Active communication between researchers and society is necessary for the scientific community's involvement in developing sciencebased policies. This need is recognized by governmental and funding agencies that compel scientists to increase their public engagement and disseminate research findings in an accessible fashion. Storytelling techniques can help convey science by engaging people's imagination and emotions. Yet, many researchers are uncertain about how to approach scientific storytelling, or feel they lack the tools to undertake it. Here we explore some of the techniques intrinsic to crafting scientific narratives, as well as the reasons why scientific storytelling may be an optimal way of communicating research to nonspecialists. We also point out current communication gaps between science and society, particularly in the context of neurodiverse audiences and those that include neurological and psychiatric patients. Present shortcomings may turn into areas of synergy with the potential to link neuroscience education, research, and advocacy.
B y the early 1920s, an unlikely pair-a powerful national newspaper publisher and a Californiabased zoologist-decided that they'd had enough. Enough of half-baked reporting on research results, enough of stories that left readers confused about even the basic principles of science. They wanted something better. They wanted reporting that encouraged a "scientific habit of mind," a citizenry aware of the role of research in everyday life.However unlikely, the alliance between Edward Willis Scripps, founder of one of America's largest newspaper chains, and Harvard-trained zoologist William Emerson Ritter, ran deep. The two men shared a belief in science as the new century's most powerful transformative agentand also a belief that scientists were doing a poor job of communicating this. By April 1921, they'd decided on a solution, a venture called Science Service, which would be dedicated to providing smart and positive science stories to the public. The organization they formed a century ago would grow into Society for Science, publisher of Science News. True science journalism-independent inquiry into the scientific enterprise and the illumination of research with all its wonderfully complex human interactions-would come much later. But with the founding of Science Service, a new profession did take its first steps, albeit somewhat stumbling ones.Although scientific societies and organizations supported the new service, researchers themselves remained wary of the often flamboyant journalism of the early 20th century. In 1934, a dozen American science writers formed a National Association of Science Writers, in part to build better relationships with their wary sources, promoting it as a way to identify elite, science-savvy writers from the other journalistic riff-raff. Boyce Rensberger, a former director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, once described this alliance between scientists and journalists as the beginning of the "Gee Whiz" period of science journalism, one that he believed led directly to embarrassing fan-boy coverage of the development of nuclear weapons and the post-World War II arms race.As Rensberger and others also note, the profession reluctantly let that model go. Science writers were sometimes downright hostile when faced with the environmental downsides of technological development that appeared during the 1960s: air pollution, water pol-
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