No Laughing Matter: Use of humour in lectures

We were asked to come up with the best and worst examples of lecturing, either our own or those we’ve attended. Clearly my lectures are textbook examples of tertiary content delivery and probably deserve prizes (worth a try). So I thought back to when I was the recipient of lectures (a long time ago). But since I went to a research focussed university in the mid 90’s where teaching was at best seen as a chore, the quality was fairly universally m’eh. There was, however, one standout lecturer who I still remember, and not because of the content, something to do with action potentials in nerve cells (holy moly I remembered something), but because of his delivery style. Each lecture had a carefully crafted hilarious diversion (normally about walking in the Alps). This in turn got me thinking about using humour in lectures, which I try, and sometimes succeed, to do. Here are some tips:

1.       Simple is best. You don’t need to be Jonathan Swift to get a laugh out of 200 bored undergrads. To be honest, most of the jokes I use work as well with primary school audiences as they do with postgraduates (particularly my carefully curated library of pictures of snot). My most successful joke uses the power of slide animation to transform “B for boring cells” into “B for brilliant cells”, this even gets applause! But beware, jokes, if they work, disrupt the flow and it can take a couple of minutes to settle the room afterwards.

2.       Context is important. Students are not necessarily expecting humour and so may not process it as such. When, in a fit of pique, I told one cohort that their dissertations needed to be handwritten and have the first letter illustrated by monks, the course organiser had a busy afternoon reassuring them that this wasn’t the case.

3.       Be culturally aware. Most jokes work because of some common ground, knowledge or experience; which the students may not have in common with you. Age in particular is a big barrier. I started working at Imperial before most of the current students were born, so my references to pop culture often draw blank looks. I once told a PhD student that “I love it when a plan comes together” and they looked confused, apparently unaware of the wisdom of Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith.

4.       Visual jokes work, but can take time. I love cartoons and have tried to use them from a range of sources (Piled higher and deeper, sketching science and @redpenblackpen all being favourites). But cartoons take time to read - don’t just flash them up and expect instant gratification. Memes work better: since they come with a preloaded meaning, they tick the shared common ground box. They can even be educational – if Boromir is saying it, it must be true.

5.       Align with teaching. One does not simply throw in a joke and expect it to work: you need to link the joke to the content. Humour can be memorable, but it can divert memory away from what you are trying to teach. This is why 20 years later I can remember my physiology lecturer but not my physiology lectures. I managed perfect joke-content alignment once, by tenuously linking UKIP, Brexit and the EU to T cell immunology. 3 years later, the students came up and said they remembered my lecture from the first year – both the joke and the concept.

On the whole, humour is a useful tool, but there needs to be a thread, however unlikely between the learning objectives and the laughter.

This article first appeared in Times Higher Education

Turn off your e-mail and social media to get more done

Distractions are a fundamental aspect of the modern world, but we don’t have to become hermits to avoid them.

We are all busy, seemingly all the time, with a never-ending stream of e-mails to answer and meetings to attend. But are there better ways to do busy? Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work (Piatkus, 2016), says “yes”. Here’s what I’ve learnt from him.

Newport argues that, in the new world of work, the only thing we have to sell is our capacity to think rather than our capacity to do. But this ability to think does not come naturally or easily, and, unfortunately, the interconnected world that we live in throws big barriers in the way of big thinking.

Newport spends a lot of time exploring this point in Deep Work. But I suspect you need look no further than your swollen e-mail inbox or your back-to-back schedule to see that your precious time is being frittered away. And that is not counting social media, which has many ways to make us dumber: how many times have you lost a great idea, distracted by that little red Facebook notification?

The solution

Fortunately, Newport has a number of evidence-based ‘life hacks’ to combat this. Fundamentally, they come down to one thing: remove all distractions. You might think you are already doing this by turning off your phone occasionally. But you need to go further: don’t just turn off your phone; put it in a lead-lined box and bury it at the bottom of the ocean. Quit all social media. Isolate yourself from all modern life. Smash the Wi-Fi router. Move to a small island. Then, and only then, through a state of pure asceticism, might you get some work done.

However, this perfect state of deep thought might not necessarily be achievable if you want to keep your job, in which case some of the following suggestions might enable you to get the most out of your brain.

E-mail better

Shake the habit. E-mail is the worst attention thief. It has myriad means of misdirection, from the on-screen pop-up, to the envelope icon, to the alluring bold font in the unread e-mail folder. There is some ‘brain reward centre’ stuff happening with e-mail — it tells you that you are important and wanted, even if it is only an invite to write for a “presgitious new jorunal” [sic]. The easiest way to limit e-mail’s impact is to turn it off completely.

