Thanks for coming. It's late in the day and everybody's ready looking for lunch. You don't want to be the speaker before lunch or at the end of the day, but here we are. We're going to talk about presentation neuroscience, and what the heck does that mean? Probably more than any other specialty, occupational medicine requires the ability to communicate, and it is essential to what we do. And giving a good presentation is kind of a thing for us. You want people to listen, and more importantly, you want them to remember what you have to say. Here's a disclaimer, nothing I say means anything, and don't blame me or the company for it. Introduction. Why do we present? We present to inspire people. We want to inform them. We want to educate them. We really want to warn them, sometimes motivate them, and of course, the gold standard for medicine, behavior change. If you can get people to change their behavior, you're way ahead of the game. We're not going to talk about anything except having them recollect what you do. In fact, we're going to really talk about what ACOM has brought up with their competencies, which parallel the ACGMEs, that it is expected that you become an effective communicator. And whether it's risk communication, patient education, talking to the corporate board to try and get resources, or talking to the worker in the plant, you've got to be able to do it well. And the problem is, there are zillions of rules. David Phillips here, he's selling this thing. I have no interest in David Phillips' thing, but basically, he came up with an organization of it, organizing voice, body language, facial expressions, et cetera. All these are really empiric rules. A lot of them are advice we give all the time, but are they proven? Don't know. So, where do you go to find out what actually has some evidence basis to it? And we're going to talk about how you get people to remember what you said. We're going to give a little short side tour as how memory works, because that is so essential to the proof that exists. We're going to also cover the evidence and the research that exists, as well as some of the theories. And for today, other goals like inspiration, behavior change, we're not going to cover that. It's just too amazingly complex. The other thing for today is you're going to, a lot of things I'll say, you'll go, oh, of course, everybody does that. Well, that's right. There's a lot of empiric sort of tribal knowledge that we have for presentations, that some of it's pretty good. Some of it comes from Hollywood, some of it comes from sociology, et cetera. And in fact, recently, there is a waterfall of information on communication, on memory, on getting people to understand what you're saying from all of these fields, cognitive psychology, behavioral science, neuroscience, endocrinology, et cetera. And it's led to an amazing growth of theories and a lot of facts that are sort of free-floating. Very interesting, you know, the central thalamus does this, and the basolateral nucleus does that, but where do they fit? And so what I try to do in this lecture is pull them into some useful facts, which we will talk about. And to, what is that, the old saw? Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them and tell them what you told them. Well, what we're going to talk about is that these things have some actual scientific reproducible facts that, to the degree that they are hooked into theories and the facts themselves are reproducible, it's quote-unquote evidence-based. Repetition, emotion, structure, and multisensory exposure all have scientific evidence of effectiveness in presentation, for recall mainly. Right now, today, we're dealing with recall, not with inspiration, et cetera. So since we're talking about recall, memory becomes an essential piece of this, right? You know, got to know how memory works. And memory is really fascinating. It's a lot more like an orchestra than like a storage closet where you go in and pull something out, and we'll show you what that means in just a second. But basically, you're looking at three basic categories of memory, each with sort of a different neurophysiology and a different impact on how much is ultimately recalled for the long-term. Short-term memory, also called working memory, long-term memory that converts short-term to long-term, but not everything, and this part of the studies we're going to look at today is what actually gets converted to long-term memory, and then long-lasting memory that can last a lifetime, basically. So how is memory encoded? Okay, so this is a little bit complicated, but if you take a look over here on the left, V for visual, A for auditory, et cetera. These are the sense events that happen outside of the body, and the body's sensory system picks them up. And what happens is, it's really an interesting thing. For most of the senses, with the exception of olfactory, the senses go to different parts of the brain. They go to cortical areas for vision, for smell, for kinesthetics, et cetera, and then they get sent to the hippocampus by way of the amygdala, which sort of coordinates the consolidation of that. And ultimately, if you want to then retrieve it, if it's after the short-term memory part of it, you query the hippocampus, which then queries the cortices and says, hey, remember that time when we were riding and we fell over on a bicycle? That was a little kinesthetic, give me your stuff, visual, bring it over here. And it brings it back, and it's called an event. And this is the issue of consolidation, and the consolidation of memory into what we perceive as a single event is an amazing thing. Actually though, it's memory, when an event occurs and these stimuli occur, it's almost like, you know, throwing a bunch of fruit into a blender with a top off, and it just splatters around the brain, and then it gets reconsolidated. This is an important concept, which we'll see. And when it gets consolidated, there's a couple