If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating

by Alan Alda

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Award-winning actor Alan Alda tells the fascinating story of his quest to learn how to communicate better, and to teach others to do the same. With his trademark humor and candor, he explores how to develop empathy as the key factor.

“Invaluable.”—Deborah Tannen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of You’re the Only One I Can Tell and You Just Don’t Understand

Alan Alda has been on a decades-long journey to discover new ways to help people communicate and relate to one another more effectively. If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? is the warm, witty, and informative chronicle of how Alda found inspiration in everything from cutting-edge science to classic acting methods. His search began when he was host of PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers, where he interviewed thousands of scientists and developed a knack for helping them communicate complex ideas in ways a wide audience could understand—and Alda wondered if those techniques held a clue to better communication for the rest of us.

In his wry and wise voice, Alda reflects on moments of miscommunication in his own life, when an absence of understanding resulted in problems both big and small. He guides us through his discoveries, showing how communication can be improved through learning to relate to the other person: listening with our eyes, looking for clues in another’s face, using the power of a compelling story, avoiding jargon, and reading another person so well that you become “in sync” with them, and know what they are thinking and feeling—especially when you’re talking about the hard stuff.

Drawing on improvisation training, theater, and storytelling techniques from a life of acting, and with insights from recent scientific studies, Alda describes ways we can build empathy, nurture our innate mind-reading abilities, and improve the way we relate and talk with others. Exploring empathy-boosting games and exercises, If I Understood You is a funny, thought-provoking guide that can be used by all of us, in every aspect of our lives—with our friends, lovers, and families, with our doctors, in business settings, and beyond.

“Alda uses his trademark humor and a well-honed ability to get to the point, to help us all learn how to leverage the better communicator inside each of us.”—Forbes

“Alda, with his laudable curiosity, has learned something you and I can use right now.”—Charlie Rose

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812989151
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	49,282
Product dimensions:	5.18(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.46(d)

About the Author

Alan Alda has earned international recognition as an actor, writer, and director. He has won seven Emmy Awards, has received three Tony nominations, is an inductee of the Television Hall of Fame, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in The Aviator. Alda played Hawkeye Pierce on the classic television series M*A*S*H, and his many films include Crimes and Misdemeanors, Everyone Says I Love You, Manhattan Murder Mystery, and Bridge of Spies. Alda is an active member of the science community, having hosted the award-winning series Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years and founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. Alda is the author of two previous bestselling books, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned and Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 12 

My Life As a Lab Rat
                                   
Testing an Empathy Exercise

I have a habit of experimenting on myself.

In my twenties, I was fascinated by the notion that a person’s temperature goes up and down during the day. So, to test the idea, for several months I carried a thermometer in my pocket and took my temperature every hour. No matter where I was.  Understandably, I appeared a little weird to the people I had meetings with while I had this thing sticking out of my mouth.

I got caught up in the same kind of mania when I started looking for ways to practice mind reading on my own. I wanted to see if I could improve on my abilities at empathy and Theory of Mind and I was searching for a kind of personal human-contact workout gym.

I started by practicing reading the faces of strangers – people in the street, store clerks, taxi drivers – trying to get inside their heads and figure out why they were saying what they said, the meaning of their body language and tone of voice.

I practiced listening to people; asking their opinion about things. Even in casual encounters, I tried to see things through their eyes.

I did it everywhere I went. It was a little less obvious than walking around with a thermometer in my mouth, but no less obsessive. Surprisingly, it seemed to be having an effect on me. Maybe it was causing a change in the tone of my own voice or the look on my face. Something seemed to be changing, because the behavior of other people was becoming different.

One day, I hailed a taxi at Columbus Circle. The cab pulled up and the driver rolled down the passenger window and called out to me, “Where are you going?” When drivers ask you this before you get in the cab, it means they won’t take the fare unless they like where you’re going. This is against the law. I drove a cab for a while in my twenties and I know how annoying it can be to have to drive to far flung places–I once had to dig my cab out of a snow bank in the Bronx at two in the morning–but I went where the passengers wanted to go, because I knew I had to. When I get asked this question now, my usual response is not to identify compassionately with the driver, but to stoke the fire under my boiling blood. I went, pal, and so can you! is roughly my thought and I walk away without negotiating.

