Talk Like Ted by Carmine Gallo

Author:Carmine Gallo [Gallo, Carmine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Business & Economics, Business Communication, General
ISBN: 9781427236180
Publisher: MacMillan Audio
Published: 2014-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

5.2: Illustration of Dopamine’s influence on the brain. Created by Empowered Presentations @empoweredpres.

You’re more likely to remember events that arouse your emotions than events that elicit a neutral response. Some scientists refer to such events as “flashbulb memories.” As it turns out, there’s a reason why you remember where you were on September 11, 2001 but you forget where you put your keys this morning. And understanding the difference can help you create more memorable, “jaw-dropping” presentations.

REMEMBERING 9/11 AND FORGETTING YOUR KEYS

When you experience an emotionally charged event (shock, surprise, fear, sadness, joy, wonder), it impacts how vividly you remember that particular event. You can probably remember not only where you were on September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, but you also vividly recall what you were doing, and whom you were with, the expressions on their faces, what they may have said, and other small items in your environment that you otherwise wouldn’t pay attention to. People remember vivid events; they forget mundane ones.

The University of Toronto psychology professor Rebecca Todd discovered that how vividly a person experiences an event influences how easily he or she can recall the event or the information later. Todd published her research in the Journal of Neuroscience. “We’ve discovered that we see things that are emotionally arousing with greater clarity than those that are more mundane,”5 says Todd. “Whether they’re positive—for example, a first kiss, the birth of a child, winning an award—or negative, such as traumatic events, breakups, or a painful and humiliating childhood moment that we all carry with us, the effect is the same. What’s more, we found that how vividly we perceive something in the first place predicts how vividly we will remember it later on. We call this ‘emotionally enhanced vividness’ and it is like the flash of a flashbulb that illuminates an event as it’s captured for memory.”

Todd and her colleagues found that the brain region responsible for tagging memories, the amygdala, was most active when experiencing a “vivid” event. The researchers showed participants photographs that were “emotionally arousing and negative” such as scenes of sharks bearing their teeth, “emotionally arousing and positive” such as mild erotica, and “neutral scenes” such as people standing on an escalator. The researchers then performed two different studies to measure how much detail the participants retained. One study was done 45 minutes after they viewed the photographs and a follow-up study was performed one week later. “Both studies found that pictures that were rated higher in emotionally enhanced vividness were remembered more vividly,” says Todd.

“Why did the audience remember Bill Gates releasing the mosquitoes?” I asked Todd in an interview for this book.

“It’s memorable precisely because it’s emotionally arousing, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant,”6 she said.

“In the brain when you’re emotionally aroused you produce higher levels of norepinephrine as well as stress hormones. We’ve known for some time that emotional arousal enhances memory. Our study was the first to show another

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