273. Quick Thinks: How to Create Messages People Remember

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: We need to leverage the way our brains learn and focus to help make our messages more memorable. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. My interview with neuroscientist Carmen Simon was truly insightful and helpful. Carmen provided so many tips and tools that we simply could not fit all of her wisdom into one episode. So fasten your seat belts and get ready to learn more ways to make your messages unforgettable.

[00:00:34] Your work distinguishes between active and passive experiences. Do you have any communication guidance for a leader who wants to turn a routine, often boring experience, like a team meeting or an all hands training of some sort, into an experience that's more active and engaging and memorable, so that people will collaborate more, buy in more, and remember it more? 

[00:00:53] Carmen Simon: Yes, I like all those phrases that you are using and one of the hottest trends in neuroscience is embodied cognition. The reason it's one of the hottest trends is because recognizing that the way we come to know the world, perceive it and eventually build memories and eventually build decisions, is not by building some abstract mental representations. Yeah, sure, we do that, but we come to know the world that the intersection of brain body interacting with the environments. Embodied cognition. So the more you invite your audiences to interact with anything, and especially physically, then you are already impacting cognition. So how can that happen in real life?

[00:01:32] Some companies are lucky where they have an experiential center. You can invite people in your offices. Even this experience right now is memorable because we could have done this very easily, virtually, but now we are in a studio surrounded by excellent people and their skills and equipment. Now, more of our senses are involved. We can kick it down a notch because not everybody has access to these kinds of spaces. One thing that I was able to show in a neuroscience study I conducted was the difference between what happens when somebody views a presentation passively versus when they're asked to type notes as they're listening to the speaker versus when they're asked to hand write notes.

[00:02:09] So of course, that third condition people in that performed better in terms of attention and subsequent memory, because now think about how much is involved when you hand write, your fingers are in it, the entire hand is in it. Your entire arm, your neck, your shoulders, you're contributing to this. Besides when you're handwriting versus typing, you are synthesizing things a little bit more versus when you're typing, by the way, you're typing more verbatim what the other person says. So the processing is not so deep. So that could be the most benign way in which we engage the brain and the body is simply asking people to take notes, tell your audience, this is worthwhile. This will serve you well. Write this down. 

[00:02:47] Matt Abrahams: So getting people to do something where they're connecting their physical experience with their mental experience helps. So a technique I often recommend that people do is to put people in a physical place mentally. So I use descriptive language, so the room is dark, it's cold outside. Is there a similar effect when it's not actually physical, but you're getting people to envision some physicality? 

[00:03:10] Carmen Simon: It's a good proxy. So in addition to the vision of it all, can you apply some motion. Like when you said, yeah, it was a dark room and he kicked a wall in it. Now you have the vision plus some movement that is happening, or the air was circulating so much that her hair became curlier in the moment. You see now there is some action, involve some movement. The brain has evolved to pay attention to movement. Lately, even spaces have evolved. Like for instance, I participated in a conference and it was held in a castle. So sometimes the environment in itself contributes to making the experience a little extra special. Another one that I just presented at recently was in a monastery. I've heard of events being held on a boat. I've heard of business meetings happening in something that otherwise wouldn't have been considered your typical and predictable boardroom. So one of the reasons they're extra special is because, remember, it's brain body interacting with the environment. So the environment itself is unpredictable, you increase the chances of attention and memory.

[00:04:11] Matt Abrahams: Super cool. So if you really want to help your audience, it's not just thinking about your message and what you ask them to do. The space in which you do it can have impact. I want to turn to two things that are very important in storytelling, and I'm curious to get your perspective on how they help us with attention and memory. The value of intrigue and curiosity. These are tools that get people to lean in. What are your thoughts on those and do you have some research and specific advice on how we can leverage those? 

[00:04:38] Carmen Simon: It's an interesting dimension, especially that of getting the brain curious. And not an easy one to reach because are you noticing that some people are so jaded where whatever you show them is like, eh, another one of those. So this is why I am glad that you have the wonderful listeners that you're talking about because we need people like them to try a little bit harder to instigate and get the brain to be just a little bit extra excited. Obviously, you often rely on intrinsic motivation. Like some people come to your content and they're intrinsically motivated to listen, and they're curious about things.

[00:05:12] When they may not, then you have the responsibility, can you create some tension in the brain? What I'm noticing in my research time and time again is that as we calculate emotions, and from a neuroscience perspective, we have two variables that are instrumental to emotion. What are they? Valence, which is how much the brain enjoys an experience. It could be positive or negative. And arousal meaning how alert and awake people are during that experience. So picture this as quadrants now. So you have valence on a horizontal axis, you have arousal on a vertical axis. At these quadrants, you have these intersections of you're really amped up and you like something, and now you're alert, like it cannot possibly be nonchalant.

