272. Say What Sticks: The Neuroscience of Memorable Communication

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: To combat the inevitable forgetting of your content that your audience will experience, you need to define your 10% message. My name's Matt Abrahams and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I am really excited to speak with my friend Carmen Simon. Carmen is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and speaker who studies the way the human brain processes and retains information. Her work focuses on helping professionals create memorable experiences that influence decision making and behavior. She's the author of Impossible to Ignore: Create Memorable Content to Influence Decisions. Well, welcome Carmen. I am so excited to have you here. It's about time you've been on the show. We've known each other for decades, and I'm really excited to have you here. 

[00:00:52] Carmen Simon: Thank you so much for inviting me and welcome everyone. 

[00:00:54] Matt Abrahams: Yeah. So let's get started. In your research, in your book, Impossible to Ignore, you discuss the difference between attention and memory. You go further to say that memory is a byproduct of attention. How can a communicator design a message that's not just experienced in the moment, but is structured to create lasting memory that influences future decisions and behaviors? 

[00:01:16] Carmen Simon: That's a strong question and a very deep one, because to aspire at creating memory traces in somebody else's brain, it sounds very good and noble on the surface, not so easy to do in practice, because we forget our lives almost as quickly as we live them.

[00:01:32] Matt Abrahams: More so as I get older, for sure. 

[00:01:35] Carmen Simon: It's to say for all of us after the age of 25, it's a downhill battle. It's not that it's impossible. We have to try harder to first pay attention, and as a result of that, remember a little bit better. It's not easy to pay attention. Attention is one of the most misunderstood cognitive processes in the brain. The good news though, is that we don't pay attention just in one way. We pay attention in various ways. We have multiple attention systems. So one practical guideline that we can share with our audiences is, as you think about attention, your own or attracting other people's, think of it in terms of these two dimensions. One is, where are you looking? Because attention can be paid to the external world. What is something that has gotten your attention lately, for instance? 

[00:02:16] Matt Abrahams: I'm spending a lot of time thinking about AI. 

[00:02:18] Carmen Simon: Okay, so you've, uh, turned around. You're surrounded by tools. Some are text-based, some are voice-based, but the attention is going outward. Attention can also be paid inward. As you're thinking about AI, and perhaps you have some introspective thoughts, are these tools getting better than we are? Are they as creative as we are? Where are you looking internally or externally? And there's also another dimension, which is who's dictating the looking? Are you looking on your own accord, either outside or inside, or is someone prompting you to look? Because sometimes you may be passing by somebody or something and suddenly you just have to do a double take.

[00:02:56] At the intersection of these two variables, where are you looking and who's doing the looking or prompting it, you might think, well, I have a lot of control in terms of prompting someone to look outside. From that perspective, you can use some physical properties of a stimulus. Like for instance, if something is small all the time, then making something large will get attention. If something is quiet, then something that will be louder will get your attention. So think about some properties of a stimulus that you can manipulate on your own and that makes someone look, if you make them look, you're more likely to enable them to remember something. 

[00:03:30] Matt Abrahams: That's really fascinating. So it's taking something and changing the way it normally appears. Our brains are wired for novelty or things that change, so that attracts our attention.

[00:03:39] Carmen Simon: Luckily, novelty is not the only thing that attracts our attention, but yes, if you can make something new, or sometimes you don't have to put so much pressure on yourselves, 'cause coming up with something new all the time, that would be very difficult. But I want to make a distinction between these two terms, novelty and surprise. Novelty is something that you haven't seen or experienced before, very hard to come up with. Surprise is something that you have seen or experienced before but did not expect. And the reason why that still works on attention is because the difference between what you expect and what happens is how the brain learns.

[00:04:14] So biologically speaking, we don't really like surprises, because what is a surprise but a failure to predict what happens next. But we can afford not to pay attention to surprises because a brain that predicts the next step is a brain that survives a little bit longer. So for example, I remember seeing an image in a presentation that somebody had created of an eggshell, and out of it comes this little pug. You don't expect that. You have seen the pug before. You have seen an eggshell before, but not in that combination. So as a practical guideline, wonder, can you look at what your audiences are looking at and expecting? And at some point, twist the familiar. 