But this time, I looked him in the eye. I saw no hostility. It’s the end of his shift, I thought. He wants to get home. Suddenly, I was all empathized up. I gave him the address, and he let me get in the car. I was surprised I didn’t feel my usual resentment at having to audition for a cab ride, but then he said: “What’s the cross street?” This was another flash point. I’ve never been there before, I thought. How am I supposed to know the cross street!? Isn’t that sort of your job?
Ordinarily, I would start boiling again. Instead, I took out my iPhone and opened a map. “I’m looking it up for you,” I said. We were getting to be real team mates.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m trying to get to a bathroom. I needed to go for the last half hour.”

“So, look,” I said, “Just drop me at 86th and Broadway. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“No. No,” he said. “You’re a kind person. People get in this cab, they don’t care about other people. I’m taking you where you’re going.”

“No, look,” I say, “It’s all right. It’s only a couple of blocks.”

Now, we were in an ecstasy of cooperation.

“Don’t make the turn here,” I say, “you’ll have to go four blocks out of your way. You’ll waste five minutes.”

“NO! You’re a nice person. I’m taking you to the door.”

I couldn’t stop him. This man was sacrificing his bladder for me. I wished I’d never started the whole thing.

I stopped practicing empathy for a while; it was exhausting. But I couldn’t stay away for long. I started in again, with a slight shift. I began to look at people’s faces not only to guess what they were feeling, but to actually name it. I would mentally attach a word to what I thought was their emotion. Labeling it meant that I wasn’t just observing them; I was making a conscious effort to settle on the exact word that described what I saw. This had an interesting effect on me. First, I felt I was listening more intently to what they were saying, even if earlier I had found them somewhat boring. And secondly, I would feel a sense of comfort, almost a sense of peace, come over me. It seemed a little bizarre, but so far it wasn’t causing people to sacrifice their organs for me.

The feeling of peace was probably just a sense of relaxation. 

Whatever it was, naming other people’s emotions seemed to help me focus on them more and it made talking to them more pleasant. I had no idea, of course, if other people who tried this would have the same experience, or if it was true that I was building up some empathy. Someone would have to do a study on it to find out. But I didn’t expect anyone to devote research time to studying such a cockeyed idea. On the other hand...

Table of Contents

Introduction xiii

Part 1 Relating Is Everything

Chapter 1 Relating: It's the Cake 3

Chapter 2 Theater Games with Engineers 21

Chapter 3 The Heart and Head of Communication 31

Chapter 4 The Mirror Exercise 42

Chapter 5 Observation Games 53

Chapter 6 Making It Clear and Vivid 64

Chapter 7 Reading Minds: Helen Riess and Matt Lerner 69

Chapter 8 Teams 83

Chapter 9 Total Listening Starts with Where They Are 94

Chapter 10 Listening, from the Boardroom to the Bedroom 108

Chapter 11 Training Doctors to Have More Empathy 135

Part 2 Getting Better at Reading Others

Chapter 12 My Life As a Lab Rat 153

Chapter 13 Working Alone on Building Empathy 173

Chapter 14 Dark Empathy 184

Chapter 15 Reading the Mind of the Reader 197

Chapter 16 Teaching and the Flame Challenge 205

Chapter 17 Emotion Makes It Memorable 225

Chapter 18 Story and the Brain 241

Chapter 19 Commonality 265

Chapter 20 Jargon and the Curse of Knowledge 275

Chapter 21 The Improvisation of Daily Life 288

Acknowledgments 295

Index 299

Editorial Reviews

04/03/2017
Veteran actor and director Alda (Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself) turns his attention to the world of social science in this breezy overview of work conducted at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York. Citing the center’s research, he explains how improvisational games, empathy exercises, and storytelling tools can help anyone get better at communicating, listening, and relating everywhere “from the boardroom to the bedroom.” Though widely associated with his role on the TV show MASH, Alda also hosted Scientific American Frontiers on PBS for 11 years, and he writes as enthusiastically about his experience with educational programming as he does about the scientists who teach the art of empathy to autistic children and medical doctors, among other subjects. Readers expecting healthy doses of Alda’s signature dry wit, however, might be disappointed. Other than a riff about his dentist and the occasional throwaway joke, he’s all business here. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (June)

Publishers Weekly

“Alan Alda is a man with a mission. He began with a passion to help scientists communicate with a lay audience, then realized that the skills and insights of improv that he’d learned as an actor could be transformative for everyone for whom communication is essential. And that is who will find his book invaluable: everyone.”—Deborah Tannen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of You’re the Only One I Can Tell and You Just Don’t Understand

