the
greater variety of voices. >> The greater variety of
voices. I'll tell you what.
There's something called the cocktail party effect.
Anybody know about the cocktail party effect?
I'll tell you what it is. Have you ever been at a party,
or at some event, and it's noisy.
And you're sitting there talking to someone and you're trying to
concentrate on what they're saying.
You're really concentrating. And somebody mentions your name
back here. That's the cocktail party
effect. We constantly monitor our
surroundings, even though we're not consciously aware of it most
of the time. And when something new or
different comes into our hearing, we check it out.
Then we either listen a little bit more or we just go on to
what we were doing before. The call-in format seems to
work that way because of the many voices we hear.
Sometimes, you know, somebody asks a question, we hadn't been
paying attention. But it's a new voice, so you
listen to it. And if you don't, all right,
that wasn't so great, so you go back to what you were doing.
And oh, there's another voice, asking another question.
Oh that one, I'll listen to that one.
So I think this definitely helps our learning.
Now, my shows are a lot of fun to do, because I have a broad
variety of guests and topics to cover.
With my daily show, I'm on the air 250 times a year, roughly.
And many of those days, I have topics, like two topics over the
90 minutes of the show, about two 45-minute topics.
So over the course of the year, I might do roughly 350 or 400
topics on my show. Then, the "Calling All Pets"
show, we do about 40 shows a year on pets.
And we interview someone in one segment of our show every week,
too. So there's another 40 or so
topics to cover. It's really a lot of fun.
I get to know a little bit about a lot of topics that we cover.
It's a nice break in the day for me.
Tom mentioned, you know, I'm actually teaching.
And I have about 100 undergraduate advisees, and I've
got a bunch of grad students. I'm over in the Department of
Life Sciences Communication most of the day.
And at about 10:00, I go to Wisconsin Public Radio, and you
know, sit down and kind of prepare for the show.
And so, most of the time, I'm not at Wisconsin Public Radio.
I'm either with students, or I'm teaching, or one of the
never-ending committees that we have at the UW.
So it's a nice break in the day for me to host that show.
As for topics, we cover topics all over the map.
Wednesdays, today for example, usually that's devoted to the
environment and the out-of-doors.
Scott Craven, UW-Extension wildlife ecologist is a great
guest. He talks about the wonderful
world of Wisconsin wildlife. That's on a Wednesday.
I do a show once a month on biofuels and research in that
area, on Wednesdays. On Fridays, they're always
garden talk days. I think that's the highest
listenership day for me is Friday.
We talk about organic gardening, trees, lawns, you name it.
And I feature a variety of authors during the month.
I've had John Grisham on a couple times.
Everything from a person like John Grisham to state and
regional authors who have some interesting books.
I do shows related to food, about health, exercise.
Phil Pellitteri was on today, an entomologist.
We talked about bugs, actually today for 90 minutes.
The weather guys, Steve Ackerman and John Martin, are on the last
Monday of the month to talk about weather and climate.
Jim Lattis of the UW Space Place is on roughly once a month.
The only show I do regularly with science in the title
is a show I do with Bassam Shakhashiri, who is a professor
of chemistry. And that particular show, we
call the World of Science. So with only one show with the
specific topic of science, you might not think that we do a lot
of shows that are really science oriented.
But as a matter of fact, if you think about it, even though my
programs are often advice oriented, how to grow better
flowers, or how to fix your house, or how to identify a
particular bird. A large proportion of my shows
have science information in them.
I was thinking about Sue Nitske, a nutritional scientist.
I had her on my show. We were talking about food,
breakfast food. And she got into breakfast
labels. I learned about one of the
principal ingredients of my favorite breakfast food that I
have about four times a week. I think it's second on the list
or maybe third on the ingredient list, so it's pretty high up
there, is evaporated cane juice, which I hadn't thought much
about. But you know, it's unrefined
sugar. And Dave Knutson, who's a chef,
who for a long time cooked for the King of Norway.
I had him on the show. He had to explain to somebody
one day about the chemical process that occurs to make
bread dough rise. Somebody wanted to know that.
And Bob Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, I had him on one
day. And we got into a great
discussion about the Jason Science Education Project.
This is the year of the frog. I had an author on that not too
long ago, to talk about why amphibians are disappearing.
Phil Pellitteri gets into some great discussions about insects.
Some of the discussions get pretty heated.
Bassam Shakhashiri was on once to talk about evolution versus
intelligent design. Quite a large discussion about
that. I talked with a guest about
windmills as energy generators once.
And I got a big surprise on that show.
I assumed everybody would be in favor of windmills.
They are, you know, they use air.
It's clean. The wind isn't going to go away.
Well, I was really quite surprised at the number of
people who called in, who were really mad about windmills.
They were citing health concerns, noise issues,
unsightliness. And what I thought would be a
fairly uncontentious program turned into a real Donnybrook,
I guess you might say. My grandfather used to say that.
The guest was an environmentalist.
And he was upset. You know, he was mad about it.
And he said, well, you know, people are complaining.
They have no source of power near them.
And unlike those of us who live in a place like Madison, where
there are coal-fired power plants and smoke stacks, you
know, right next door. Those who were complaining about
their energy, get their energy shipped from a long ways away.
And they would like to keep it that way.
I thought that was a little bit uncharitable comment on his
part. But you know, there's probably a
little truth to that. And I had to think about my
role in the process, when you've got that kind of show going on,
be it windmills or any kind of topic.
I feel like I have to take a neutral role in that process.
I have to be respectful to my guest.
I have to be respectful to my audience.
And you know, once in a while, I shudder a little bit about some
of the questions. Sometimes, I have to re-phrase
it a bit so our guest and maybe the rest of the audience can
understand what the question was.
And in commercial radio, if you've ever listened to
commercial radio call-in talk shows, the goal is often to goad
listeners. They want to make listeners mad.
And you know, I think my job is to help educate people, to help
them learn, to have fun while we're doing it, and to keep the
program on topic as much as possible.