Burst transmission. That said, you still need to be in touch with the outside world. I try to limit myself to bursts. I can sustain focus for about 50 minutes, after which I reward myself with 5 minutes of e-mail, which inevitably turns into 10. No, this is not perfect and yes, resetting after 10 minutes is tricky, but it is much more effective than having the e-mail monkey on your back for the whole day.

Short and sweet. E-mail overload is universal and often exponential. ‘CC alls’, imprecise e-mails leading to immediate clarification and e-mail ‘tennis’ while trying to settle on a date all add to this burden. Making your e-mails concise and final means everyone wins. For example, instead of suggesting a time to meet, send a calendar invite directly. One question I don’t have the answer to is when to say ‘thank you’, balancing the need not to upset someone with not getting stuck in a further round of acknowledgment and counter-acknowledgement. Send better e-mail and ye shall receive better e-mail.

Do it later. E-mail is an insatiable beast; it feels like it needs immediate action: it doesn’t. Scan read, flag things for later and do it in batches.

Not now

Batching non-essential tasks can be applied to more than e-mail. I’ve found there is no way to stop the random thoughts coming, but it is possible to reduce their derailing impact. If a thought crops up, I scribble it onto a Post-it note and then batch busy work into times of the day when I am normally less productive.

Find a space

Your shared office maintained at slightly the wrong temperature, next door to a chatty neighbour with a penchant for pickled fish, might not be the ideal place to achieve the Zen of deep work. Try working elsewhere: libraries, cafes, at home. I get a surprising amount of writing done on the train to work — an added benefit of London commuters not talking to each other.

But it is not just about work. Making your brain better is more than 9 to 5. The Internet has invaded our lives to the extent that we cannot switch off. And you might argue that it is just downtime, but the habit of endlessly checking devices leads to a loop of inattention and a dilution of focus during working hours.

A lot of a scientist’s job relies on creativity, which in turn relies upon your subconscious doing some of the work. But it can’t do this when overloaded with cat videos, envious thoughts about your friends’ self-reported quality of life and pictures of someone else’s lunch. Stepping back from social and work media after certain times of day both help.

More radically, aspire to be bored. Put your phone away and if you have five spare seconds, keep them spare. Being click-baited to generate advertising income for unscrupulous publishers doesn’t do any good to you or the world.

Health warning

At the beginning of the summer, I tried the full ‘academic monk’ thing and failed. There were some mitigating circumstances for my lack of focus, but then again I’m sure there will be next summer, and the summer after that.

Clearing your head has clear benefits: better productivity; being more present with friends and family; brilliant ideas. It is also slightly addictive in itself — achieving deep focus and really working through a problem is intensely satisfying. We’re all working hard enough. It’s time to work smarter.

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community.

What are science?

Apparently we all fucking love science, or at least we love pretty pictures, anecdotal facts, chemical explosions and slightly preachy environmentalism.

However, science is none of these things. Science is the generation and testing of ideas; normally disproving them, in the process generating more ideas that need more testing.

Science junkies

Sadly, the day job of a scientist is nothing like the programs ‘Bang goes the theory/Tomorrow’s World/Johnny Ball Reveals All’ (delete as appropriate depending on your generation): in my 20 years being a professional scientist, there has been no time at work when I have blown anything up, thrown heavy weights into bowls of custard or put Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke.
To be honest, blowing things up at work is frowned upon and the management go to some lengths to prevent us blowing up the building (just another example of health and safety gone mad).
Highly visual demonstrations of chemical reactions are educational if phrased properly – if I do this, what do you think will happen and why? And these demonstrations can be effective for attracting the impressionable to a life of science. In effect, flashy chemical reactions are the gateway drug to scientific addiction.
At school we had a teacher who once a term gave us unrestricted access to the chemical store and a Bunsen burner; I imagined this was what it would be to be a scientist. Nowadays I don’t even get to do experiments, and yet I identify more as a scientist now than when I was doing my PhD as a space-filler before getting a “real job”.

Indoor work, no heavy lifting

So if the day-to-day of science isn’t setting things on fire, what is it?
It is immensely varied, and depends upon both the stage of your scientific career and the field you work in. But the main work of science is testing ideas. Some of which involves being in a lab, but most of which involves sitting in an office analysing the results from your experiments or coming up with new ideas because your experiments haven’t turned out as expected.
Since 99% of these ideas come from other people, another major strand is evaluating other people’s ideas and building on the back of them. And since other people need to evaluate the ideas we have, we need to be able to effectively communicate them, as written articles (papers), as sales pitches (grants) or in person (conferences).
So disappointingly, the day to day work of science is not so far removed from other professions, though we do get to wear a white coat occasionally. You need to be able to read, to write and, terrifyingly, interact with other people – very much none of the things that got most of us into science in the first place.