[00:05:52] Matt Abrahams: What immediately popped into my mind is listening to a comedian tell jokes. 

[00:05:55] Carmen Simon: So a good standup comedian doesn't necessarily let you relax lower. Right now you can relax a little bit more, maybe like reading a book lower left that's negative valence, but you're not upset. So as you're thinking about these quadrants, know this lower left negative valence and low arousal. That's where boredom settles in, and that's where memories go to die. Some people might think that, oh, should always have things that are positive. Either that they amp you up or they keep you more relaxed, but positive nonetheless. But that's not what I'm observing. Quite often attention and memory are created at the intersection of negative valence and high arousal.

[00:06:31] Now I'm feeling it. I'm a little anxious about this. There is tension and quite often that tension can provoke some curiosity, which is what you're asking about. So I remember we were doing a presentation about cybersecurity, and this vendor was saying, if you use us, we'll help you manage information, technology and OT, operational technology. And in the presentation they were saying, if in IT some of your systems get hacked, data gets stolen, there's a breach. People lose their jobs. OT if a physical object gets hacked, people can lose their lives because if you hack an oil rig for instance, people can really die.

[00:07:07] So we are just getting like really deep into this and even the slides are turning dark and you could see like a little cross with a little bit of blood dripping off of it. Now you can like physically see this lean in motion. The brain is motivated to keep on going a little bit. So from a neuroscience perspective, I think I would equate this dimension of motivation and leaning into a system versus withdrawing as a sign of curiosity. Now tell me a little bit more. I'm willing to stay with you for the next moment over until you get me to that lower left. You're always just a click away for lower left, but a bit of tension and friction can help you there. 

[00:07:43] Matt Abrahams: So as we think about the stories we tell, the examples we use, the testimonials we provide, we should actually, I think, almost map them on your two by two matrix and see where do they fit. And as long as they are arousing in some way, and the valence isn't as important and we can think about how we can drop those in and I assume we can't have too many back to back of all the same kind. 'Cause it can become almost overwhelming. 

[00:08:07] Carmen Simon: It's true. It can become overwhelming and you don't want people to be staying in that upper left for too long because then it is just really draining. But a combination of the three, so upper left, upper right, and lower right, those are really good. Every so often the brain will go into a slight state of boredom. We can't claim that all of a sudden just everything is going to be an epiphany. 

[00:08:27] Matt Abrahams: You argue that we often overdeliver on content, which creates cognitive overload. What are the key communication habits a person should break to reduce the load they put on their audience and ensure that their core message is not only received, but understood? So we say more than we need to it sounds like. 

[00:08:44] Carmen Simon: Sometimes we say more than we need to, and it's an intriguing concept to me because here's the good news for everybody, especially as the world is getting more complex, the brain actually synchronizes better with that which is complex than that which is simple. Where does complexity and overload come in? It's not really complexity that gets us in trouble. It's randomness. So really when we talk about overload, we're talking about some random bits and pieces that people go on, in and out, in and out, in and out without enabling somebody else's brain to see some patterns to see how all of these, as difficult as they may be, components come together.

[00:09:20] So one practical technique, especially if we have technical people who like to geek out for a moment, is related to fractals. So for those of you who may wonder what are fractals, there are these objects or even parts of our bodies have those properties, objects that have the same properties at any level of magnification. So for instance, if you picture a tree, you have the trunk, you have the branches, and if you go to the smallest of the smallest of the branch, that low branch has the same properties as the entire big tree. Or if you go to the grocery store, you see a head of cauliflower. The entire head of cauliflower is composed of these tiny baby heads of cauliflower, and those baby heads have the same properties as the entire head.

[00:09:58] So it's cauliflower all the way down. So as a practical technique, think about all your content, anything that you want to share with an audience, and as complex or seemingly overloading as it may be, wonder what are just some core sets of properties? That's where would your 10% message to come in as well, so that your entire content is being perceived as cauliflower all the way down. Because if you have this core that never changes, then you can elaborate and you can add stories, and you can add details, you can add your analogies, all of those beautiful things you mentioned. But you won't feel overwhelming because you're coming back to the same core. You're coming back to the same short set of rules.

[00:10:37] Matt Abrahams: So have a clear through line that you can connect things to rather than, that's why when people go off on tangents, it can be so frustrating and difficult to stay focused. So we have to have a clear goal, clear direction, help our audience see the patterns of the things we're saying. 