That's kind of how I see my goal, or my role at Wisconsin
Public Radio. Sometimes, it can be a problem
keeping the show on topic. I can give you many examples of
times when we went off in a direction that I never really
intended. This last week as an example, we
had Bassam Shakhashiri on the program.
Now that day, Jim Packard told me about it afterwards.
He filled me in. It was the day before the vernal
equinox. And Bassam was talking about the
superstitious belief that you can stand a raw egg on end only
during the equinox. And this apparently comes from
the notion that due to the sun's equidistance between the poles
of the earth on the first day of spring, there are some special
gravitational forces that apply. Well, now for the skeptically
inclined, the first objection that comes to mind is the fact
that there's also an equinox on the first day of autumn.
And why isn't there any balancing of eggs in September?
Secondly, while it is true that on both equinoxes, the earth's
axis is perpendicular to the sun, so you know, night and day
are exactly the same length, there's no scientific reason to
believe that the alignment causes any appreciable effect on
the gravitation. And I guess, also, you know, if
the equinox can cause this for eggs, why not for a broom or a
pencil, or something else. Anyway, Bassam more or less gave
that response. Immediately the phone lines.
( laughter ) Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
You know, they all lit up. And over the course of the next
45 minutes, we had seven questions, or comments, I don't
think they were really questions.
They were comments from people who insisted that it was true.
One fellow said he had done it for 23 straight years, exactly,
you know, at the point of the vernal equinox.
Another guy called in and said, no, for me, it has to be exactly
12 hours after. ( light laughter )
Somebody else called in and they had a whole string
of pictures showing the egg standing on end.
Well, it is true that you can balance an egg on end during the
vernal equinox. But it is also true that if
nimble enough, you can do it any day of the week.
( laughter ) Now listening to me talk about
this, you might say what does this radio program have to do
with science, or anybody's knowledge of science.
Here we are talking about balancing an egg.
You know what? It's fun.
And it gets people thinking
about the equinox and science. And it gets them thinking about
it in a different way. It piques people's interest.
And I'll tell you what, Bassam, he's a great guy.
He has a wonderful Web site, by the way.
This is an aside. It's scifun.org
I highly recommend it to you. Go to it.
He says that after he does one of my radio shows, he always
posts some things from my show. The number of hits on his Web
site just shoots up. So he gets a lot of hits.
And he has some great information, again, on there.
He's got experiments you can do with your kids or grandkids, or
just do yourself. I've found a few of them just
fun to do, just myself. He's got some recommended books,
and his Christmas lecture, and a whole lot more.
You know, that's one of the cool things we do, to teach
people about science or anything else on radio.
We can't always give a lot of detail on radio.
You know, I can't tell you how to splice a gene on radio so
that you're probably going to remember exactly how to do it
when I'm done or the next day. But I can pique your interest.
And I can make you more aware of something going on in science
like that, that can entice you to learn more about that later.
And I can even tell you where to go to look for it.
We're not great on the minute details on radio.
Two fellows who are really great in talking science on
radio are Steve Ackerman and John Martin, meteorologists.
I call them the weather guys. They're on the last Monday of
the month on my show. And to do a good job, you have
to be able to talk about a complex topic, like climate or
global warming, and do it in such a way that people actually
listen and learn from it, obviously.
And John and Steve are great guys.
And they are funny. They know their stuff.
And they're able to communicate in a very friendly, off-hand
way, that helps us retain information.
The information comes out very smoothly.
Sometimes you don't even realize that you're learning something
from it, which is great. They can explain technical
concepts in ways that make sense to those of us who aren't so
great in math or other ways. A Wisconsin newspaper wrote an
article about them in relation to my radio show.
They talked about one of the callers for my show.
They called in and said, when John and Steve were on, the
caller asked if they had ever seen an "M" shaped rainbow.
You know, it's like this normally.
This was like this. And the caller said she just saw
one. They peppered her with
questions. They couldn't come up with an
answer. So after the show, Steve looked
through a bunch of optics books. And he never found an answer for
it, exactly, but there was one book that said when it happened,
it always happened over lakes. And so, he thought it was
probably some sort of solar reflection.
So the next time he came on the show, he said yeah, you can have
an "M" shaped rainbow. And then several months later,
there was another caller who called in about the same thing,
who hadn't heard the earlier shows.
And he said he saw this "M" shaped rainbow.
And of course now Steve knows. Steve says, did it happen over a
lake? The guy said, how did you know
that? ( laughter )
Oh, man. It's great to be able to work
with smart, funny people every day on the show.
My job, sometimes gets a little difficult because it requires me
to obviously be prepared. If an author, you know, is on
with his or her latest book, I read the book beforehand.
Topics I don't know anything about, for sure, I will do some
research on that. And it helps.
One time, I had a guest on to talk about how to deal with
stress. And she was great before the
show. I got on the show with her,
asked her the first question. Her mouth opened up.
She stressed out. Nothing came out.
( laughter ) So I said, you know,
"Before you answer that question, why don't I?"
So I answered my own question. And then I asked her another
question and, so mouth came open and nothing came out.
So I answered that one. Then we even got a call and
somebody asked a question. And I said, you know, before you
answer that question, let me give a shot at that question.
She would always get out, "yes" to me.
After that, something clicked, she was fine, and she was great
the rest of the show. That was about three days later,
I started getting mail. I got quite a bit of mail.
And the gist of every one of the comments was, why are you
talking all the time, why don't you let your guest do the
talking. ( laughter )
So that's my job. It's a lot of fun.
It's interesting. And you learn a lot, I do, from
my guests and callers. Callers are really a big part of
the call-in talk show, obviously.
They're part of the program. When you're answering a question
for the caller, we're really doing it for everybody else, as
much or more, than for the caller.
It's a very effective way to learn.
Dave Giroux, is an information director for the president of
the UW System. Dave did his masters work in my
department, Life Sciences Communication.
And he was quite interested in what people take from my show.
He did a study of callers to my show.
We got the numbers of people who called us.
He called them back and he asked them about the show.
