Hi, Matt here.
For most of us presenting confidently and clearly in our native language is hard enough.
But communicating in another language is marked by unique challenges and opportunities for
growth.
I am swung with links to my favorite English language learning podcast playlist.
Please check out fastersmarter.io slash ELL.
Look back to a time where you were so engrossed by a story you were hearing that you lost
track of time.
You were just listening, learning, and experiencing new things.
This happened to me just yesterday as I was listening in to David Eagleman's new podcast
Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman.
Now David is a friend, a colleague, and a former guest on this podcast Think Fast Talk Smart.
And it reminded me of all the excellent advice David gave that discussed how our brains
are actually wired for story.
So I invite you to sit back and listen in as David and I discuss the neuroscience of storytelling.
And I invite you to listen to his new podcast Inner Cosmos.
The professor in the very first communication class I ever took started by saying communication
is very simple.
You just need to get what's in your brain into the brain of someone else.
And while he was right, the brains are definitely involved.
There is nothing simple about it.
Today we'll hear from a world-renowned neuroscientist who will provide insights into how our brains
help us communicate with each other.
Hello, I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of
Business.
Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast.
I am so thrilled to chat with David Eaglement.
David is a neuroscientist and an adjunct professor in psychiatry at Stanford.
His research includes sensory substitution, time perception, vision, and synesthesia.
He is the author of eight books including his latest live wired.
David wrote and hosted The Brain, an Emmy-nominated television series on both PBS and BBC.
And if that isn't enough, he has launched several neuroscience companies based on his research.
Welcome David, thanks for being here.
Great, Matt, thanks.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Great, let's get started.
I'm sure neuroscience has something to say about how do we gain people's attention and
how do we sustain that attention?
Yeah, I mean really at the heart of this is storytelling.
There's a sense in which storytelling over the centuries has perfected structures to
do this to make people feel like, okay, there's something going on.
There's something that needs to be solved.
There's an unresolved cord here that needs to be resolved.
We are suckers for it.
There's a great book by Jonathan Gottschild called The Storytelling Animal.
And he uses the analogy that if you remember at the end of Star Wars, when Luke has to
try to get this bomb into the death star and he finds his little porthole.
And if you can just drop the bomb right into that little hole, it blows up the whole death
star.
And essentially that's what storytelling is to our brains.
It is the porthole that completely can sway us, can make us feel like, oh, you know,
make us laugh, make us cry, make us understand someone else's point of view or at least push
us in that direction.
So that is really at the heart of what neuroscience tells us about how we communicate and how we
engage people.
So it's safe to say our brains are wired to receive stories.
Is that what I'm hearing?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Or a different way of saying it is that stories are crafted to plug into what matters to
the brain.
I want to jump into a point that you mentioned about stories that stories seize our attention
and engage us.
Are there certain elements of storytelling that really capture the brains?
For example, is it being very vivid or using emotion?
Are there things that neuroscience points to that really locks our brain into story and
communication?
You know what's funny.
So I teach the brain in literature at Stanford.
And one of the things that has really, I've been chewing on a lot lately is that everybody
is very different on the inside.
And some people just as one example are very vivid visualizers.
You know, if I say imagine an ant crawling on a red and white tablecloth to a jar of purple
jelly, some people see that like a movie.
At the other end of the spectrum, some people just have a conceptual understanding of it,
but there's no picture there at all and everywhere in between.
And so it turns out that I think there's no single answer to the question you asked in
terms of if a thing is vivid, for example.
What I've been hypothesizing lately, and this is nothing but my own idiotic hypothesis
on this, is that writers like, I don't know, James Fenemore Cooper or Thomas Hardy probably
had extremely good visualization.
And so they assumed that everyone else, their readers would like that too.
Whereas somebody like Ernest Hemingway, I assume, had terrible visualization.
And he assumed that his readers would appreciate not having all those details.
And so there's no single answer to how vivid to make something because some people like
Hardy and Cooper and other people like Hemingway.
Interesting.
So it seems to me that the advice that would come from that is twofold.
One, remind yourself that your worldview is not the same of others.
And second, try to appeal to a variety of different ways of seeing the world to catch
a bigger audience.
Are those two fair take a way?
Fundamentally, people, they don't necessarily care about whatever the topic is you're talking
about, whether that's physics or gardening or genealogy or whatever.
