I had the pleasure recently of chatting with Dr. Carmen Simon, a cognitive scientist who works for Memzy, a company that uses brain science to transform presentations. She’s also the author of Impossible to Ignore, published this year by McGraw-Hill, a book about crafting memorable messages using insights from brain science to make them more sticky.

Nick: Memory is very important to your thinking and writing about communication.  How does memory work, and why is it so important?

Carmen: Imagine you’re sitting at your desk. What are some memories that might come to mind, sometimes intentionally, sometimes randomly? A heated conversation with a friend, images from a recent vacation, your computer password, your parents’ voice, your boss pestering you for some information, where you put your keys…? These examples show the various ways we look at memory. They represent different ways to remember and different reasons for which we remember. For example, we keep a request from a client in mind temporarily, until we finish a task, but we keep a vacation in mind for a long time to remind us of whether we want to do something similar in the future. Or not. Overall, memory is the process of encoding, storing, consolidating, and retrieving information. And things can go right or wrong at each of these phases.

Nick: Can you give us an example?

Carmen: We are often baffled why we remember an irrelevant detail from childhood but can’t remember what we had for lunch yesterday. This happens because of the way we encode information: some events have strong sensory impressions and emotional fabric, like a stolen kiss in fourth grade, while others are neutral, like a bland salad at the cafeteria.

We store memories in our brains as groups of neurons that fire together to recreate the original experience. Some memories are stored short-term, like remembering a phone number or a client’s name until you finish a conversation, and others become long-term. In this situation, an area in the brain called the hippocampus takes memories from different sensory regions of the brain and structures them into an “episode.” For example, you may retain one general impression of a group dinner but not all the names of the people you met. Sometimes the connections between neurons in the hippocampus become so fixed that one memory immediately reminds you of another, like smelling someone’s perfume transports you to the place where you met that person.

Nick: Let’s get practical – how do you store memories of, say, important presentations? Can I learn them the night before I give them?

Carmen: Memories are not created instantly; they need time to solidify. Some scientists believe that the hippocampus only stores memories temporarily and then re-distributes them to the regions were they were initially created through a process called consolidation, which happens during sleep. This is why cramming for a client presentation the night before is not a good idea—you’re likely to forget details because memory needs consolidation time. This redistribution process also accounts for the fact that we have different memory systems, which enable us to remember differently. For example, it’s harder to forget how to drive (this is procedural memory, which has evolved over a long period of time and is linked to multiple areas deeply embedded in the brain) and it’s easy to forget calculus formulas (this is declarative memory, which activates primarily the cerebral cortex and requires constant repetition to keep things fresh).

Retrieving memories is often complicated because not only do memories decay over time, but also the act of retrieving alters the initial experience, much like the telephone game, where people take turns whispering messages in someone’s ear. Each retelling distorts the original. For example, the memory of a past family dinner will be reshaped based on whether you’re in a good or bad mood when you’re retelling it.

Nick: If we’re trying to communicate with customers, or clients, or the public — which kind of memory should we be seeking to invoke — verbatim or gist — and what’s the difference?

Carmen: In Impossible to Ignore, I make the distinction between verbatim and gist memory, meaning that you may enable someone to remember specific information about what you say versus offer a sense of familiarity about what you say. Typically, when I teach brain science workshops, I ask participants to reflect on this question before they create content for their audiences: would you like others to remember exactly what you say or…sort of what you say? The difference is important because it has business consequences.

For example, gist memory is longer lasting, but this helps only if you don’t have competition in your field. If you do, then you must definitely seek verbatim memory because you want others to articulate what your business is about in a distinct way. Take Chipotle, for instance. They have to differentiate from other fast-food places. One of the ways they do it well is through the clever “food for thought” packaging, which offers 2-minute literature on their bags and clever jokes on their soda cups. You could read aphorisms (“You had me ‘til hello”), counterintuitive approaches to management (“I spend too much time trying to spend less time”) or provocative questions (“Is there anything you would die for if no one would ever know you died for it?”). If you have a chance, check out their Cultivating Thought author series and you will learn at least one or two things that are likely to stick verbatim. Once they have messages that are easy to remember verbatim, the next step is to constantly associate these messages with their own brand and not anyone else’s.

Nick: You say that pictures should be easy to label and words easy to picture.  What do you mean, and what is the role of images in your approach to communication?

Carmen: I often hear people saying that pictures are more memorable than text. That’s simply not true. It’s possible to forget images easily and it’s possible to remember text for a long time, as long as some conditions are met. For example, when text helps an audience build mental pictures in their minds, it’s possible to make text memorable.

Words can be memorable as long as they paint a clear picture in someone’s mind, and the more clearly they describe people, places, and events, the stronger the memory.

Pictures are often easier to remember when they are easy to label. If the picture is straightforward, the brain understands it quickly and it may even have enough cognitive energy to process details. However, when a picture is generic and complex and hard to label, it is harder to fit it in an existing mental schema and retrieve later.

Nick: In your book, you speak about the importance of repeatable words to create memory. Are clichés always bad in your opinion?

Carmen: Clichés are not always a bad thing. Expressions such as “take a deep dive,” or “think outside the box,” “move the needle” help us to communicate an idea very quickly and speed is valuable in business. However, speed does not always equal memory. Clichés have earned their reputation via overuse, which means that when everyone is speaking the same way, customers or prospects will not remember who said what.

The more common topics you address, the more clichés you’ll have to fight (e.g. how often do you hear about “data-driven approaches” in almost any business field?) Avoiding them gives us a chance at influencing someone’s memory because we’re more likely to come up with something that deviates from a predictable pattern, which means extra attention from an audience. To create distinguished, authentic language, do what others don’t, see what others don’t see. A trip to a local piano bar, costume shop, salsa dancing, or Laundromat will give you fresh perspectives. Creating content from behind the desk renders the clichéd and the forgettable.

Nick: Thanks, Carmen!

We’ll be creating our own impossible-to-ignore speeches at our one-day Powerful Public Speaking conference in Boston on October 28th.  Information and sign-up here.