And they were pretty complimentary about it, which
was great. But he also asked them if they
could give him a specific. It was sort of near the end.
He asked for a specific piece of information they learned from
Larry Meiller's show. And everyone of them, could give
a piece of information, often in pretty great detail, of what
they had learned through the show.
He was pretty surprised. But it shows that even with
potentially difficult topics like science, you can teach
people through call-in radio. You know what though?
There are other ways to teach people about science on the
radio. Steve Paulson's show is a much
different format from mine, but his is at least as effective.
You heard the awards that he's gotten for the show.
I want to turn to Steve now to tell us about "To the Best
of Our Knowledge." Steve?
( applause )
It's fun watching radio people struggle.
( laughter ) >> Yeah, in the studio,
the microphone is right there. You sit down and it's right in
front of you. >> That's why I have engineers.
( laughter ) >> You've got it?
Yeah. ( no audio )
Can you hear me? And there's a magic box here
that I hope will somehow turn on here, because I'm going to play
some excerpts from my radio show.
And this has to click on for this to happen.
And there we go. Well, I have to say, it's a
great pleasure for me to be here.
It's great to follow Larry. As he was saying, our shows are
really quite different. The big difference, of course,
is that his is a live show. It's a call-in show.
He talks with listeners. And I don't do any of that.
I should say that actually, I came out of that tradition.
My first five or six years at Wisconsin Public Radio were in
producing call-in shows. In fact, I think, Larry, you
probably don't remember this, but I believe you were on the
hiring committee that originally hired me.
One of the people. So I have a debt here.
There are obviously some disadvantages, because my
program, "To the Best of Our Knowledge," does not take calls.
As Larry was just saying, there are certain things that you get
from that. You get that immediate response
from people. You get the sense that you are
helping them right away. And I don't do any of that.
What we do on "To the Best of Our Knowledge," is we do
pre-recorded interviews. We tape them.
We edit them later. Usually the interviews are maybe
about a half an hour in length. We cut them down to anywhere
from say, seven to 12 minutes, or so.
We put together four or five interviews in an hour.
They are always on a related topic.
And the advantage of that is that we have a lot of control
over what we do. We have total control over what
goes on the air. Then we can add all kind of
extra things. We can add, oh, it could be a
poem. It could be a bit of music that
comments on what we've just heard.
It could be a movie clip. And it's hopefully bringing a
little extra sparkle to what you hear.
And the philosophy of the show is it's really putting together
different interviews that are kind of related in some way.
Let me give you an example of this, a science example.
We did a recent show about physics.
And we told the story of a physicist who's trying to build
a time travel machine. And physics, theoretically, you
could do such a thing. We put that interview next to a
poet who writes about physics. Then we had a segment about how
science fiction movies and TV shows use and abuse the actual
world of physics. And finally, we talked about
real space travel. We talked about a guy who talked
about a mission, and how dangerous that is.
So we went from the theoretical, to the poetic, to the pop
culture, to real space travel, all in one hour.
To me, that's sort of the delight of putting together
"To the Best of Our Knowledge," it's this kind of mixing
of different kinds of things. And sort of the joy of producing
our program is when you feel like you're getting the right
mix. What I'm going to do here
is I'm going to play about a half a dozen excerpts from
interviews that we've had on "To the Best of Our Knowledge."
These will all be about one to three minutes or so.
So you'll actually spend just a certain amount of time just
looking at me and listening while we do this.
I'm going to start out with a bit from an interview that I did
with the neurologist Oliver Sacks.
You may be familiar with him. He tends to write about very
strange things that happen in the brain, or brain
abnormalities usually. His latest book is called
"Musicophelia," which is about how the brain makes sense
of music. And what Sacks is, above all, is
a wonderful story teller. And here is the very first story
he told in the interview. Maybe.
Tony was a surgeon in his early '40s.
Very robust and athletic and extraverted.
He had very little interest in music.
And one day, this was in 1993, he was on the phone.
It was an outside phone. A storm approached.
A bolt of lightning flew out from the phone and hit him in
the face. It gave him a cardiac arrest,
and along with this, an out of body experience.
He was resuscitated. And he seemed pretty much
himself, except two or three weeks later, he got what he
called a sudden insatiable passion to hear piano music,
then to play piano music, then to compose music.
And in the course of about 48 hours, he really became
transformed. He became possessed by music.
That was his term. He started getting up at 3:00 in
the morning. He got a piano.
He got a piano teacher. He learned to transcribe.
He was at music when he came back from his surgery.
He said his wife wasn't pleased. And basically, this has
continued. >> You read about other cases
where music is profoundly therapeutic.
For instance, you have worked with people with Parkinson's and
Alzheimer's diseases. And these people may not be able
to talk easily. They may not even be able to
move very well. But often, those problems seem
to disappear when they listen to music, or play music.
Yes, this is where things started for me as a physician
more than 40 years ago when I saw the patients I later
described in Awakenings. These people are almost
transfixed with extremely severe Parkinson's and Catatonia, these
sleepy sickness people. But music could liberate them in
the most remarkable way. They could dance.
They could sing. They could move normally.
They could think normally while the music lasted.
Music has a special use in aphasia and people who have lost
language, because even though they may not be able to speak,
they're usually able to sing. >> That's fascinating.
So you're suggesting then that the part of our brain that deals
with language is a different part than deals with singing,
for instance. >> Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Well, you say something astonishing in your book, that
neuroscientists can actually spot a professional musician,
just by looking at the image of their brain.
Oh, yeah, I was very fascinated by this.
I wouldn't have believed it had I not seen this myself.
This is beautiful work, especially done by a man
comparing the brains of professional musicians and
non-musicians. And he found that in many
different areas, in the corpus callosum, this great bridge
between the two hemispheres, in the auditory parts of the brain
and in the motor parts of the brain, and in the visio-spacial
parts of the brain, there was a real enlargement of gray matter
in musician's brains. So that although you can't look
at a brain and say that's the brain of a mathematician or a
visual artist, you can look at a brain and say this is probably
the brain of a musician. >> So that's Oliver Sacks.
