Daniel Engber: Distracting Mark Cuban
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2014
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Daniel Engber risks derailing his PhD by constant daydreaming, until his neuroscience research gives him a idea that will revolutionize the NBA. Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate.com and Popular Science, and a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He has appeared on Radiolab, All Things Considered and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and received the National Academies of Science Communication Award in 2012 and the Sex-Positive Journalism Award in 2008. His work has been anthologized in The Best of Technology Writing and The Best of Slate.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.9 | Is NYU a scientist the... |
| 0:06.6 | I felt... |
| 0:07.4 | I was so... |
| 0:08.7 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:09.6 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.8 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:26.8 | Hey, everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. Quick reminder, we have a show coming up August 13th in New York. |
| 0:32.9 | This week's story is from Daniel Engber. The story was recorded in July 2014 at Littlefield in Brooklyn. |
| 0:40.2 | So the science of sports. I'm not particularly good at sports, but I am particularly bad at |
| 0:48.7 | science. I was a grad student in neuroscience. I was a particularly bad grad student in neuroscience studying the neuroscience of motor control in humans and in cats. |
| 1:00.0 | And the reason I was bad, or one of the reasons I was bad, is that I was kind of a daydreamer. |
| 1:05.0 | And I know it's true that there are many great scientists, Nobel Prize winning scientists who were daydreamers. |
| 1:11.6 | I read once that Alexander Fleming would take breaks from doing his research and he would take this |
| 1:17.6 | wire metal loop and he would drag it through microbes that bloom different colors and smear it on agar plates |
| 1:24.6 | and he'd sort of make these multicolored paintings and petri dishes. And then |
| 1:28.3 | he found this wonderful pigment one day, this brilliant blue-green fungus that was penicillium. |
| 1:35.1 | But I was not that kind of daydreamer. I was like sort of distractible, didn't do his work, |
| 1:42.0 | did a lot of surfing the web when he should have been doing experiments, |
| 1:44.7 | that kind of thing. And one day when I was in the lab, I was kind of daydreaming about something |
| 1:50.2 | that happened the night before. The night before I had gone to Oakland to see a basketball game, |
| 1:54.1 | I'd seen a Golden State Warriors game. And I'd noticed in the game that whenever one of the |
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