At the Aeronaut Brewery on a recent night in July, there wasn’t an empty table to be found as people greeted each other by the bar and then settled into chairs after walking carefully by the large projector screen at the center of the room.
The question that drew them: What we can learn from fruit flies.
“[Fruit fly] brains are a really good model for ours. They’re just numerically smaller, the number of neurons,” Sara Wasserman told the crowd. Wasserman, an associate professor of neuroscience at Wellesley College, was the featured speaker for the pop-lecture series, “Binge Thinking.”
The lecture series, which invites local professors to give talks at Boston and Cambridge area bars, is the brainchild of founder Rory Madigan, who works at a think tank in Cambridge. He wanted to escape “doomscrolling.” “Every day my screen time was over, like, six hours a day,” Madigan said. He had heard some people spent even more time, but for him the real issue was “I just felt like if I wasn’t at work, and I wasn’t sleeping or eating, I was just kind of brain rotting.”
Madigan looked at how other people were experimenting with untraditional nights out, and found examples of people organizing pop-up lectures that brought professors into more casual environments. Boston seemed like the right place to combine learning and libations.
“Boston’s maybe the nerdiest city in the world,” he said. “It has the highest density of universities and I feel like there’s a ton of students and just intellectually curious people here. There’s probably no better place in the world to start this than Boston.”
Enlisting the help of his father, a statistics professor at Northeastern University, Madigan devised the first of the Binge Thinking lectures in January. However, Madigan soon realized that there was one major obstacle to creating the series: He had recently moved to Boston and didn’t know many people to spread the word. He went to Reddit’s Cambridge and Somerville pages and posted about his idea. Within a short period of time he had around 10,000 views and some 50 comments. Madigan was able to build an email network and scheduled the first of the lectures, at Somerville’s Bow Market in January. His father, David Madigan, was the guest professor.
“I didn’t think anyone would even come, to be honest,” Madigan said. Instead, the $30 tickets sold out, with more than 50 people attending. “Since then, the demand has just been so high. A lot of our events sell out within about 15 minutes to an hour. Every event has sold out, and there’s been wait lists of over 100 people for some of the events.”
In the beginning of the year, he hosted a few lecture events a month. In July he had eight events, and August has six on the schedule.
Madigan thinks of a topic he finds interesting and then looks for a local academic expert.
For July, Madigan thought decision making might work. He found Wasserman, vetted her on Rate My Professor to make sure she went over well with her students, and asked her to talk.
Wasserman said when she got the email from Madigan, “I looked into it a little bit more and it seemed like a really fun opportunity to get to share my research with the broader community.”
Wasserman started by asking the attendees to talk with their tablemates and come up with a definition of decision making that didn’t use words like choice or decide. After a few contributions from the audience, including one guest who was able to pinpoint the Latin root for decision, decidere, which means to cut away, Wasserman popped a slide on the screen titled “What’s in my bag?”
She said she began putting different things in her purse as her family grew, an example of how her external environment affected the way she made decisions. She then tied it to her fruit fly research, to see how different environments prompt different decisions from the flies. Their process, she said, is effectively the same as ours, just on a smaller scale.
Her lecture followed the Binge Thinking format: about 40 minutes of lecture followed by a 10-20 minute question and answer session. After the lecture is over, guests are also encouraged to chat amongst themselves and with the professor, though few people stayed after this particular event. Speakers usually receive a small gift – Wasserman got a new tote bag and a bottle of wine.
Madigan said the series is currently just a side project for him. However, he did not rule out expanding the event beyond just Boston in the future.
“People seem to really enjoy it, and I do think it’s a great way to meet people and to also get off your phone,” said Madigan. “Initially, I didn’t have any ambitions for it, but now it seems to be taking on a life of its own … I hosted the first event in New York last week, and it seemed to be very popular. We sold out that event. I’ll probably try to run a few more in New York per month and then we’ll see from there.”
For more Binge Thinking events, information about future lectures can be found on the website.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.