A wonderful story, I think. So let's just talk for a moment
about what that interview is about.
It's not really an interview about how the brain works,
although that's certainly part of it.
It is an interview about how unusual and complicated the
brain is. It's also the story about, or
tells a story about how one person's life can totally change
because something happened to his brain.
It's about what makes music so extraordinary.
So when I think about this, and I think about how we do science,
I think this is certainly an interview about science, but
it's not strictly informational. It's not just sort of taking you
through the steps, sort of the road steps, of what happens in
the brain. It tells this partly through
story. And this leads me to one of the
core principles that we have on "To the Best of Our Knowledge,"
which is somewhat different that what Larry's doing on his show.
And that's that ideas are not the same as information.
And I start with the basic premise that we, as a culture,
are swimming in a sea of information.
With the Internet, we have more information that we can do, more
than we can process. So one of my goals on "To the
Best of Our Knowledge," is to sort out the stuff that really
matters from the things that may be more ephemeral, or are
strictly informational. Now, to some degree, you could
say science is an accumulation of information.
But information itself often does not make for great radio.
It sort of goes in one ear and out the other, unless it's so
original, so unexpected that it qualifies as what I call
a "gee whiz" story, just sort of knocks you out
because it's so original. But most science stories are not
like that. So in my experience of, at
least the kinds of things that we do on our show, what tends to
work best are those science interviews where ideas are
really being talked about. And when I talk about ideas, I
mean it's the kind of thing that it causes you to mull over, to
think about it, maybe to debate it.
It's, you know, you'll remember this interview that you heard on
the radio and it'll spark a conversation you'll have later
at the end of the week. When that happens, I feel like
we've succeeded. If we can do that just one time
in an hour long program, I feel like we've done a pretty good
job. A lot of the best science
communicators are great story tellers.
Oliver Sacks is one. The NPR reporter Robert Krulwich
is another one. My colleague, Anne Strainchamps,
recently interviewed Krulwich about the science show that he
co-hosts. It's called "Radio Lab" and it
comes out of New York City. In this next bit of tape, he
talks about a show that he recently did about zoos.
The underlying question of this program was, what are zoos for,
and are the animals in the zoos really wild.
Imagine a wild tigress sitting in her cage.
She could eat you if she were hungry, ( growls )
and you're gone. Think of that tigress and then
imagine a mother coming into the zoo with a baby in a pram, and
taking the baby out of the pram, and lifting it up and putting
her baby right in front of the tigress, maybe 3/4 of an inch,
there's just glass between the baby and the tigress.
Saying, "Look, Darlene, the big kitty.
Look at the big kitty." Now, the cool eyes of the
tigress are staring at what could, to the tigress, look like
food. And the mother's putting her
most precious thing, her own daughter, right in front of a
wild animal. So something's wrong with this
picture. The zoo-goer doesn't understand
that this is a wild animal. Or maybe it isn't a wild animal
anymore. What is it?
I'm going to play one more excerpt from the interview that
Anne did with Krulwich. This will include a bit of his
own radio show. And listen to how he puts
together this radio show to tell his story.
Wouldn't it be fun for the cats to chase around a mouse or
something? And we looked around.
Does anyone do that? In Europe, they give hairy
carcasses, dead, hairy carcasses to animals.
And you can watch the animals fight over the carcasses and rip
up the hair. In the United States, they think
that's gross, except in southern Ohio, where in Toledo, they have
a wild animal feeding for special guests only.
We went to that. >> So we brought the boy down,
since my wife told me about it. We made sure we got there early
to check it out. >> The carcasses were already
out. The zookeeper comes out with her
microphone and sort of gives a little...
Part of our enrichment program...
Description, carcass feeding, why they do it...
All of the animal's behavioral needs, as well as
their psychological needs. >> And nobody at this park is
listening to the interpretive discussion of this, because as
she is doing this... >> I think I heard a door.
They let the tigers into the pen.
( dramatic, and lively music ) Oh, look, here come the tigers.
Watch, the big one's coming down!
One of the tigers just streaks across the pen and grabs
the carcass. And like, starts immediately
playing with it. And I have never seen, in all my
years of zoo-going, I have never seen a tiger move that fast.
Like, at one point, one of the tigers was carrying one around
by the ear. You could see, like, the little
cow face. And it was dragging it around.
What were people doing? Were they cheering?
Were they crying? >> There was nobody there that
seemed to be disturbed by it. >> Really?
Although, here was a conversation that I heard many,
many times. The children would say,
"What is that? What is he eating?"
And the parent would say, "It's a baby cow."
And the kid would say, "Why is he doing that?"
That's how they eat, honey. >> Well, that's what he eats.
And the child would say, "I don't eat cow."
I don't eat cow. >> Yeah, you do.
And the parent would say, "What? Of course you eat cow."
When? >> At home.
You eat hamburger. >> What do you think
a hamburger is. >> That's made out of cows?
Sure is. >> And there would just be this
shocked look on the kid. And I must have heard that
conversation like five times. >> Why is it dead?
Because it's food, honey. >> And then, from China, we
found out that when you go to the zoo, you can buy a goat, and
feed the live goat to the cats. And people do.
So we got on a bus in Beijing, went out to the zoo.
We bought a chicken and fed it to the lion.
So that's an excerpt from the radio show, "Radio Lab."
And I have to say, I love that sound piece that we heard from
there. Think about how that's put
together. There are three layers of sound
in it. There's the field recording.
The sound actually being at the zoo, hearing the parents and the
kids talk to each other. There is the radio reporter,
who's talking about that. It's sort of a simultaneous
narration. So you have kind of this double
punch of, you know, the narrations working together.
It kind of reinforces, one reinforces the other.
And then you have the music. And you know, what the music
does, it just makes it fun. It gooses it up.
It adds drama to the story. You could totally do that piece
without the music. You don't need the music.
It just adds interest to it. That's part of using the art of
radio, is bringing together different sound sources.
And again, it's all about storytelling.
