Umm…well this is going to sound silly, but I was actually not terribly well-trained as a scientist in college; I was much more of the social science type, so I actually never took any chemistry or physics in college and don't have a very good fundamental grounding. So I am easily panicked in my science and I think thus I can easily imagine more readily than most people in my position how somebody else can be. I think sort of pedagogically where that came about: during grad school I wound up in a grad school that didn’t have an undergraduate college—it was just a research institute—so we didn't have to do the TAing stuff that grad students do here, and thought that was probably a bad thing sort of professionally, so I figured out a way to sneak off and moonlight, I was in New York at a place called The New School for Social Research, where they kind of hired me to moonlight on the side, and it like totally violated my fellowship and I had to like sneak off out the back way from my university and stuff. And right around time there was this fashion institute in New York called Parsons School of Design that had just lost their academic accreditation—which it turned out to be, like, decades after that probably should have happened—and they decided, they went out and like shut out all their tenured non-design faculty and they forced their students to go over to The New School to take their courses. And there was a science requirement and I was like offered one of the two science courses at the New School, so I would get these classes full of these unbelievably hostile, phobic, teeny-bopper textile designers, and this forced an enormous pressure to be clear, and to have a good sense as to when people are about to go berserk with too many terms and stuff and like when you have to stop and give an anecdote or metaphor or something, so I think in retrospect it was actually very good training. I know every one of those people is now a chief of neurosurgery at a major medical center.

Robert Sapolsky