A Note From The Author

Hello friends and readers, it’s been a while. I wanted to write sooner, but I’ve been in crisis-mode at work since the end of February, when the drumbeat of news about COVID-19 spreading across the Western Hemisphere was growing louder.

At the science museum, we acted quickly and chose to use the coronavirus crisis as a science teaching moment. We moved to develop an exhibition about viruses, and in the course of a week, (an unheard of pace in non-profit years) a small team of us quickly developed, printed, and installed a series of informative panels. The most difficult part of this process was sourcing accurate rapidly changing information from all over the globe (back in February, daily scientific reports on COVID-19 were coming primarily from Europe and China).

Cue the back-and-forth with our on-staff scientists – long-winded explanations about the nuances of viral protein structure, and even more long-winded responses as to why we couldn’t bog our visitors down with those details. The resulting exhibit is about viruses, how they spread, and what’s special about COVID-19 – and you can view it here. We made it available online in English and Spanish as soon as we realized the physical museum would be shut to visitors for over a year while it became clear the crisis was farther reaching than we could have anticipated. If you’ll remember, Corona, Queens, was the “epicenter of the epicenter” of the global coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020. Talk about coincidental nomenclature.

I first sat down to begin planning how I would personally write about and cover COVID-19 at the end of March as if I were a working science journalist. To be honest, as soon as I did, I became overwhelmed by the frightening uncertainties of the virus entangled with the unstable future of my home in New York City. I needed to step back and process the situation before I could write about it without bias. I know many others have felt the same vulnerability, fear, and sadness in the last few months, for a plethora of their own personal reasons.

Even since that moment in the end of March, so much has changed (and continues to, such as recently finding out I’ll be working remotely for over a year while tackling the dismantling of systemic racism within the museum and science fields). But one thing continues to ring true. These last three months have affirmed my conviction that doing what I love – writing about science and how it’s communicated – is more important now than ever. In 2020 this blog will remain in the same format (namely the TLDR; for why you should care), but the topics will be more timely than ever. And boy, is there an ocean of new content for me to dive into and dissect. Let’s dive in!

Your Biggest Communication Barrier at Work is Physical

Imagine this scenario in a team-building workshop: You’re a leader, standing face-to-face with me, one of your team members. You’re holding a mallet, and I’m holding a metal clothes hanger and a piece of string. I tie the string evenly around the top of the hanger, curl the remaining lengths of the string around my index fingers, and put my fingers in my ears. You then bang the hanger with the mallet, which emanates a dull noise, and I look up at you and smile in surprise.

If it seems like an unusual scenario, it’s meant to be. What I just described is an experiential activity designed to help you communicate better (and more effectively) with others by harnessing the language of the body, using a method called “embodied learning.”

Body Language is the Universal Language

Think about it – everything you learned as a child, you learned using your body. The five senses, spatial awareness, and imagination were the tools you used to navigate your environment. As we grow up, we limit our own bodily awareness by secluding into our minds, shunning physicality in favor of verbal communication. That is where we are stunting our human potential!

When I first directly experienced embodied learning from performance artist Tommaso Lana who runs a company by the same name, I knew I had to write about this powerful way of learning that was already built into us. As a science communicator I was intrigued because in my professional experience, body language can be more telling than words (the days of running studies at MIT aren’t too different from managing interns at NYSCI.)

If you type “embodied learning” into Google, you’ll get ambiguous definitions because it encompasses lots of different theories, from psychology to fitness to behavioral science. Some related scientific buzzwords include “somatic intelligence” and “meditation” – which are two plausible methods of embodied learning that embrace the core idea that bringing awareness to the body can help stimulate new or underlying thought processes.

Tommaso’s approach to embodied learning is different than meditation or brain-training. It’s not a solo journey on a long path to self-discovery. It’s fun, collaborative, nimble and immediately applicable to the workplace, and that’s why it stuck out to me. I’ve learned that in 60 seconds of observing my colleagues’ body language, I can learn more about how they operate compared to working with them over email for 60 days.

Communication = Collaboration = Success

The first step in embodied learning is understanding this key message: Each of us has a different perspective of our inner and outer worlds, and that perspective influences our behavior. At work, we all aspire to be more inclusive and collaborative. But collaboration only works when one person understands the other and can find successful compromises, and compromise only works if every party feels included and heard.

Think back to the mallet and hanger activity I first described. The mallet gives you a position of leadership in that scenario – you control the noise as I wait for your action. Therefore, as my supervisor, it’s up to you to infer any of my non-verbal communication in the moment. Did I rush to tie the string around the hanger unevenly, or take measured steps to assure perfection? Did I signify that I heard something different than you, or did I mimic your muted response?

Without “embodying” my perspective, you probably expected that I heard the same thing as you did, when in fact, I heard an entirely different noise than you. These are unconscious expectations, and can be hazardous points of communication breakdown in the workplace when a manager is unaware of how they influence others around them.

You can learn to reset your unconscious expectations by tapping into complete self-awareness through embodied learning. Actively combining your mental intelligence with your senses allows you to learn how and why decisions are being made (is your colleague a snap-decision-maker, or a patient list-checker type?). Each of Tommaso’s workshop experiences is designed to create a somatic memory of using your body to collaborate with another person, so that team-building and self-awareness training occur simultaneously.

Science-Backed Tools for the Senses

While there is no field of science dedicated to embodied learning (yet!), we can build a strong case in support of it. Numerous cross-discipline scientific studies over the years have demonstrated that non-verbal communication is equally as important as word choice. Cognitive scientists have demonstrated that the brain recognizes when verbal and non-verbal cues don’t match up. Tommaso’s work is built on these scientific concepts and is applicable in the corporate environment, the educational environment and the elder care environment (learn more on his website, Embodied Learning).

Professor Amanda Blake – an international expert in embodied learning and behavior – calls the body our “social and emotional sense organ.” The ability to use the body for social and emotional sensing is a learned skill; a skill that can be mindfully nurtured through a practice rooted in a little bit of cognitive science, a little bit of psychology, and a dash of professional development. 

Through my personal experience with embodied learning, I developed a sense of self-awareness I can literally feel in my bones. It’s now easier for me to understand the root of a complex situation, own my knowledge and carve a path forward.

Embodied learning gives you the tools you need to succeed with other people in work and in life. It’s up to you to apply them to become to best leader you can be. 

All Photos: Ivan Nikolov. Courtesy: Tommaso Lana, Embodied Learning

Science Summarized: Original Research on Food Allergies

In a past life, before science communications, I was a scientist who did actual experiments in a lab. While doing said science at MIT, I had the privilege of being able to design and run my own study on a topic that’s important to me and millions of other people — food allergies. The final paper was presented today by my friend and colleague Hillary Abraham at the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting. You can read it in full here.

As a food allergy sufferer myself, I’m happy that in recent years, food allergies have been getting more attention and legitimate support from the medical and scientific community. And it’s a huge group to pay attention to -- 15 million Americans have food allergies that result in over 30,000 annual hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths following accidental consumption of an allergen.

One reason for this is because in the US, there are limited federal standards for companies to follow when labeling allergens in food products (the FDA's food labeling guide is particularly long and convoluted). Products need to list the common name of the allergen in the ingredients, but most font types, colors, and additional warnings are up to the manufacturer. That means some products might have no explicit warning, or have additional warnings that a product “contains” an allergen. Furthermore a food company might voluntarily choose to warn consumers that the product might have been cross-contaminated, but they aren’t mandated by law to do so.

This lack of a standard labeling practice results in extremely varied food labels, some of which are easier to read than others, and makes grocery shopping a serious pain in the butt for those of us with allergies. One study found that among 98 food products with cross-contamination warnings, there were 25 different phrases! The only advice for allergy sufferers is to read “every label, every time” according to the Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE). Unfortunately there has been little to no research on if the advice from FARE is faster, easier or more effective with certain kinds of labels -- until now.

Our study specifically focused on nut allergies, with the original question being: Do certain typographic styles affect people’s ability to correctly identify allergens in food? But after I spent a dozen hours in grocery stores choosing products to include in the experimental design, I realized that there was no way to control for the variability across each manufacturer’s different choices on label typography. Some products had a big red allergen section while others only included them in the small black ingredients list — a list that sometimes felt longer than this article as I was reading every label on every product in aisle 12 of the Cambridge Stop & Shop.

The study ultimately evolved into an analysis of how much time it would take a potentially nut-allergic consumer to correctly determine if a product is safe for consumption or not by analyzing the food label. Participants (who had no known food allergies) were asked to imagine as if they were grocery shopping for someone with a nut allergy. They were video recorded as they randomly selected products, and gave a verbal yes/no in regard to whether or not the food was safe to eat.

The results showed that participants had difficulty and took a longer amount of time to correctly identify allergens if the packaging only listed the allergen in the ingredients list or had a confusing cross-contamination statement. If a product had a clearly defined and obviously labeled allergen statement, participants tended to answer more rapidly and correctly. However, safe products without a “nut-free” label took the longest to identify as safe, and were most often classified inaccurately - better safe than sorry! In a post-experiment questionnaire, participants self-reported that aesthetic challenges of the packaging made it difficult to read ingredients, such as glossy packaging, low contrast, small font, and inconsistent labelling practices. They reported feeling empathetic towards allergy sufferers who had to read “every label, every time.” Given these results, it’s safe to say we need more research on how additional typographic factors affect accurate classification.

Ultimately with this study, I hoped to draw attention to the lack of standardization in US allergen warning labels and how high of a burden it creates for allergy sufferers. Adding symbols that let shoppers know a product is free from allergens could dramatically reduce shopping time and energy spent looking for an allergen that isn’t in the product. More importantly, a consistent warning label scheme might reduce the risk of accidental exposure to allergens, potentially leading to fewer related emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths. Better labels could save lives, while saving the healthcare system money -- seems like a win for everyone involved.

Science Summarized: From One Cell to Many

I came across a lengthy article published last month on Science that went deep into the biology of a question I’ve always been personally curious about: how did the rudimentary unicellular life of the past (and present) evolve into the complex multicellular life that now dominates the planet? I found the piece fascinating and thought you might as well, so staying true to the name of this blog, I’ve summarized it below.

Original Piece: "The momentous transition to multicellular life may not have been so hard after all" by Elizabeth Pennisi for Science.

Science Summarized: Until recently, we didn’t really know how single-celled organisms transitioned into multi-celled organisms, even though multicellularity has been in fashion for a long time (fossil evidence of multicellular algae dates back ~2-3 billion years).

Scientists have come to three main conclusions thanks to recent advances and discoveries in the fields of genetics, cell biology, animal development and evolutionary biology:

1. Organisms have been evolving for billions of years. Single- and multi-celled organisms have long shared the same basic cellular machinery, and can over time reprogram their genes to change that machinery to develop multicellular capabilities as needed.

2. Multicellularity can evolve quickly. The biological processes needed for multicellularity to flourish can evolve relatively quickly -- new experiments suggest only a few hundred generations (that’s quick in biological time!)

3. Change is not “one and done”. Some organisms have made the transition more than once in their history of being alive, for example, some fungi have unicellular and multicellular siblings.

The experiments that led to these conclusions are a little science-heavy, unless you can say “Chlamydomonas” five times fast. Some highlights include:

• Genes previously thought to be exclusive to multicellular organisms are also found in unicellular ones (and vice versa); one scientist found that an ancient unicellular organism both looked similar to and had the same genes as the cells that make up the inside of a sea sponge, which regarded to be the oldest multicellular organism on Earth, suggesting that evolutionary link.

• Single-celled organisms are capable of gene regulation -- meaning they can turn on and turn off genes as needed in order to survive-- something previously thought to be exclusive to those of us endowed with multiple cells.

• A single gene mutation can lead to multicellularity; scientists saw it over and over again with individual yeast cells that were specifically bred to create multicellular structures with specialized cell roles, which went on to spur more multicellular yeast structures.

• Cells get more complicated as time goes on; once you go multicellular, you don’t go back.

However, two major mysteries are still being debated.

The first unknown is why it took so long for multicellularity to become prevalent, given the new data. The answer might have to do with oxygen levels on a young Earth and the difficulty of evolving complex gene regulation. The second unknown is what was driving this transition. We still don’t know what caused life to make the multicellular jump in the first place.

All of this is evidence that shapes our understanding of how we, humans, got here.

And the evidence is pointing towards it being a series of small steps rather than a giant genetic leap towards multicellularity. We’re moving towards a more complete understanding about how life on our planet (and perhaps other planets?) evolved.

The image above is captioned and credited on Science as: “To study developing multicellular animals, students at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, apply various stains. In juvenile squid (Loligo pealei) they reveal muscle (red), hairlike cilia (green), and cell nuclei (blue).” Wang Chi Lau/Embryology Course at the Marine BIological Laboratory.