Let me tell you one of the things that I think all of us in
this business who are generalists, who are not
scientists, have to deal with. How do we deal with really
complicated, arcane information. It's tricky.
You know, frankly, when some of the scientists talk about things
that are very theoretical, I just sort of hope that what
they're saying is right, because I don't really have the
wherewithal to challenge them. But I have to say, I love
talking to certain kinds of scientists.
Theoretical physicists. I think theoretical physics is
just fascinating. It's so mind blowing, a lot of
the ideas. Think about black holes and the
possibility of time travel, of parallel universes, and quantum
physics. The idea that reality is never
certain. We can only talk about
probability. It's great stuff.
And it so happens that some of the pioneering physicists have
been especially fascinating people.
And often, the best way to talk about science is by talking
about the people who study it, rather than focusing on the
science itself. Some of the science will come
out, but it's through the people's stories that is often a
way into the science. And a perfect example of that is
Albert Einstein. Of course, any interview about
Albert Einstein inevitably deals with the nature of genius.
And here's the question about Einstein.
Was he just smarter than everyone else?
Or does genius have to do with thinking in a radically new way.
It's a question that I asked his latest biographer, Walter
Isaacson. He said this.
He questioned every premise. He didn't kowtow to authority.
He hated rote learning. One headmaster basically sends
him packing. Einstein leaves and is a dropout
from a high school in Munich. Another amuses us by saying
Einstein won't amount to much. He finally gets to the Zurich
Polytechnic on a second try at getting admitted.
But once again, he's able to tick off all three of his
professors there. So by the time he graduates, he
can't even get a recommendation from a professor.
In one lab class, he had thrown away the instructions, tried an
experiment his own way and blew up the equipment.
They put him on academic probation.
Do you have favorite stories that illustrate his rebellious
nature, as he was coming of age? >> His rebellious nature in his
thinking. When he is sitting there as a
patent clerk, in 1905, because he can't get a job as anything
else. He can't get a job at a
university or a high school. He's examining patent
applications. And he questions every single
premise. At one point, they try to
synchronize clocks, because it's in Switzerland, and they're kind
of obsessive about getting clocks synchronized in
Switzerland. They had just gone on Standard
time zone. And all of the devices they used
to synchronize the clocks send a signal between the two clocks.
The signal travels at the speed of light.
And he is sort of rebellious. He even questions the premise of
how do we know two things are simultaneous.
Einstein sort of rebels against those premises, and says we have
to define how the signal would get to us, to tell us
something's happened at the same time.
And that's when he comes up with the notion that if you're
moving, that signal would get to you in a different way than if
you're standing, say, on the train platform.
So, what's simultaneous is relative to your state of
motion. And from that, he comes up with
the theory of relativity. >> Was that a brand new idea?
Did he just pluck this out of nothing, or was he building on
certain intellectual ideas that had come before?
He had two great ideas that create 20th century physics.
Quantum theory and relativity theory.
Both pop into Einstein's head when he's a patent clerk in the
same three month period, in the spring of 1905.
And both of them are what you could call quantum leaps.
By quantum leap, it doesn't just mean a big leap, it means a
disconnected leap. It means a leap that isn't just
built incrementally on something that was there right before.
The notion that light is both a wave and a particle is just a
new, out-of-the-box way of thinking.
Secondly, relativity theory. You had really smart professors
dealing with this subject. They're all looking at moving
bodies and why the speed of light is constant.
But it takes this patent examiner to make the leap that
time slows down for you, as you approach the speed of light.
Even after he makes this leap, people who are studying this,
they're all reading that paper, and they still don't quite get
it. So yes, this was something
totally imaginative and rebellious.
Let me back up for a moment and talk about how we put
together our program, "To the Best of Our Knowledge."
It's interdisciplinary by nature.
We try to bring together different kinds of people in the
same hour. We joke that the perfect hour on
"To the Best of Our Knowledge" would have a historian, a poet,
a scientist, a comedian, and say, someone who has a riveting
personal story. Of course, an actual show never
works that way. But you know, we can try.
And I think there are a couple of reasons why we try for this
kind of eclectic mix of guests. And I think it's especially
important with science, because it can be so dense.
The subject matter can be hard to get.
And I think sometimes, producing our radio show is a
bit like fixing a meal. You have the appetizer.
You have the main course, the side dish and dessert.
Or to think about it more specifically in radio terms, you
surround your big think interviews with brain candy.
And so, we're kind of always looking for brain candy to stick
into our show. As Larry was saying, to make the
show more fun, more listenable, more listener friendly.
And I can tell you, it's actually kind of nutritious when
you do radio this way. I think the interdisciplinary
approach is valuable for another reason as well.
It breaks down what years ago was described as the two
cultures. The idea of there's science and
then there's humanities, and the two don't know how to talk to
each other. They have different languages.
And I don't really think that's true, actually.
So that's kind of one of the animating philosophies in our
show. Let me give you an example of
this. Here's a poet who loves physics.
Hyperspace. >> A poem by Fleda Brown, Poet
Laureate of Delaware. >> Tree trunks seemed to keep
shrinking all winter. And by mid-March, the Elk
River's visible in blips from horizon to horizon when the
sun's going down. Some things I want I only get a
glimpse of. Coltrane at his gentlest.
You can still hear what's harnessed though.
He might be playing Soul Eyes, but it's not just eyes.
His sax is opening its mouth like a hole in space.
I have a theory of a net laid across as a kind of protection.
It is like latitude and longitude.
Or more abstractly, the warp and wolf of belief, the kind of
thinking that separates day from night, heaven from earth, and so
on. Suppose the universe began as a
tear in the fabric of another universe.
On a two-dimensional plane, the tear would look like a
pushed-out curve, the shape of Coltrane's saxophone.
What if there were ten dimensions and Coltrane is in
the three of space, and the one of time, and the rest are
hidden. They might be quivering out
there like branches of invisible trees, or wormholes in the
branches. This is a very religious
feeling, beyond belief. Not everything is vertical or
horizontal. I keep thinking I should do
something instead of just stand here.