What they, if you're speaking to a broad audience, you need to figure out what the piece
is that connects to them, that makes them feel something in particular.
That's the important bit.
Yes.
So you are echoing what we've heard many times on this podcast that really understanding
your audience and what's relevant to them is critical to helping make for effective
communication.
And you're layering on that how understanding that relevance and tying it to some emotion
and some story can really drive home what it is you're trying to do in terms of connection
and get your point across for sure.
So I'd like to ask you, you are involved in so many fascinating research projects and
ventures.
Perhaps the most important for people who are deaf, we capture sound on the wristband and
it turns it into patterns of vibration on the skin and people who are deaf can come to
hear the world, can come to understand what's going on around them.
Now we actually have 70 different projects going on where we're passing in new senses for
people either who are missing a sense or who just want something extra like infrared vision
or picking up on the stock market or whatever.
So anyway, we've got all these experiments.
But in answer to your question about how that can impact our communication and connection
with others, one of the things that we're trying, we have tried is many smart watches can
measure all kinds of things like your heart rate, heart rate variability, your skin response,
all these different things.
So what we do is we pull it off the smart watch, we push that through the internet and then
to the wristband so that you are feeling, let's say, let's imagine you're wearing the
smart watch on one hand and you're feeling you're wearing the wristband on the other
hand and you're feeling all these states of your body that are normally invisible to you
like your galvanic skin response.
So, okay, but that's not the interesting thing.
The interesting thing is your spouse wears the watch and you wear the wristband.
So you're feeling her physiology and you can be, because it's through the internet, you
can be on the other side of the globe and you could call up and say, hey, you seem like
you're stressed out or you're having a bad day is everything okay?
That kind of thing.
Now, I have no idea if this is going to be good for marriages or bad for marriages.
Yeah, I was just thinking that.
Yeah, it's probably a terrible idea.
But I'm very interested in all the experiments that we and others will be able to do with
this in the near future.
What if you're wearing it at work, what if your colleagues, you're looking about haptically
through these sensations while we're in the midst of communicating because all the feedback
that we get, there are all these tools that will tell you, talk time and how intense your
voice is, but it distracts you.
You have to look somewhere else.
You have to be distracted from it.
And yet, if I had something on my wrist just vibrating to give me that information in
real time, I could make adjustments in a non-destracted way.
Yeah, we've actually done a version of that that would only work for really, really big
speakers, but we have done this version where we can scrape Twitter in real time for any
hashtag and then do an automated sentiment analysis, which is, say, are people tweeting
negative or positive things about this with this hashtag?
And on the fly, you can feel what thousands of people are experiencing.
So this would probably only work for a president or somebody who's giving a big live talk.
But during the talk with a few seconds delay anyway, you could start feeling how the
whole Twitter sphere is responding to you.
Oh my goodness.
I don't know.
We have to be careful with that, but fascinating.
Fascinating.
Yeah.
You know, perhaps more than anyone I've interviewed before, you communicate in so many different
ways, writing, television, lectures.
And to so many different levels, academic peers, students, the general public, would you
be willing to share a bit about your place for a science publication?
And my mentors really worked to beat that out of me.
They thought that it was ridiculous that I was writing in that way, but I kept at it.
And I still write my science papers in a way that I think people can digest more easily.
The science is exactly as rigorous, but I try to make it so that people care and they
get analogies and they understand what's going on.
And so I think I would say jiggle event that you thought you understood that there's a
new layer to it or whatever, but it can't just be, hey, I ran this experiment.
Here was the result.
And this is equally true across writing television and lectures.
It's equally true across academics and community, community came to the general public.
Well I have read many of your books and watched many of your lectures and shows and you
have an ability not only to make things that for me seem out of reach reachable, but
you make them interesting and I think it's through what you're talking about, understanding
your audience, making it relevant and connecting for sure.
I want to hit on one issue that you mentioned just briefly, but you've demonstrated today.
And that is the use of analogies.
You use them a lot.
In fact, today you talked about Star Wars and I'm curious to learn more about that.
That just comes right back out.
It keeps one file separate from another, but with human brains, Romeo can say, Juliet
is like this son and we understand that he means she's bright and beautiful, right, transforms
darkness to daylight and so on.
All the things that the sun does, brain, human brains are particularly good at understanding
the structure of things and then understanding, oh, okay, this is like this.