[00:04:51] Matt Abrahams: And it doesn't have to be as dramatic as having a dog come out of an eggshell, but it could be anything that's slightly surprising. And by virtue of helping guide people's attention, does that necessarily mean that they'll remember it more? 

[00:05:03] Carmen Simon: Typically, so if you can't have attention, you are increasing the chances of memory and what is science, but the increased likelihood that something is going to happen, is it going to happen all the time? Definitely not, and it's unfortunate because I would love if a hundred percent of attention turned into a hundred percent of memory, and that is not always the case. Often attention is combined with some stronger emotion too, because you may see the pug and the eggshell, but maybe you don't really care about pugs at all. You're thinking, ah, yeah, whatever. And those segments are not really all that easy to come by.

[00:05:37] Like I remember a classic study that was done on a campus and somebody had put a clown on a unicycle, and they wanted to see how much attention would that clown on a unicycle get? And because people were walking, looking at their phones, maybe a fraction of those paid attention, even those who did look weren't necessarily tuned into what was happening. So even though visually you're seeing it, you're not really processing all that fully. So therefore the memory for it is not as strong. So imagine I look with humility at business content because hardly ever are we in the position to create something as exciting as a clown on a unicycle. So if that doesn't get attention, it's very clear that we have to work hard at it. 

[00:06:19] Matt Abrahams: In the business context, people are often distracted by other things. So actually just getting that focus in the first place is hard. 

[00:06:25] Carmen Simon: So true, multitasking and distractions are quite often the biggest culprits to attention and therefore memory. So in a humbling kind of way, look at what people are doing, deviate from the pattern, and a step before that would be what we call priming. So get the brain in a ready state to pay attention. One of the reasons we may not observe the clown on a unicycle is because we're not ready for something that's a little extra special.

[00:06:51] So priming means getting the brain to process the stimulus so that the next stimulus can be processed a little bit differently. So if you sacrifice some of your darlings, let's just say, you're coming up with some of these surprising elements, something that's a little bit more unusual, put those elements right before something that really has to get attention and therefore be memorable. So don't waste those within a sequence. Place them strategically before points that really have to get attention. 

[00:07:16] Matt Abrahams: Really interesting. So this notion of priming and disrupting patterns can be really powerful and as somebody who does what I do, uh, helping people craft stories, we often talk about the emotional arc or the logic of the story, but what I hear you is adding something else to it, which is thinking about where those things that are most surprising fall, and what you can do beforehand to get people prepared for them. That adds a whole nother dimension, but one that could be very valuable. 

[00:07:40] Carmen Simon: Very valuable because everything has a sequence. Something happens first, and then something else happens and something else happens. And I'm noticing in my neuroscience research quite often it is very important to get their brain in a ready state.

[00:07:52] Matt Abrahams: Gimme an example of something you could do to prime somebody for a typical business presentation that somebody might do. What might I do to help? 

[00:08:00] Carmen Simon: Let's think of some primers first. There's some generic ones, just so you can recognize the power of priming. So for instance, let's just say that I wanted you to process the word table a little bit easier, if I said to you the word chair, you'd be a little bit more ready for the word table. But I, if I said to you the word tiger, you would not be all that ready for the next one. In business content, let's just say that you want people to remember the fact that if they use your services, they will be prepared for AI, for instance. You could have a semantic prime, you could have an emotional prime. A strong story can be a good primer to an otherwise abstract message. 

[00:08:36] Matt Abrahams: I'm reminded of a conversation I had with Robert Cialdini, and he talked about pre-suasion, the things that we can do in advance to make somebody more likely. And he gave the example of a mattress company who on their website had pictures of clouds, and the idea was that our beds are very comfortable and soft. And so you're priming the brain to think about that, and I find this really fascinating. You argue that the brain is naturally forgetful. How can a speaker proactively build retention moments into their presentations or communication using specific, perhaps linguistic or visual cues, to ensure that the most critical information isn't forgotten?