It is all so beautiful, for the few minutes I can see the flat
plane of blazing water through the trees and the terrific sun
on the brink. >> Physics seems to pop up
pretty often in a lot of your poems.
Why does this appeal to your poetic sensibility?
Honestly, I think there are few things closer related than
poetry and physics. You go back to John Keats, the
English poet, able to be in mysteries, and doubts, and
uncertainties, without any irritable reaching after fact or
reason. Well, okay, Heisenberg's
uncertainty principal. It's exactly the same thing.
You stay in one place and you discover that everything is
shifting. No matter where your focus is,
it shifts the entire universe as you change your focus.
And so I've been reading a lot of science lately, because I
think it's just the richest mind for poetry that I can think of.
It's fascinating. It sounds like especially
quantum physics, because it's so weird.
Yeah, it's so weird, of course, it's weird.
And it's weird, and the interesting thing is poetry is
kind of based on looking at the gaps between things, not the
things. I mean, if you want things, you
go to prose. But poetry gives you the
concrete object about what you're really looking at is the
unsaid things between the gaps. And that's exactly where all of
physics is going right now. >> I have to say, I have never
thought about this before. There's this similarity between
physics and poetry. I have one last bit of tape I
want to play. This comes from a time when I
was in Cambridge, England recently.
I had a journalism fellowship to study the connection between
science and religion. And one of the people I met
there was a delightful gentleman named Russell Stannard, who's a
retired physicist from Open University in London.
He also wrote a series of best-selling novels about
theoretical physics, about relativity, quantum mechanics,
and so on. And what's remarkable about the
series is these books were for children.
They're told from the perspective of a fictional girl
who travels in thought bubbles with her Uncle Albert, Albert
Einstein. And I asked Russell Stannard to
read me a passage from one of the books.
She sat there thinking, just for a minute, it had been like
the old days, Uncle discussing science with her.
She and her uncle had this wonderful secret.
Her uncle was able to think so hard that he could produce a
thought bubble. It was like the ones you get in
comics, but this one wasn't in a comic.
It would sit there, right above his head, wobbling about.
And that was only half the secret.
When he thought mega-hard, he was even able to beam her
into the bubble. Once there, she would go on
exciting adventures exploring the universe in a space craft,
all done through the power of Uncle Albert's imagination.
The discoveries she made in that spacecraft had helped her
no end with her scientific research.
A real team, they'd been. But all that was over now.
The last time she went on one of these adventures, she wrecked
the spacecraft in a black hole. >> That's wonderful, thank you.
What made you want to write children's books about Albert
Einstein and physics? >> Well, I got to university to
study physics. And it was there that, for the
first time, I cam across Einstein's theory of relativity.
And it just blew my mind. I thought it was the most
wonderful thing I'd ever come across.
Because it comes up with extraordinary things like the
faster the go, time slows down. So if you travel fast enough,
close to the speed of light, you can live forever.
I tried telling, you know, my friends about what I'd now
discovered, and they just weren't interested.
They just said this is ridiculous.
It can't be true. It's against common sense.
But then I came across a saying by Einstein himself, who
described common sense as those layers of prejudice laid down in
the mind before the age of 18. I thought, yes, that's true, you
know. One really ought to be
introduced to these ideas when your mind is flexible, you know,
when we're young. And in fact, one should be
introduced to it in school. You shouldn't have to go to
university to find these things out.
So I thought, yes, one ought to try and get it across to
children, young children. >> I love that quote.
"Common sense is those layers of prejudice laid down in the mind
before the age of 18." In some ways, I hope that
that's what we can do with our radio show, is to occasionally
cut through those layers of prejudice to get us questioning
about some of our basic assumptions.
And maybe at times, we can see the world in a new way.
And partly what we're doing, and I think this is the same impulse
that really inspires a lot of scientists, is we're motivated
by that wonder in the world. The wonder of the natural world.
And that's what we hope to convey on the radio, as well.
In some ways, I see my role on the radio is not that different
from what Russell Stannard does with his children's books.
I want people to get excited about science.
And I found that you can talk about all kinds of big, very
complicated ideas, mind blowing ideas, if you do it in a way
that's radio friendly. And that's sort of the kind of
thing that both Larry and I have been talking about today.
Usually, it's by finding experts who are passionate about their
specialty, who are good at communicating it.
And it's often through good storytelling.
There's one other thing that I think makes a science story come
alive. That's by showing that there's
something at stake here, that ideas really matter.
They feed our minds. They feed our souls.
And they help us understand our place in the world and in the
cosmos. That's the reason why I like to
talk about science on the radio. Thank you.
( applause ) ( inaudible )
I have one. Okay, sure.
So I think there is some time for Q&A for the both of us.
We'll just sort of be together. >> Together!
Sure? ( inaudible )
Is there any difference in an hour-long show, or I guess,
a longer format show and then a five-minute show.
Getting the point across in five minutes, versus an hour, is
there something specific that you'd say is different about the
useful tactics? >> So the question is, is there
a different way of doing science effectively, especially making
it fun in a five-minute format versus an hour-long format.
Larry, do you want to take that one?
Oh, thanks, Steve. ( laughter )
Well, you know, it's probably a lot harder to do it
in five minutes. It's certainly much harder to do
it in five minutes. But, you know, you would use the
same kind of principles that you would use in a longer form.
I mean, what you want to do is you want to capture people's
attention, right away, to get them to stop and listen.
And then, you give the information in a manner that is
fun and interesting. Even in five minutes, you can do
little human interest kinds of things.
And then you come up with your conclusions.
And it is harder, I think, to do it in five minutes, or even, you
know, sometimes we have to do things in two minutes, or even
one minute. Sometimes, I have to talk about
my show, and Steve probably does, too, in 17 seconds.
We have to say what we're going to do.
And we try to do is get people's attention right away, give them
the information they need, hopefully in a friendly way, and
in a way that we use picture language and imagery to make it
sensible. Then we sort of drive it home.