No researcher is too junior to fix science

Here is an article from Nature about how we can work together to improve science

https://www.nature.com/news/no-researcher-is-too-junior-to-fix-science-1.21928

How will you judge me if not by Impact Factor

Here is an article I wrote for Nature on the lack of clarity about replacing impact factor

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05467-5

From Parade ground to PI

Here is a piece I wrote for Science on how being an officer in the British Army reserve helped prepare me to run a lab

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6373/362

Flu and our poo

There are various outlandish estimates about the numbers of bacterial cells there are on your body compared to the number of your own cells. Wikipedia informs me that current guestimates put it at a 10:1 ratio, with approximately 100 trillion bacterial cells per adult human; which is the kind of number that a stressed scientist makes up when the answer “I don’t know but it’s feckin’ loads” won’t suffice. Our guts are particularly rich in bacteria, and it is estimated that 30% of every poo is dead bacteria. We don’t really know for certain what all these bacteria do, quite a lot of them are probably just along for the ride living off dead skin cells and sweat. But there is a small proportion of these bacteria that we rely upon for all kinds of useful things, like breaking down our food properly, training our immune system and fighting off the bacteria that make us sick. Finally there is another group of bacteria that are just waiting in the wings to cause infection, often pouncing when we are at stressed or tired.

Collectively the bacteria that live on or in us are referred to as the microbiota and the ecological communities that they make up are called the microbiome. Our knowledge of this superficial (using its proper meaning of at the surface) second life has exploded in the last decade, mainly because of our ability to read DNA cheaply and easily. There has been a huge number of studies that have reported a link between our bacterial fellow travellers and a huge range of body functions. Some of which make some sense as the bacteria at least live at the same site as the disease including obesity, diabetes, asthma and tooth decay and some that require a more conceptual leap including mental health and autoimmunity. These links have also led to some outlandish ideas for new therapies, including faecal transplant (which is almost precisely what it sounds like) to reduce gut bacterial infection and ‘vaginal seeding’ of C-section babies.

Now that I have mentioned the obligatory facts about the microbiome – it outnumbers us, it has something to do with health and people are utilising it for weird therapies – I can concentrate on what we did in our recent paper. Given the myriad associations between the microbiota and health/ disease it is important to understand what shapes these bacterial communities. In particular we wanted to know if infection at one site, the lung, would change the bacteria at another, the gut. We looked at two important respiratory pathogens, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza. Following lung infection, we observed a transient but significant change in the bacteria present in the guts.

One of the offshoots of studying the microbiome is that you need to learn (or relearn) your Linnean classifications (which for those of you that can’t remember go Domain-Kingdom-Phylum-Order-Family-Genus-Species: so for example humans are Animals-Chordates-Mammals-Primates-Hominids-Homo-Homo sapiens). We saw a shift in the bacterial phyla with a big decrease in the Firmicutes phyla and an increase in the Bacteroidetes phyla. Further subdividing within these phyla we saw a decrease in the Lactobacillaceae family and an increase in the Bacteroidaceae family. More strikingly, when we analysed at an approximation to the species level, we saw different species profiles with each experimental repeat. This suggested that lung infection wasn’t specifically affecting one or two species, rather it was changing the gut environment in such a way that one phyla of bacteria (the Bacteroidetes) would benefit at the cost of another (the Firmicutes). This change was acute and transient and by the time the mice had recovered from infection, their microbiome had also recovered.

Like most of science, this study acts as a starting point, asking more questions than it answers. What does it all mean? Frankly your guess is as good as ours. There is some suggestion that Lactobacillus are ‘good bacteria’, mostly from Yoghurt manufacturers who are trying to claim that a fruity, milk-based pudding is in some way good for you. One speculation is that if the bugs in our gut produce things we need to be healthy, lung infection, by disrupting the gut microbiome, may amplify sickness. But we would need to replace the ‘good’ Firmicutes and see an improvement of disease outcome to demonstrate this. Why is this happening? Again, we don’t have an answer. We had one tantalising result, which was that there was an increase in proteins associated with airway mucus in the guts, which occurred at the peak of point of bacterial change. Many of the bacteria in the Bacteroidetes phyla can utilise mucus as an energy source and so the swallowed mucus may support their growth. As I type, we are following up on both of these questions – so stay tuned and we might just have the answers, or more likely more questions!