Staying awake, staying (scientifically) alive

I can't imagine I'm the only person with this problem: I sit down at a seminar by a visiting scientist, or at a conference talk, and my mind drifts.

Who's that sitting in the third row? What's the name of that grad student I just met? How should I persuade my PI that my proposed Experiment X is higher priority than his proposed Experiment Y? What is Experiment X, anyhow? Also, dinner.

It isn't necessarily because of fatigue, though some days that plays a role; and it isn't only for boring speakers--it's just easier to retreat into Headworld than to stay focused on whatever's going on in Realworld. But I always feel ashamed fifteen minutes later when I turn my attention back to the seminar and find myself hopelessly lost. Back to musing on dinner.

Sure, it'd be nice if all speakers were so dynamic that they engaged us from the first slide, but the horrid truth is that there are some very smart scientists doing interesting research who speak in monotones, or use tiny fonts, or work outside your immediate area so they're just plain harder to follow. The challenge is, how to maintain attention even if they're not making it easy for you.

My new solution is this: Pretend I am the host (if at seminar series) or session leader (if at a conference). What's that person's job? To be ready to ask a question, any question, at the end of the talk if no one else in the audience has a hand up, to avoid the dreaded awkward no-questions silence.

The criteria aren't very stringent for my ready-to-ask question. I try to stay away from just "Have you tried that experiment under Condition Q?" unless there's a valid scientific reason to think that Condition Q might be relevant for the topic.

Ok questions, even if a bit anodyne, include things like:

"What's the behavioral outcome in that transgenic fly/mouse/worm?"

"Would your new technique be applicable to Issue Z?"

Better questions of course are more analytical, even if still pretty open-ended:

"Could that result be due to some developmental compensation?"

"Are there any other consequences to that manipulation?"

Obviously if I can manage to come up with a really good question, hey presto, I'll just ask it. But the point of this exercise is that if you are the person responsible for starting a discussion in the face of a quiescent audience, you just need to have something coherent ready to go. It needn't be fancy, but the speaker shouldn't have already answered it during the talk, either.

Simply setting this goal is usually enough to keep me focused and engaged with the talk, even in the face of poorly-designed slides or, heaven forbid, Comic Sans.

The downside being, I don't manage to figure out dinner.