times of that. There's synaptic consolidation, which is sort of the shorter-term version of consolidation, where basically you're trying to strengthen the neurons, increase the number of impulses they send, so they'll strengthen, they'll start distributing dendrites and other things to kind of keep that going. And then over time, it can be weeks, months, and years, if those are strong pathways, they go into long-term memory that you remember. And so there's different kinds of memories. We have it listed over there, but basically we're going to be talking about long-term memory for most of today. So that's how memory works, massively simplified. It's really an amazing thing. So we're going to talk about basically what is shown for the brain. Most of you are familiar with this. This is the Ebbinghaus curve that shows that one to two days after attending a class, generally you lose 75 percent, if not more, of the information you learned in a class. This is done in studies where they actually have people, you know, sit down. They have them have a didactic. They sit them down. They then test them in a few days, a few weeks, a few months. But what's incredible is the sort of the exponential drop. So most of the information is lost within the first half hour. So most of you won't remember me, which makes me feel okay, that's good. What Ebbinghaus also showed is he did different types of reinforcement. Sometimes he would reinforce immediately after the class, 24 hours later, a week later, a month later, and they had different extinction curves from memory. You notice if the other thing is if they did it at longer intervals, the reinforcement would be better and the curve would not drop as much. So this is really significant and kind of you have to be aware of this if you're going to teach and it has implications. And the implications are you want to repeat things throughout the presentation. If you're going to give a presentation, you want to say what happened and then later bring it up again and then bring it up again and at the end summarize it. We'll talk about structure in a minute. And you really want to use, damn it, emotionally charged words. If you do, you will talk about exactly why that is, but it's been shown to be really effective in terms of longer-term recall. You have to obviously use judgment, you have different audiences, know your audience is another very important speaking shibboleth, I guess you'd call it. And so to review, the brain phenomena is repetition and if you want to increase memory, you need to repeat because the brain is very forgetful. And you want to repeat throughout a presentation and summarize at the end. If you have handouts at the end of the lecture summarizing material, remember the Ebbinghaus curves went beyond the day of the classroom. If you have something that will reinforce it, some way of reinforcing it later, you're really helping the recall of the material. So that's forgetfulness. All right, now emotions. This is really fascinating. Things that are more emotional get remembered much better than facts alone. So if you have a bunch of facts, try and think of what led to them, what interesting story there is, what will involve the audience in those facts. It's really important because if you don't, they'll be forgotten. A lot of the emotional tagging hypothesis, which we'll talk about in a second, is supported by animal evidence, human evidence, and a ton of the fMRI assessment of the pathways to the hippocampus from the basolateral amygdala. That's the coordinator of memories that then get consolidated in the hippocampus later to go out to the different cortices. So if you know this, you can kind of take advantage of it. This is a really fascinating thing. When we get a stimulus, if there's a neuroendocrine dimension to this, glucocorticoids and epinephrine, if you're charged up when you hear something, think fight or flight or whatever, you're going to remember it a lot better. Because all those memories go into that blender and go into the cortices, suddenly have a post-it note on it saying, this is important, and your hippocampus makes a special note and puts it as a memory to the front of the line, and there's more neuronal pathways leading to that memory than if it was just, oh, so this is a rainfall in Bolivia, okay, that's great. Important. I mean, so we can use this as educators, as teachers, as presenters to really try and make the learning experience better. We make it better initially because it's more fun, and we make it better later because it's going to be remembered. The way they do these studies is kind of interesting. What they do is they have both interview techniques, like we said, but they also show people things. On the top is what's called a neutral stimulus. They have them look at a picture and they'll tell them a story. This is a couple going on vacation to Phoenix, and they're going to stop at a couple sites and that's it, and that's the neutral story. This down below are parents coming from, you know, who are told their children have been on a flight coming from the aircraft that just crashed in the background there, and this is an emotionally charged thing, and they tell kind of some horrible stories, and some of the pictures are very intense. They show them, not only do they have kind of recollection things and have them emotionally grade them the day of, the day after, and a week later. They also do fMRIs, and they look at the activation both on, this is on retrieval, but what happens is the neutral activation, you can see are the gray bars, and the black ones are the sort of emotionally stimulating things. So they actually begin to see what is happening in the brain as emotional things are learned. So the notion that emotions are very important to understand isn't just tribal wisdom. It's scientific fact. Very interesting. There's another dimension of this that we can use as educators called priming. Priming means that if you're