E Paul Zehr, University of Victoria, Canada

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.119.36

It turns out that I wasn’t really all that great at punching, in the beginning. I’d always been interested in martial arts, largely driven by my exposure to the fighting exploits of comic book superheroes like Batman, Captain America, Iron fist, Black Widow, and many other masters of martial mayhem. So I later leapt at the chance, during a family trip to Canada’s Arctic in the summer of 1978 to visit my sister, when I had the opportunity to beg one of her friends (a black belt in some martial art I’ve since forgotten) to teach me how to punch and block. Of course at that time of leaping I had no idea that my first lesson in martial arts would take me into a career in science. Nor that one day I would combine science, superheroes, and education (with a dash of martial arts thrown in, of course). 

Everybody’s got an origin story

I’ve always been fascinated with martial arts. In comics, movies, and TV shows the fights seemed pretty cool to me in my formative years (which continue anon). Usually the fights were centred around the idea of helping someone. Good versus evil. At a very early age I had a feeling that I wanted to do something in my life that would help other people. From the beginning, then, there was already a bit of a connection for the dissemination of knowledge and empowerment. 

Once I truly began to study martial arts in earnest, which was several years after my Arctic experience, I became fascinated by the changes that were happening in my body and the skills and abilities I was beginning to acquire. I was enchanted by adaptive plasticity and that charm is how I got into science. Initially I was motivated to understand what was happening to my body, brain and muscles with all the training I was doing, in the skills and abilities I saw emerging in myself and already present in my teachers. It got me fascinated about the wonders of the human body and the seductive science of physiology. This led me to exercise physiology and biomechanics and eventually neuroscience. My first few publications were actually about physiology and karate. 

The second act 

Eventually I started my own lab and continued my scientific journey as many professors do. I got grants, mentored trainees, published papers, and taught courses. But eventually I began to question the extent of the impact I was having in society. I thought about the legacy I might leave once I retired. How many people would I truly have helped? 

Please don’t misunderstand me. Much of my work focuses on rehabilitation applications of neuroscience discoveries to help people and my papers are reasonably well-cited. I’m grateful for the scientists and clinician who read and cite my work. 

Today I have more than 6000 citations of my work and am doing fine on all the “metrics” we use (including the superhero-sounding H-index). So it’s not like I was having no impact, but to truly have a broad impact in society takes a different kind of effort and a different approach. My books have tens of thousands of readers, and my related blog posts at magazines like Psychology Today and Scientific American have millions of page views. 

It’s this difference in impact and discomfort in my contribution to society that started me on the very journey I had questioned. This journey saw me embrace Batman and his superhero compatriots Iron Man, Batgirl, Captain America, and others to engage the public in scientific knowledge and especially a fascination with physiology. 

Did you hear the one about the scientist and the superhero? 

People like stories. They like access points to concepts, niches and nuances that they know a little bit about to make them feel comfortable to learn or engage in something else that is new and possibly a bit threatening. When we’re going to talk about science, which inherently has complex and often foreign ideas for many minds, providing some comfort as a bridging mechanism is a useful idea. 

At the time I wrote my first book Becoming Batman, superheroes were not nearly as mainstream as they are now. But I thought then that popular culture was the right way to go if I wanted to disseminate science as widely as possible. I had a feeling that superheroes were soon to enter the mainstream in a big way and decided to combine my passions and use superheroes as metaphors, as vehicles for mass transportation of information, to communicate science to the wider public. 

What I started doing at the time and have continued since is to embrace popular culture as a method of disseminating information widely. Hey, it is called popular for a reason! If we really want to effectively communicate something to a large group we need to understand the way that group can best be placed to understand what we’re trying to say. That includes not just how we’re saying what we want to say, but the stories which we use to convey and communicate science generally. 

I was inspired by Carl Sagan’s “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” and I read books about science and popular culture like Jim Kakalios’ “Physics of Superheroes” and Laurence Krauss “Physics of Star Trek”. Then I wrote books about Batman (2008), Iron Man (2011), and Captain America (2018) to explore the science behind transforming humans into super humans. Whether by physical training, in the story of Batman, technological integration, in the story of Iron Man, or genetic manipulation and biological engineering in the case of Captain America, these books all use the superhero backstory as a bridge to real scientific knowledge. It’s important to note that when using popular culture icons it doesn’t matter if the approach is “wrong” or right, because you are going to talk about what is the correct science. In many ways, if some example is wrong it is actually more helpful for making the points you want to highlight. 