The other thing that I would add to that is I think that in
the really short form, let's say a five minute interview, it's
probably going to have to be a lot more structured.
Yes. >> We tend to think about the
arc of a narrative. There's often a beginning, a
middle and an end. And you're kind of, if not
telling a story, you're kind of advancing an argument.
Then you want to wrap it up. And obviously, if it's shorter,
you have to do that quicker. >> Without looking down at your
shirt, is there really such a thing as a green flash on the
horizon at sunset? ( laughter )
There is. >> Every time, on the earth, or
on the water, or what? >> The question is, is there
really a green flash that occurs at sunset.
And typically, it's only seen, frankly, if you're in someplace
like the Caribbean standing on the beach in Barbados, or
someplace, and looking at the sun.
And there is a little flash that occurs.
It's been documented. How it happens, I can't tell you
off the top of my head. >> I have to tell you, this is
funny that you asked that. I was just on vacation in
Florida about a month ago. And we happened to be out on the
beach with some friends. There was a really bright sun.
And we were thinking, are we going to see the green flash.
And so we all looked. And two of us, we were looking
at the same thing. Two of us thought we had seen
it. And I was looking, and I don't
know. It's, you know, a fraction of a
second. And I'm wondering if it's, you
know, there's something a little subjective about this.
( inaudible ) >> The Astronomical Society.
And I have actually seen the green flash.
You usually need to have a very flat horizon.
It doesn't have to be the sea, but that's usually the best
opportunity. And it isn't always visible,
because the atmospheric conditions.
It's caused by the fact that the atmosphere refracts the light
like a prism. So the last bit of light as the
sun disappears is in the blue and green end of the spectrum.
That's what gives you the flash. >> I hope you're not going to
ask us to repeat all that, Tom. ( laughter )
That was really a good answer. Yes?
Steve, I was amazed to hear you mentioned "Radio Lab,"
because I was going to ask you if you knew about it.
A friend of mine recommended it to me a little while ago.
I listened to it, only a few episodes actually, for content.
And I'm wondering what you think.
My reaction was this is extremely well produced, very
entertaining, but there's a lot of effort put into it to be
entertaining. I thought the sample that you
played maybe didn't capture that aspect of it as much as some
other moments might. There's a lot of quick cuts and
layers, like you mentioned. Very casual conversation that
I think is excruciatingly carefully planned in advance,
I suspect. But to me, I'm of mixed mind
about it. It's kind of entertaining, but
it's also kind of the MTV of radio.
It's fast. It's a little bit disjointed.
And maybe that's what it takes to get people's attention.
I don't know. If that's true, something about
that is a little sad, but maybe that's the world we live in.
I'm wondering what you think about that.
The question is, the radio show that I mentioned, "Radio
Lab," that comes out of New York, which has very fast paced,
lots of editing, highly produced, is that an effective
way to talk about science. I think it's a terrific show.
And I also know that it's incredibly labor intensive to
put that together. It's a program that, it's not
even scheduled regularly because it takes too much time to do it.
So it's not a once a week program.
It's, they maybe do six hours a year, and that's it.
And they sort of put it on however often they can produce
the programs. And it's highly acclaimed in
Public Radio circles. I know what you're saying a
little bit about is it kind of going over the top in being too
clever. I mean, that would be the
criticism in a way. And this, in a way, points to a
larger, philosophical discussion in Public Radio right now, which
is, I mean, there's sort of the highly produced, versus more of
the old-school kind of talk radio.
I don't think there's a right answer there.
I mean, I think there's a place for both of those kinds of
things. >> Yeah, it is less expensive to
do the kind of show that I do for Public Radio.
I have a producer who's half-time, Jim Packard, who does
a great job. And you know, I'm there a couple
hours a day. You know, I'm reading books at
night, and all that sort of thing.
But you guys at "To the Best of Our Knowledge," that's a great
program, but you have several people working.
Yeah, depending on how you count our staff, we have roughly
about five full-time staff members who work on it to do two
hours a week. And two hours a week is pushing
it. We can't always do it.
It's very labor intensive. Anytime you go from live to
tape, and then with tape, you're editing, it adds up
exponentially. >> How much homework do you have
to do before each program? When I listen, I'm just like,
how did he know the answer to that question?
The question is, how much homework do we have to do for
our programs. And in my case, as I said in my
talk, if it's an author, I read the book.
If it's, some topics, you know, I have a pretty broad knowledge
of, you know, garden talk on Fridays, I don't have to do a
lot of preparation for that, because I know quite a bit about
it. But for other shows, my producer
Jim Packard helps enormously. Every day when I come to the
station, I have a packet of materials that he's put
together, newspaper pieces, maybe a chapter out of a book,
or you know, magazine stories. And I read through all of those
before I go on the air. Plus, I will have, you know,
one of the things about a job like ours is that we are never
really off-duty. I and Steve, I'm sure does too,
read at least a couple of daily newspapers.
I get two weekly magazines. I read at least a book a week,
more like two books a week. And so, you're constantly
keeping yourself informed about what's going on.
I'm sure that's the case. >> Yeah, I do a lot of reading
in advance, too. There's a fine line, I have
found, about how much you should prepare.
I absolutely believe that you should go into an interview
prepared. And I think winging it usually
is not the best idea. You can be too prepared, or you
can know too much. That's an occupational hazard.
And so, because you are the stand-in for the listener there.
Then the other thing that's tricky, and it's almost more of
a philosophical question, I find, about how you think about
radio, is okay, you've read the book.
You know what the person is going to say.
You're asking the question to elicit the story.
You already know what the story is.
So, do you feign ignorance there?
Or do you, are you kind of up front about it.
It's a tricky one, because you want the person to tell the
story. You know that's a good story.
But there also can be a certain amount of artifice there.
And it's just an occupational hazard.
One of the problems, or one of the issues we have with
"Calling All Pets," the other program that I do with Patricia
McConnell, who has her PhD in zoology and animal behavior.
