Medical Affairs and Scientific Communications Forum

What if the primary imperative for advancing scientific communication is not simply to disseminate data to support optimal care decisions, but rather to design communications better calibrated to how and what people forget, what they choose to ignore, and how selective they are in absorbing and putting into practice the evidence? What if, as in the recent case of the complete reversal of thinking as to how elementary school reading is taught in the US—based on revisiting evidence from cognitive psychology, neuroscience and other branches of research— we too have had it all wrong? Advances in cognitive neuroscience—specifically recent findings that have led to some reevaluation of the interplay between memory, knowledge, and decision-making— now merit our consideration. These advances chart paths for innovation in medical affairs and scientific communication practice. In some respects, they call for reconsideration and change.

In this closing talk, we will consider adaptations to form and content; discuss best practices and lessons learned; and dip into the key ideas from those pushing the science forward. Specifically, looking beyond the suppositions of pure rationality or even “ecological rationality,” we will discuss the cardinal problems of:

• Persistently suboptimal evidence-based medical decisions
• Apparently intractable misconstruals of scientific evidence, in the face of new or better evidence, up to and including those based in misinformation

We will lay out some contributing factors, in the form of individual/group differences in the automatic appraisals of scientific information; individual differences in memory encoding-retrieval; and, of course, how much (even) experts forget. We will do so with an eye for practical solutions, end users, and end goals of supporting optimal health outcomes.