Along the way I also wrote a book specifically for young adults, driven largely by the comments and questions I would get from the innumerable school visits and assembly presentations I gave in middle and high schools. Questions from folks asking “when are you going to write a book for us”, where “us” meant a younger audience. This audience was especially young women, since they were the ones asking all the questions! 

So in 2014 I did a fiction nonfiction hybrid book with the director and artist Kris Pearn called Project Superhero. This book used diary entries of a fictional 13 year old girl across her Grade 8 school year as she explores relationships, science, superheroes, and achieving her potential to become who she could become through effort in applied martial arts training. It’s of course largely inspired by Batgirl. It was also a dismal failure in the first draft. 

I had thought I knew about how to communicate using popular culture. After all, I had two pretty successful books under my belt already. Writing for a younger audience would be no big deal. I would just write “simpler”. My agent was fairly kind to me. She said, essentially: “Paul, I appreciate your efforts. But nobody is going to read this. An 11 year old girl is not interested in reading a book that takes an adult style and just uses smaller words and shorter sentences. You have to write what they want to read. You’ve got two daughters, right? Read what they are reading and then use that style.” That is how I learned to read all the “diary of a…” books I could find and used that style in Project Superhero. I learned a lot from this experience.

The medium is the message 

The key issue here is figuring out how to spin what you want to in a way that is both interesting to you because you’re the storyteller, but moreover must be interesting to your audience. I use superheroes, but there’s no limit on the imagination of what you could use. I strongly suggest using popular culture for the reasons outlined above, but that could mean almost anything. The key to all this, the essence, is using something that is already understood as the way to transform knowledge from one mind to another. Use the known to nuance the unknown. 

A punch is still a punch as time goes by

As for me, more than 40 years after that martial arts lesson in the Arctic, I continue my daily martial arts training. I’m still trying to get better at punching, to improve my knowledge, and to refine myself. As a person, a physiologist, and a science educator. It takes effort and time and a little desire to help. But as I’ve written elsewhere (Zehr 2008, 2011, 2015), I believe it’s crucial for scientists to work towards being the primary disseminators of science. 

A call to action 

It’s critical to always keep in mind the discoveries we make are not owned by us, we just got to look at them first. Those discoveries only have real value, importance, and worth, when they are shared in the most widely accessible manner possible. Stan Lee, when writing one of the most famous Spider-Man stories in Amazing Fantasy Number 15 in 1962 said that “with great power there must also come great responsibility”. He meant it in describing the ethics of behaviour that the young Peter Parker must learn if he’s effectively going to grow into Spider-Man. Yet this concept applies equally effectively to science and scientists. 

Knowledge is power and scientists discover knowledge. Thus scientists actually possess great power. Our great responsibility is sharing that power with others to improve our society and our world. What could be more superheroic than that as a mission statement? Our society continues to evolve and become more and more reliant on science and technology, not less so. 

The active presence of working scientists in science education grows more and more important each day. It’s imperative for all of us to embrace the idea of effective science communication and education to all demographics in all age groups and to do our best to help. This is well captured in the motto from the University of Victoria “A Multitude of the Wise is the Health of the World.” In comic book terms that all scientists and superheroes would understand, the fate of the world truly does rest in our hands.

Paul Zehr has a passion for sharing knowledge of moving, martial arts, and the mind. His earliest scientific studies were on martial arts, but shortly into his scientific career, he shifted to the neural control of movement and rehabilitation of walking after stroke and spinal cord injury. Now he is working to see if martial arts training can help with balance, walking, and self-efficacy in Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and after stroke.

References and further reading

Kakalios J (2006) The Physics of Superheroes. Gotham Books, New York, New York 

Krauss LM (1995) The Physics of Star Trek. Harper-Perrennial, New York, New York 

Sagan C (1995) The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House / Ballantine Books, New York, New York 

Zehr EP (2008) Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD 

Zehr EP (2011a) From Claude Bernard to the Batcave and beyond: using Batman as a hook for physiology education. Advances in Physiology Education 35:1-4 doi: 10.1152/advan.00120.2010 

Zehr EP (2011b) Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD 

Zehr EP (2014) Project Superhero. ECW Press, Toronto, Ontario 

Zehr, E.P. (2014). Avengers Assemble! Using pop-culture icons to communicate science. Adv Physiol Educ 38:118-123 

Zehr, E.P. (2016). With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility-A Personal Philosophy for Communicating Science in Society. eNeuro. 2016 Sep 8;3(5). pii: ENEURO.0200-16.2016. doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0200-16.2016. 

Zehr EP (2018) Chasing Captain America: How Advances in Science, Engineering, and Biotechnology will Produce a Superhuman. ECW Press, Toronto, Ontario