[amazon_link id=”1597265632″ target=”_blank” ][/amazon_link]In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Spock, poster boy for reason, emotionless logic, and science, goes through a battery of tests to determine if he’s sufficiently recovered from having been recently dead to go back to join the world. Though the cube root of negative infinity comes easily to him, he’s completely stumped by the last question.

“How do you feel?”

In “Don’t Be Such A Scientist,” author/scientist/film-maker Randy Olsen points out that Hollywood knows something that scientists were never taught. Communication needs to convey feeling if its going to have impact, and scientists, in true Spockian tradition, have been taught to divorce themselves from feeling, lest it muddy the data.

Olsen was a tenured professor at the University of New Hampshire when he realized that what he really wanted to be was a film-maker. So off he went to Hollywood, where he had his own moment of emotional questioning, not from the gentle Amanda Grayson (Spock’s mother), but from an abrasive acting teacher who could have reduced even the stoic Spock to tears.

“Don’t Be Such A Scientist” delivers an inconvenient truth to the scientific community: You’re winning the battles, but losing the war.

Without the ability to communicate science, the important issues of the day will be decided by those who know how to engage people on an emotional level and couldn’t care less about the science. If that’s not the exciting world of tomorrow scientists want to live in, they’ve got to get in touch with their feelings or we’re all doomed!

Randy had already touched on these themes in his 2006 film Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus, where he forces us to think about who the real dodos are, the Intelligent-Design crusaders, or the scientists that fail to out-communicate them?

Now he takes the painful lessons he picked up in acting class and shares them with us to save scientists from themselves.

• Stop communicating with your brain – nobody listens to brains, they listen to hearts, guts, and if you really want to get their attention, bring on the naughty bits (though that can easily backfire)
• Spontaneity is the antidote to boring
• Effective communicators seek a win-win result – by making your interviewer (or audience) look good, they’re much more willing to consider your position.
• Listen before you speak.

For all their smarts, scientists are like people who think talking louder will help them get through to someone who doesn’t understand English.  “Arguing louder,” Randy points out, doesn’t do anything but increase the alienation of the audience, which is why the National Science Foundation recommended that scientists not debate Creationists in public. They were hurting the cause.

Scientists suffer from “Field of Dreams” syndrome, it turns out. If you build your case out of excellent research and solid reasoning, won’t everyone come to your conclusions? Not unless you’ve got Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones and a team of all-stars angels to step up to bat. “When it comes to mass communication, it’s as simple as two things” the author quotes communications professor Tom Hollihan as saying, “You need to first arouse your audience…then you need to fulfill their expectations.”  Although it reverses the traditional order of “bread and circuses,” it’s not a new idea…nor one scientists have taken to heart.

What science has to offer, and what Hollywood fails to deliver, is the fulfillment part of the equation. Movies are great for getting people fired up, but when you try to dig deeper into their message, you find that there’s no “there, there.” So it’s important to use media to fire up audiences, but other forms to fulfill them.

What scientists need to become is storytellers, but they’ve got to find ways to include conflict, tension and release in their narratives or they’ll continue to be dismissed as boring and irrelevant…and worse, arrogant. As the author points out, when it comes to bad guys, arrogance “is the most common trait, for everyone from Hitler to Dr. Evil…(the) belief that that the are smarter and better than the rest of the world.”

What scientists appear to be missing is that today style is substance, and scientists can’t get past their reaction to style as the precursor to nonsense. To scientists, boring is the hallmark of a good theory. Anything that grabs your attention is either an indicator that something is wrong, or that misdirection is about to occur. But to the broader audience, it’s an indication that something interesting is about to happen. What scientists don’t realize is that the amount of information transmitted to a viewer by the way a thing is presented is far greater than that presented explicitly.

What scientists have style? Carl Sagan. Jacques Cousteau. Albert Einstein. With the exception of Albert though, their very style put off the main scientific community, especially in the case of Carl Sagan. To survive and get your message out, the author points out, you need to be bilingual. Talk like a scientist to the public and you wind up with a mob with torches and pitchforks, assuming they’re still awake.  Talk in plain English to scientists and you’ll get sucked into a black hole.

Even at a light 175 pages, the book goes on a bit, which isn’t surprising since Randy is after all still a scientist. But it’s a good book, and well worth reading for anyone who takes science seriously and wants to get the word out to more than a handful of fellow lab-coated geeks.

If they heed the advice in this book, maybe scientists will once again save the day in movies, and like Spock, discover they too feel fine.

Links: YouTube: Spock How Do You Feel?

Square (not the cube, but in reality both questions are probably equally undefined) Root of Negative Infinity: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-square-root-of-negative-infinity

Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus: Trailer-YouTube /   IMDB