You know, we'll have a behaviorist who's written a book
about animal behavior, and I know and Patricia knows full
well that she knows at least as much, and often times more than
the person we're interviewing. So it really becomes a problem
in those. For me, it's never a problem,
because I never know more than my guest.
But for her, it gets to be a real conundrum, because she
doesn't want to come off sounding like she doesn't know
the information. >> Right.
So there is a fine line. >> One of my favorite shows from
Public Radio is "Car Talk." And I thought it particularly
interesting that the National Science Foundation were some
of the original funders for "Car Talk."
I think they're mostly known for being funny.
But the other thing that's amazing about them is that they,
more than most shows that I know, help develop the ways that
people can think and analyze a problem.
It has to do with cars, but that kind of line of thinking of
diagnosing problems, how to ask questions, and then how you go
out and test those ideas. That's a huge idea.
And I'm wondering if you know other places besides your shows
and "Car Talk," where that's something that really comes
through strongly. And it's clearly something that
they're trying to do. So it's basically, in your
thing, where you say 85% of what we learn is sight.
If 11% is hearing, it's also the whole how we use language to
analyze a problem. Are there other radio shows that
emphasize that type of thing in addition to what you do with
your call-in and your conversations that you guys have
on your desk right now. >> This one comes to sort of
Click and Clack. I'll go back to my own show for
just a second. And I think Steve Ackerman and
John Martin are as close to Click and Clack of anybody that
I have on my show, because you now, they're funny and the
approach that they take, and back and forth.
So they're probably the two best from my own show.
I'm going to have to think about, and I'm not getting it
from any other of our programs. >> Yes, I'm having a hard time
answering that. I mean, one of the things, I
don't know if everyone realizes about "Car Talk," and this is
also true with Larry's show, "Calling All Pets," they're not
live shows. And so, they're actually taped
and edited. So, they can be changed.
And the producer of "Car Talk," I know does a fair amount of
mixing and matching, to sort of, you know, doctor the pacing and
all of that kind of stuff. So what you hear on the radio is
not just the way it happened. >> Yeah, and in "Calling All
Pets," for example, the Saturday show for two weeks from now, we
record it, I was at the station at 20 minutes to seven this
morning. And we recorded, we spent,
essentially, from about 7:30 to about 10:00 recording that show.
And it's, we start and stop. When people call the show,
because there's 100 and some radio stations carrying it.
When they call the show, they get a recorded message that
says that we're going to be on the air.
This is a recording. If you want to ask a question
for our next show, which is going to be recorded such and
such a date, go ahead and leave your number, name, and the
nature of your call. And our answering machine holds
100 and some, room for about 100 and some calls.
And it fills up every week. And then the producer sits down
and listens to all 100 of them. And then she picks out the ones
that we're going to use. And she, Cynthia, she doesn't
tell us what they are. She doesn't tell us the nature
of the calls, or anything. So we don't know what they're
going to ask. But she'll pick the ten or so
that we might use. And she'll pick some men, some
women, east coast, west coast, north and south.
She'll kind of mix it around a little bit that way.
But we never really know. So when we're recording, it's
kind of real time for us. But if the caller says, I'll
say, hi, you're on "Calling All Pets," and the person says,
"Good morning." Then we have to say, oh, we
have to start over again. ( laughter )
Some of the shows, you know, some places it's aired
in the evening, or whatever. So there's a little bit of
starting and stopping that way. But otherwise, we don't know.
But it is edited after the fact and put together.
We do it pretty much in the order that it comes.
But she plans the order ahead of time.
So you know, there's somebody from the east coast, and then
there's somebody from the south.
Then there might be somebody, you know, usually the later call
is from Alaska, because we're recording at 9:00 in the
morning, and it's pretty early in Alaska.
It's easier to start on the east coast, where they're an hour
later. >> Yes?
Referring to the way that people learn, has anyone looked
at if the learning that occurs when people hear and then create
mental imagery about what they're hearing?
I know when I read a book, I sort of see it as I'm reading
it. So when I hear things on radio,
I tend to just see it in pictures.
Has anyone looked at that component of learning?
Well, a lot of the things, you know, I teach a broadcast
class. And one of the things we talk
about is the use of picture language.
And so you try to use picture language when you're on the air.
You know, I had somebody on the air talking.
Somebody asked a question about bats.
And you know, how do I get them out of my house.
And you know, well, the guy says, well, a bat can, you know,
a bat can fit through a hole 3/4 of an inch in diameter.
And I said, oh, about the size of a dime or maybe a nickel.
And he said, yeah, it's about the size of a dime, actually.
And so, 3/4 of an inch, versus the size of a dime.
That image transfers. So we try to do that in our own
presentation. I don't know if that answers
your question. But we try to paint the pictures
for people. Mm-hmm?
I listened to a radio show once where they told how to do
an origami folding exercise. And they did that with the
imagery. Usually, you learn origami from
sitting right down with someone doing it step-by-step.
It was pretty amazing to hear it over the radio and being able to
do it. >> To be able to actually do it.
Yeah, I can tell you right now there was some thought put into
that description beforehand. It didn't just come right off
the top of a person's head. Those are the kinds of things
you really have to think about beforehand.
But you don't ever want it to sound like you've thought about
it a lot beforehand, or it maybe even written it out.
It has to come like normal conversation.
And I will say that there are a few people in Public Radio who
are sort of famous for their ability to paint these kinds of
word pictures. I mean, Robert Krulwich is one.
And Ira Flatow kind of made his reputation by, back when he was
a reporter, by doing that kind of thing.
Most science reporters don't, frankly.
It's hard to do that well. >> It's really hard.
Who's really good? >> Ira Flatow.
Ira Glass has "This American Life," which is another
wonderful Public Radio program, but it's not a science show.
I've learned a lot from Public Radio over the years.
And I definitely turn on to listen to the program, starting
from 6:00 in the morning on. >> We love you.
( laughter ) >> Two stations,
AM NPR and FM NPR, that's it. >> Other questions?
Thanks, everybody. >> Thank you.
( applause )