For neurobiologist Kenneth Britten, a good lecture title works like a catchy advertising pitch: It grabs people's attention. American studies professor Jay Mechling says some of his best titles have come to him while he's swimming or taking a shower. Dan Cristol, a former UC Davis postdoctoral researcher who now teaches biology at William and Mary College in Virginia, says a good seminar name can live on well past the talk itself. "Clever titles don't increase turnout at all, but they greatly increase long-term recall," says Cristol, a bird-behavior expert who gave a talk here last fall called "A Tough Nut to Crack: Crows and Gulls Dropping Their Lunch." "Most people can remember the clever title years later, but not much from the seminar. Dull titles are a complete loss." Not for Davis Enterprise columnist Bob Dunning, who has written entire newspaper columns lampooning particularly soporific names of campus seminars. "The ones I really get into are the ones about nematodes and things, and anything with the letter Z in it, like protozoa," Dunning says. "They [campus researchers] do some really clever things, like the sex life of a mosquito." Dunning says he has actually attended two campus seminars-one on the mind and the other on beer. The beer speaker, food science and technology professor Charles Bamforth, was entertaining, Dunning says. "No free beer though, no beer you could even buy. We didn't even get to look at it. It was totally false advertising." The mind seminar went right over his head, he says. "I thought it would be about philosophy, where great thoughts come from. It was all physiology. They kicked me out because I started snoring." Read like a foreign language Seminar names-posted on Web pages and bulletin boards across campus and published each week in Dateline-often read like a foreign language. Written in the specialized jargon of scholarly disciplines, they're perfectly understandable to those who know the lingo and gobbledygook to the average person who does not. And then there are the creative titles-ones that use metaphor, innuendo, puns and even movie titles to describe such topics as brain physiology and theoretical dynamics. They can be like the erudite uncle of a newspaper headline, an ultimate insiders' joke, the poetic distillation of years, or even decades, of research. Some of the most interesting seminar titles used in recent months include: o "Dancing With Grapevines-a Phylloxera Story," by Jeffrey Granett, an entomology professor and authority on the vineyard pest. o "Does Your Dog Really Need a Color Television or Glasses? The Truth about Animal Vision," by Christopher Murphy, a comparative ophthalmologist who taught at the veterinary and medical schools here before joining the faculty at University of Wisconsin, Madison. o "Blood Will Tell-Rats, Cows, People and Cholines-terase Testing," by animal science professor Barry Wilson about a blood test used to measure insecticide poisoning. o "How to Make Friends and Influence Monkeys-the Amygdala, Temporal Cortex and Social Behavior," by psychiatry postgraduate researcher Nathan Emery. o "Conservation as If Our Lives Depended on It-Collaborative Research on the Ethnobotany and Conservation of Native Fruit Taxa in Indonesia," by ecology doctoral student Jeanine Pfeiffer. o "Random Walks on Tree Space," a theoretical dynamics seminar given by Susan Holmes, a Stanford University statistician who uses computer-intensive methods to build charts of genetic differences. Charles Fuller, chair of the exercise science department and a neurobiology, physiology and behavior professor, says good titles, like good classroom teaching, combine both information with an engaging style. Tickling somebody's fancy The titles need, foremost, to describe what the talk is about, he says. "At the same time, I would like to tickle somebody's fancy." A seminar he gave in November on the biological clock was titled "How Time Flies-the Effects of Gravity on the Circadian System." A knack for title-writing can pay off when it comes to applying for grants, Fuller says. Some grant-giving organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health, limit the number of characters used in a title. "You want to submit something that conveys the essence," he says. "It could have $1 million riding on it." American studies professor emeritus David S. Wilson says he never prepared a seminar talk without writing the title first. Wilson likes using metaphors, often from famous poems, such as Henry Thoreau's "different drummer" or Marianne Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Other metaphors are more graphic, even geographic. "I've been intrigued lately with the idea of the Sutter Buttes as mandala, a natural feature that both centers the [Sacramento] Valley and contains within itself the wildness and the human presence that is California, which is the world." 'Kiss my Buttes' Hence, a paper he once presented to an American Folklore Society meeting was titled: " 'Kiss My Buttes': Convergence of Folk, Popular and Scientific Apprehension of Place." Another lecture he gave to a touring Credit Agricole group from France was called " 'Eclaircise the Myth': France to Americans and California for America." The title used a French-derived word for "clarify," borrrowing from Walt Whitman's Passage to India: "Passage O soul to India!/ Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables." Mechling, an authority on folklore, says his titles usually occur to him when he is about a third of the way through preparing a talk or paper, sometimes when he's doing something else, like swimming."I'm one of those people who likes kind of weird, strange titles," he says. Elegant titles, however, may be becoming more rare with the advent of the Internet, he says. Many authors are cramming their titles with key words likely to be found by search engines. "I almost never write an essay with a colon in the title. I think they're ugly. ... A title with a colon is meant to get as many key words in as possible." Mechling gave a lecture in December about the importance in children's development of such ditties as "Jingle bells, Batman smells. Robin laid an egg." He titled his talk "Children's Folklore or What the Teacher Doesn't Know." Some titles are suggestive, such as one for a talk given by neurobiologist Britten in November on his research on the brain. The title, in part, was "What Does it Mean to be on Top (of a Cortical Hierarchy)?" For Britten, who typically chooses a seminar title before preparing the content, this title was a no-brainer. He studies one of the highest-level visual processing areas of the cerebral cortex. "Hierarchy is what I think about. It's what I live and breathe." Britten, borrowing from Madison Avenue techniques, says he tries to gear his titles to the audience. "If it's going to be a general audience, I try to use an amusing name just to get people's attention."