[00:09:12] Carmen Simon: What I'm noticing in my research, no exception, is after 48 hours, people forget 90% or more of the content that they're exposed to. Beyond the fancy environment of it all, beyond the handwriting of it all, people naturally forget. We haven't merged with AI yet. We have human brains, and those brains are fallible. I'm not so worried about the 90% that is forgotten. I am worried about the 10%, let's consider it a metaphorical number because sometimes people forget way more, by the way. Every so often I'm noticing increase just slightly, not by much. So the metaphorical 10% tends to stay there across time. You need it to stay there because people make decisions in your favor based on what they remember, not on what they forget.

[00:09:55] But what I worry about that 10% is that it is random unless you take care of it. What I mean by that is if you present to a group of 20 people, one person will take away one 10% message, another one will take another one, and another one will take another one. And the reason sometimes decisions in your favor are slower is because not everyone walks away remembering the same things. So you're not just after a memory or after a unified memory across a group. Decisions are hardly ever individual, usually they're social. So as a practical technique ahead of time, wonder what is your 10% message. So many people aspire at attention and memory, but very few really know what they want to be memorable for.

[00:10:38] So as you're listening to us have this conversation, ask the question always, what is my 10% message? And if you had the courage to call your audience members in 48 hours and say, what do you remember from that segment? Would you be satisfied with their answer? You're only satisfied with the answer if you know your 10% message and then there is no secret. Repetition is the mother of memory. You'll come back to that message again and again. Like for instance, if we had to create a 10% message for this show right now, let's call it control your 10% and one criteria then for controlling your 10% is you clarify it. Then you repeat it more often than you think.

[00:11:15] In my studies, I'm showing that in a five minute presentation, a repetition of four times is necessary for you to be in charge what they take away, 10 minutes repetition of at least six times, 20 minutes, at least 12 times. And the reason I think people are not so comfortable with repetition is because they think I'm approaching very smart audiences, especially people in tech, especially people globally who have brilliant minds. Even those brilliant minds still have human brains and their memory is just as valuable as yours. Repeat your 10%. 

[00:11:47] Matt Abrahams: This notion of picking what is your 10% and doubling down and really focusing, really, really important. Does that repetition have to be saying the same thing exactly the same way? Or can I say it, and then tell a story that reflects it or use an analogy that represents it? Does the repetition have to be the same words to get the effect? 

[00:12:06] Carmen Simon: I like where you're going to in the sense of you're using the repetition, you're using the analogy. You can use all of the other techniques you want, as long as once you're done with those, you come back to the exact same message. Don't leave it to chance and don't leave it to them because especially from a beautiful story, people can extract so many other meanings and so many other nuances. So they can take it in many directions, but no, we want to come back to the same main message, control your 10%, for instance, for our conversation. 

[00:12:33] Matt Abrahams: So you can use a variety of tools for repetition, but you definitely wanna say the same thing a few times. So if I have to say it 12 times for a 20 minute presentation, maybe I actually say the literal words three or four times, but I use all these other examples to fit in.

[00:12:47] Carmen Simon: You can use the other examples, but come back 12 times because when you want people to decide in your favor, they will use their memory. And if you are in a competitive space and people don't remember you and a message associated with you verbatim, what happens is that you take away gist. And if they take gist away from you and gist from somebody else, and gist from somebody else, after 48 hours and beyond, people will not know who said what. And what do they do? They tend to give credibility to the more familiar source. And if you're not a familiar source, that means you have spent that time creating somebody else's message and they take the credit and that really hurts. 

[00:13:23] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. 

[00:13:25] Carmen, I knew this was gonna be a fantastic conversation. You did not disappoint. You've given me so many tools to think about how I can communicate so that I get my 10% message across and engage audiences more. Before we end, I like to ask three questions, as you well know. One I create just for you, and the other two are similar across everybody. Are you, you up for this? 

[00:13:43] Carmen Simon: Sure, sure. 

[00:13:44] Matt Abrahams: You do a masterful job in your explanation of being very descriptive, of using lots of examples, you practice very well the things that you teach and have studied. Is that something that you really think through? Is that just natural? And how did you learn to do that with so little effort? 

[00:14:00] Carmen Simon: It's, um, often a combination. Some things come naturally, but some things have to come a bit more deliberately because in our practice we help a lot of clients do the same for their audiences. In our business, as you very well know, we have audiences with audiences. It's very easy to start speaking about your own features and benefits and things that get you excited at the expense of what this means to you, the secondary audience. So it's always a reminder to put it through their lens, sit where they're sitting, wear a few of their shoes, the customer's shoes, would be even more, more exciting.

[00:14:36] I really enjoy also examples because if I have some good examples and stories, and you are a believer in great stories, with each time that you speak, it's almost an extra excitement moment for your own energy. So I'm hoping one of the practical lessons from this conversation that we have, as you control your 10%, is to challenge yourself to say, how can I maintain my own motivation and have that be up? Because people will sense lack of energy very quickly. And I remember this interview with the longest lasting Broadway show, the Phantom of the Opera. Some people think Cats, but it's actually the Phantom of the Opera.

[00:15:11] So a journalist interviews the person who has played in the show for so many years, and his first question is, how many times have you done this role? 1764 at the time of the interview. So this person had to repeat his own 10% message 1700 times. How do you master that much repetition? For him it was highly sexual because every two weeks he says we get a new Christine. So that's why, how he was keeping his own motivation going. But the lesson for all of us is look for some small elements. It could be the stories, it could be the practical applications. It could be something very concrete, but something has to keep your own motivation up. 

[00:15:50] Matt Abrahams: I very much appreciate that. I teach very similar content and have for many years, and what helps me keep it fresh is reminding myself that it's new for the other folks and what can I do to help land it best for them. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:16:05] Carmen Simon: I know we could go for the public figures, but here's one that's still in my mind years later, I wanna say it's been at least five years. So picture it. I'm in Poland and I'm visiting the Salt Mine, so I'm not a big tour group person, but the only way to go and visit the thing is to join a group. And as I'm here at the entrance, I'm part of maybe 10, 12 other people, and there comes a tour guide and the first thing she says is, welcome to this three hour tour. And I just want to fall over because I'm thinking not only am I not a tour group person, but three freaking hours of this thing, there's just no way. And let me just tell you that she was one of the most inspiring communicators I had seen in a long time. I had to go all the way to a Polish salt mine to find it.

[00:16:50] But she applied many of these techniques that you and I are talking about and you very likely teach in your classes. The storytelling was just top notch. Not only just was it top notch in the sense that stories existed, they were being said with good inflections and the timing and the punchlines and the priming of it all, like before a good story would already be ready, that something exciting is going to happen. Remember priming the brand and getting it ready. So I think we can find inspiration from so many people. Like next time, maybe you go to Starbucks, pay attention to how that person might have a story and tell it because they could be a good communicator that can inspire you. 

[00:17:26] Matt Abrahams: I love finding great communicators in average places. There was a gentleman who ran a barbecue next to a car wash I used to go to. He was one of the best storytellers I've ever heard, and I would just wash my car a lot because I just liked connecting with him. Final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:17:48] Carmen Simon: Ooh. So the three ingredients would be tied by the one main message, control your 10%. Underneath that, what would be the ingredients? Make sure you clarify it. If you know what your 10% message is, your audience is also more likely to know, nebulous to you, nebulous to them. Number two, we are talking about the element of surprise. Associate some of your messages, supporting points for your 10% message with something that jolts the brain out of its habitation. And number three, there is no secret. Repetition is the mother of memory. Come back to that 10% more often than you feel comfortable with, and that's how you are deliberate about your 10% message and you do not leave it to chance. 

[00:18:28] Matt Abrahams: Clarify, surprise, repeat, and in that you will really deliver on your 10% message and make your message more memorable. And Carmen, our time together, I hope, will live in the memories of all of our listeners, certainly etched in my memory. Thank you for your time and I'm super glad we finally got to do this. 

[00:18:46] Carmen Simon: Thank you so much everyone. 

[00:18:50] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about communication and neuroscience, please listen to episode 39 with David Eagleman. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abraham. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special 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 and Instagram and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, AMAs, Ask Matt Anything, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.