Some recent research on memory and retention has important implications for public speakers everywhere who care about their audiences actually remembering what they’ve said. First of all, the good news. The human brain can retain ten times more than previously thought, a new study finds. That’s as much information as the entire Internet. It’s petabytes, for those of you math-literate people who know what that means.

It’s not clear what we’re doing with all that extra capacity. Or rather, it is – we’re retaining a virtually infinite pool of data in our unconscious minds that, unfortunately, we can’t recall to win trivia games or rival Google. We do use it in our unconscious minds for pattern recognition. That’s both good and bad, because much of our pattern recognition is not terribly useful. For example, when we get nervous about a speech because our unconscious minds see it as similar to that time in the 6th grade when everyone laughed at us – even though we’re older, wiser, and speaking about a subject we’ve been expert on for many years. The logic of change escapes the unconscious mind.

So while pattern recognition causes us to duck expertly when something is thrown at us, when higher order activities are concerned, the logic of fight or flight is not as handy.

The other research studies are potentially more directly useful for speakers. First of all, we remember better when we’re fed small doses of information, with spaces in between the doses. If you’re going to try to teach an audience something, then, alternate data with stories, or other audience-centered activities, in order to give the audience a break before hitting it up with more data.

Bite-sized is best.

Second, the way in which we remember something influences our ability to recall it. If we remember something rich with sensory detail – what the item in question smells, tastes, looks, sounds, and feels like – we retain it much more vividly than if we just go for the broad strokes.

The message here for speakers is to tell stories full of vivid detail – not irrelevant, and not too much, but vivid – about the sensory aspects of the material. On that day that you won the gold medal, was the sky blue or threatening rain? Was it cold or hot? Did you smell pancakes on the way to your morning workout?

You’ll always be making judgments between necessary and unnecessary detail, because too much detail kills a story, so make the detail count. And then go back through the story and edit ruthlessly. Ask yourself, what color were the hero’s eyes? And then, does it matter?

Speakers need to find the right balance between their need for completeness and the audience’s need for you to tell it just enough information to be getting on with – and not a jot more. There is no hard rule for making that judgment – but you’ll know it when you see an audience’s eyes glaze over or their bodies start to squirm in their seats.

By then it’s too late. You’ve lost them. Next time, remember that when it comes to information in an information-overloaded age, less is certainly more.