So it's a very powerful way to get information in there because it's taking a path that
people already understand and saying, hey, look, this is how the new thing works as well.
You already understand this thing.
You already understand what it is to load a dishwasher or to see your friend's face or
to drive to work or something people get.
And then, hey, this thing is just like that.
It's a very complicated physics concept that you thought you would never understand.
Just think of it like this, bang.
And that is the way to get that bomb into the porthole.
Nice.
Nice way of coming back to that analogy.
Yeah.
I learned actually from one of my students how you can take analogies a little too far,
but I totally agree that they're very helpful in communication.
We here in the US use a lot of sports analogies to explain things, especially in business.
It's a slam dunk, push it across the goal line, hit it out of the park.
But if you don't know those sports, you're in trouble.
And I had a student in the middle of a speech he was giving, given analogy to cricket.
And you literally could hear crickets in the room because nobody knew how the sport
was played.
And he stopped and looked at all of us and said, that's how I feel when you talk about
American football.
And it was very powerful.
So analogies, I agree, are wonderful, but you just have to make sure that everybody has
that pathway already that you're talking about.
So thank you for that.
And keep using the analogies.
They help me so much to learn what you're saying.
Before we end, I'd like to ask you the same three questions I ask everyone who joins me
on this podcast.
Are you up for that?
Yep.
Let's do it.
All right.
Question number one.
Sure, the best communication advice you ever received as a five to seven word presentation
slide title.
What would it be?
Leverage storytelling and don't use jargon.
Ah, nice.
So we've talked a fair amount about storytelling.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the problems with jargon?
Yeah.
I mean, this is what you see in grad school all the time.
Because that, you know, a kid comes in, they feel intimidated by all their super smart
professors and the people are sitting on their committee and they figure, okay, if I use
all these jargon rewards, everyone's going to think I'm so smart and they're going
to be so impressed.
But it loses an audience.
For every jargon you word you use, you lose half them.
So jargon can obfuscate the meaning.
See, like what I did there, I used a big jargon in words.
It can get in the way of you really understanding what's being said.
And that's so true.
And I guess the challenge for many people is because we use some of those jargonny terms
all the time in what we do, we have to remember that not everybody else is part of that lexicon
and we have to back off from using it for sure.
Yeah.
And by the way, that is critical.
And I can tell you how I solved that in my books and my television, which is, yeah,
I'm always crystal clear on who my audience is.
My audience is me when I was much younger and didn't know that word and didn't know that
piece of jargon.
Oh, I like that.
I'm talking to you.
I just steal that.
That's great.
So genuinely and passionately about the things that he loved.
And I grew up in the mountains of New Mexico and aside from my parents, I didn't have a,
I didn't have a single example of what a science communicator was like, of what big ideas
could look like and why they were beautiful and why they weren't things to be intimidated
by but to be madly attracted to.
And so I would say Carl Sagan, single handedly changed my trajectory in life.
And I just, I regret that, you know, he passed away a long time ago and I never met him.
But he's, he's the one that I admire.
In fact, I named my, my son's middle name, my name, Sagan.
Oh, cool.
What a tribute.
Yes.
I, I think you and I are of similar vintage and I and Carl Sagan certainly was an amazing
communicator for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And by the way, just on that vintage thing, I'll just mention I pulled up Cosmos on YouTube.
Yeah.
You know, the original Sagan Cosmos and had my kids watch it and they loved it too because
his stuff doesn't age.
Excellent.
That's a good idea.
I need to get my kids watching some of that too.
Believe me, it's much better than with some of the other stuff we watch.
What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?
You know, this is a, this is a very specific tangential one, but I, I feel saying that for
years, but having a renowned neuroscientist say, Bullets kill, don't kill your audience
with bullet points is phenomenal.
Thank you.
Did you have other ingredients to add?
Well, yes.
I think I've already said that me, you know, like don't, don't try to show off how smart
you are by using big words.
Right.
And, and, and make it matter to people through storytelling.
Right.
So it's about story.
It's about using language that can connect to people and it's about images in a motion,
not just lists.
So, so excellent.
That's going to turn, that recipe is going to turn into a great dish for sure.
Well, David, thank you so much.
Your insights into neuroscience into storytelling into connecting with others is, is fantastic
and incredibly helpful and actionable.
And I guess I should end by saying, may the force be with you since you use Star Wars.