[00:10:52] Carmen Simon: See the patterns, and just come back home. So when we say control your 10%, come back to that 10% message every so often to say, yeah, we went over here and we went over here, we over here. But overall, everything just condenses down to this one handful of things. 

[00:11:06] Matt Abrahams: One of the other things that strikes me that 90% does is even though you might not remember the content, you might remember the feeling. And so even if I only remember 10% of what you say, I might leave saying, she was really on her game and competent, and that can help me as well. 

[00:11:22] Carmen Simon: The strong emotions will definitely help in a competitive space. Challenge yourself to combine emotion with some verbatim phrases. You cannot afford to only operate on emotions as some, just because other companies will also have their messages and their emotions. So ideally it's your combination that makes it through. 

[00:11:41] Matt Abrahams: I have seen your books. I've seen your book covers. I've seen presentations that you've done. Visuals play very strongly in what you do. Can you give us some best practices and advice when using visuals to help with memory and engagement? 

[00:11:57] Carmen Simon: Yes. That is one of my favorite topics to talk about because with neuroscience we can debunk some myths. And I'm sure you've heard this many times before, same for our listeners, that some people are visual learners, some people are auditory learners, some are kinesthetic. I hope nobody ever repeats those sentences ever again because primarily we are the visual beings. 60 to 70% of our body receptors, which is how we take in the world, and we start perceiving things and building memories are visual. We have visual people. Assuming of course, you're visually able, even when you're not, you're still seeing inwards. You have to take care of your visuals.

[00:12:33] You can do them by showing people some pictures or by doing what you were recommending earlier, which I really like, enabling the brain to see inwards, like building mental images. So don't put so much pressure on yourselves, like suddenly you have to come up with some amazing graphics and you don't have a graphics degree. If you do have some sort of inclination towards the images, what I'm doing a lot of research on is cliché images and cliché phrases. I'm noticing that the brain, especially the global brain, I did a study on this, has some comfort with the written cliché.

[00:13:05] So for instance, if you say phrases like such and such is a game changer, or this is a win-win situation, or data-driven, anything these days, I was noticing that as I included people from the us, people from Asia, people from Europe, we have a certain amount of comfort with a cliché, it's almost like it's a universal language. People come home. It's like, I got it. As long as you don't overdo it. The clichés in that study, there are only 5% of the entire communication. However, the global brain doesn't have any energy for cliché images. And what are those? You wanna take a guess what's the most cliché image in business content? 

[00:13:40] Matt Abrahams: The first thing that came to mind was like a sun rising or something.

[00:13:43] Carmen Simon: You're not far. So the mountain, climbing mountains, and especially usually at a sunrise or a sunset. And I have to say this, by the way, I was listening to this incredible keynote speaker and he was a mountaineer, and he said, visualizing business success by showing a business person on top of the mountain is like the worst thing that you can do. Not only is it cliché, but most accidents in mountaineering happen when you go down the mountain. So just to show that you've made it there at the top, you have made at the top, you make it when you come back down to the bottom unscathed. That's success. So removing the technicalities.

[00:14:15] Then if we talk about visuals, then we have to ask, how is it that we avoid the clichés, the mountain of it all, and the chess strategies and the iceberg metaphor. So here what we did something with the iceberg metaphor, because I was reflecting on that and I was thinking, you know, the iceberg metaphor has a good story in it. It tells us that at the top you see something small, but really what's important is underneath it. So I was challenging our designers to say, how would you visualize there is more to the story. So we had three versions in that presentation. One was you're seeing what would appear as a sharkfin on top of the water, but then when you really zoom in under the water, it is just a regular goldfish.

[00:14:52] And the other one, we were showing a person climbing a mountain that looks like it's covered in snow. Then on click, the whole thing rises, and that's actually the top of an ice cream cone. So because now you didn't expect that, you see there's more to the story and that unexpected piece was a little bit unusual. Or you take any kind of stone structure, let's just say Stonehenge, and on click, you raise it up and you see a few aliens right underneath there in the dirt. There's more to the story. Depends on where you wanna take it. But see, you can challenge yourself to say, look at a familiar visual and play off of it. Jolt the brain out of its habituation. 

[00:15:29] Matt Abrahams: So visuals play in a very important role, and there are things we can do through visuals to stimulate interest and attention.

[00:15:36] Well, there you have it. Tips, tools and techniques to make your messages more memorable and engaging. I challenge everyone to apply Carmen's insights and advice into your upcoming communication. Thank you for joining us for this Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please also consider joining Think Fast Talk Smart's Learning Community at fastersmarter.io/learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, our AI coaches, and a book club. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning.