Your Audience Knows Nothing

You could be the smartest person in the world, but, if you keep that knowledge to yourself, your intelligence will be wasted. One of the great challenges of obtaining knowledge is the communication of said knowledge. Our educational system acknowledges this challenge with curriculum focused on different methods of communication. Students learn to write narratives to communicate fictional ideas, construct research papers to communicate data, and give presentations to persuade an audience. If scientists cannot share knowledge, it dies with us. Thus, it is our duty to learn what we can and then share what we learn so future generations can benefit from our work. 

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One of the most impactful lessons in communication of ideas during my educational career came during my SPCH 140, Public Communication class. In preparation for us to present the first of three speeches we would give, our professor was giving us the “do’s and don’ts” of a quality speech. She emphasized that speakers cannot make assumptions about what an audience knows or thinks. In order to effectively communicate an idea you need to break it down into simple points, explain every idea explicitly, and never assume your audience knows what you are talking about before you say it. You are the expert in the subject you are speaking on so it is your job to explain it to others. If you bereeze over information that you assume the audience knows, you run the risk of them missing the entire point of your speech. 

 

This class was also full of business majors who gave speeches on adoption, the environment, and international business practices. I was the only science major in the class giving speeches on genetic engineering and antibiotic resistance. So, in addition to fulfilling the requirements of the speech assignments, I had to overcome the scientific background barrier that separated my audience and I in order to effectively get my point across. I found that the best way to effecively explain scientific ideas to an uninformed audience was to simplify and generalize concepts in an introduction and then follow up those simplifications with the more advanced scientific information I was speaking about. 
 

Several months after this class, I was an undergraduate research assistant in a lab at Marquette University. The culmination of my research project was a presentation to the corporate executives of Promentis Pharmaceuticals. This company was using the data from the Marquette lab I worked in to develop and market a treatment for Trichilotilomainia -- a manifestation of schizophrenia and obsessive complusive disorder that causes patients to compulsively pull out their hair. The findings of my research served the company with a possible second use for their treatment on patients suffering from impulsive disorders, because the glutamate release pathway is indirectly linked to decision making and habitual behavior. Therefore, understanding how to manipulate that pathway could be crucial in treating disorders affected by glutamate release. While the Vice President of Research and Sevelopment and the scientific lieson for the lab had the background information to understand the implications of my research, the VP of Finance, VP of Marketing, chief investors, and CEO of Promentis Pharmaceuticals had no scientific context for what I was saying. 

 

In preparation for this presentation, which contained lots of charts, graphs, and data analysis, I thought back to the techniques I learned in Public Communication. Once again, I needed to communicate complex scientific data to a non-scientific audience. I had to be a chemistry professor and a research presenter. So, I started the presentation by explaining the general significance of astrocytic cells. Then, I explained the glutamate release pathway and the cognitive functions that it is linked to. After laying this foundation, I dove into the data from my project. After each data set, I reminded my audience about the significance of the data that I had presented in relation to the astrocytic glutamate release pathway. By jumping back and forth between the easy to understand concept and the complex scientific data, I was able to walk my audience through my research in a way they could all understand. At the conclusion of the presentation, I went out for lunch with the executives who expressed how impressed they were with how I was able to explain the science to them in a way that they could understand. The VP of finance told me that this was the first presentation to come out of the research lab that she was able to follow the science behind. I was thrilled because I knew I was able to create a presentation where the investors and executives all understood both my data and its contextual significance. 

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Through these experiences I learned that, in order to communicate scientific knowledge, it is best to walk through everything step by step. I also learned a technique for communicating scientific information to a non-scientific audience which is a valuable skill in research to write grant applications, give conference presentations, and to get people to care about your research. Without effective communication, the knowledge of a researcher would die with them and humanity would never reap the rewards of scientific exploration.