“Alda’s curiosity, intelligence and desire to wipe out baffled and bewildered faces make a compelling case for clarity, communication and, always, empathy.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Bright, breezy, and upbeat . . . In writing this book, Alda follows his own advice: Communicate through storytelling.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

“A swift and enjoyable journey.”—PopMatters

“Alda uses his trademark humor and a well-honed ability to get to the point, to help us all learn how to leverage the better communicator inside each of us.”—Forbes

“[Alda] was frustrated that men and women of science were not able to get their points across—to the public, the media, the government. Turned out they had never been trained to do so. So Alda set out to do something about it . . . Aided by his warm, conversational style, Alda’s message shows that the lessons also apply to the rest of us—and at a time when we could really use it.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Alan Alda breaks down the importance of face-to-face interaction in his new book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face? Alda developed this compelling conversation technique to help scientists distill down complex scientific principles for a general audience.”—Entrepreneur Magazine

“A distinguished actor and communication expert shows how to avoid ‘the snags of misunderstanding’ that plague verbal interactions between human beings. . . . A sharp and informative guide to communication.”—Kirkus Reviews

“An enlightening and thoughtful combination of shared experience and advice.”—Booklist

“In this charming, witty, and thought-provoking book, full of rich anecdotes, Alan Alda describes some of the tools of communication that he teaches in his work with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and shows how everyone—from lovers to politicians to scientists—can benefit from being better communicators.”—Lawrence M. Krauss, author of The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far

“I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand and use the art of communication. And then comes this fellow Alda—actor, interviewer, academic, and, mostly, student—who teaches me new, useable ideas. Communicating is at the heart of connectedness. Alda, with his laudable curiosity, has learned something you and I can use right now.”—Charlie Rose 

“Sit back and enjoy Alan Alda’s scientific journey of communication.”—Barbara Walters

From the Publisher

05/01/2017
Today, we have more ways to communicate than ever before, but how well are we actually communicating? As founder of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, the beloved actor and author helps researchers learn essential skills that can help them communicate their work to a wider audience. The center also trains health-care professionals, with the aim of improving their relationships with patients. It's not only scientific concepts that need clarification; the content of our daily lives can be better expressed and understood. Alda utilizes methods that he has learned at the center and through his work as an actor to explore how we can become better listeners and communicators. Drawing on a range of scientific and social science research, as well as his work in improvisation and directing, Alda outlines the steps and missteps in relating to other people in productive, meaningful ways. VERDICT Alda brings a distinct perspective with his trademark warmth and humor. As he addresses current popular themes in general nonfiction, readers can imagine his voice and expressions in recounting his experiences, making this book's content even more welcoming.—Meagan Storey, Virginia Beach

Library Journal

2017-03-15
A distinguished actor and communication expert shows how to avoid "the snags of misunderstanding" that plague verbal interactions between human beings.When Alda (Things I Overhead While Talking to Myself, 2007, etc.) first began hosting the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers in 1993, he had no idea how much the job would change his life. In the 20 years that followed, he developed an enduring fascination with "trying to figure out what makes communication work." As a TV show host who interviewed scientists and engineers, Alda became painfully aware of his own shortcomings as a communicator and how his background as an actor could help him improve. In the first section of the book, he discusses how effective communication requires listening with ears, eyes, and feelings wide open. Drawing from research, interactions with science professionals, and his work as an actor, Alda reveals how individuals who aren't "naturally good" communicators can learn to become more adept by practicing their overall relating skills. He describes activities like the "mirror exercise," in which partners observe and mimic each other's actions and speech. Not only do people learn how to focus on each other, but they also "strengthen cohesion and promote cooperation" in groups. In the second section, Alda, who founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, points out the importance of empathy in communication. He discusses, among others, an exercise that forced him to name the feelings he saw others express. Raising awareness of emotion increases empathy levels, which can trigger the release of oxytocin, the feel-good "love hormone." By adding emotion to communication, using storytelling, avoiding jargon, and eliminating the assumption that others share the same knowledge base, message senders can forge closer bonds with recipients. The book's major strength comes from Alda's choice to take an interprofessional approach and avoid offering prescriptive methods to enhance interpersonal understanding. As he writes, communication "is a dance we learn by trusting ourselves to take the leap, not by mechanically following a set of rules." A sharp and informative guide to communication.

Kirkus Reviews