exposed to something and then get exposed right after, there's like a, I don't know, what's the opposite of a refactoring period? It's a stimulation period where you're much more receptive, and you'll get much more rapid uptake in the brain of oxygen and fMRI when you basically have a stimulation that gives you a long, it gives you a second stimulation in the same category. So you can use this as educators, right? You can, you know, you know you've got this obscure concept, you're teaching differential calculus, and you know, you know, what the hell are flexons? Who knows? But if you can kind of bring it to something that the audience knows for a high school calculus class, and maybe you'd say, you know, this is like the ramp of a skateboard park where you really want to know, you need to know how much cement's going to go under there, so here's how you calculate it. You bring it to something they know, and then when you bring it up again, they're going to remember it more. There's going to be much more information, and the brain will be much more easily activated. So you can use these things to great effect as a teacher. The next kind of closely related concept is the emotionally competent stimulus. Remember, when you're emotionally charged, you're releasing hormones, epinephrine, glucocorticoids, et cetera, that put tags on your memory. Well, if you can do something that kind of helps that process along, you've competently stimulated the body. You can give people amphetamines. It's the same process, and they'll remember more. You're probably not going to do that with most of your classes. But so an emotionally competent stimulus, you've seen it a lot in presentations where presenters tell a joke, they tell a story, you know, they go, gee, that reminds me. Instead of the fire hose of information coming into your brain, which is trying to filter out, figure out what it needs to remember, what it can neglect, you're kind of giving the audience a chance to absorb what they've just heard and kind of process it. And you know, that reminds me. Why couldn't the bicycle stand up by itself? It was too tired. So the implications of the emotional stuff is that when appropriate, and this is, you've got to use your judgment as, you know, as doctors and occupational health professionals, you really have to use your judgment. When relevant and appropriate, you want to try and use emotionally charged images, words, controversial ideas, try to stay out of trouble, of course, but, you know, it's easy. My first boss told me, he said, you know, Dean, the easiest way to get in trouble in a corporate environment is public speaking, you know, be careful. So it doesn't have to be like a fancy kind of thing, you can use more visceral words. So instead of, you know, kind of, we all sort of refer to high English when we're presenting and we use, you know, big 25 cent words, you know, but instead of disliked, you say, he was disgusted by that, you know. It's the same concept, but you get a much more, a much greater chance of having been remembered. If you're gonna show pictures to the degree when appropriate, you know, show a smashed car, don't show, you know, bar graphs of auto accident statistics. You know, you really are trying to pull the audience in, get them involved. And then throughout the presentation, you want to try and interspace emotionally competent stimuli to give people a chance to process. So to summarize emotion, emotion will increase memory if you use emotionally competent stimuli, if you use vivid images, vivid language, et cetera, and there's a priming effect from that. And, you know, jokes, stories, insights, or examples of this works great. Another, I don't know, I find this stuff really fascinating because when you give a presentation and you look back, you realize how many mistakes you've been making. The brain prefers basically having context before you add details. When you give the context of something, you're giving it something to latch onto. And then the details, as you discuss them, your job as an educator is to relate them back to that original concept that you're doing. And that is one of the reasons, there's educational research that basically shows that if you give a pretest to a completely naive class, they have no clue what the subject is, and you give a pretest, they will recall more in two days and two weeks and even a month later than the same exact class that had no pretest. Why is that? You see this pretest, your brain is kind of getting an idea, oh, these are the things we'll be talking about. And then as you hear them through the lecture, you're beginning to associate. Even if you don't know what they mean, you're beginning to associate. And this is where kind of some of the issues of sort of people sitting and then their brains wrestling to try and understand something while you're moving on to the next subject doesn't happen because you're taking the time. So there's many studies, I like this one. This is where they gave people lists of words to memorize. And if they put them in a hierarchical way rather than just random words, they had two to three times better recall, both early, middle and late recall. And this has been repeated hundreds of times. And this is one of those things I mentioned, everybody go, yeah, of course. Well, it's actually shown, it's actually proven. So that's kind of the sort of the gist of that. The other issue is there's really this whole focus on the gist rather than the details is actually documented. This is another one of those tests that's the same airplane crash because I didn't wanna show you one of the grosser pictures, but this is a nice bucolic sunset and they tell a story of having a picnic and watching this. And in fact, when you tell the gist and then have an emotional stimulus, you're gonna remember it more. But if you don't tell the gist, these what are they called voxels on fMRI, they're when, remember MRI is a, it takes water molecules and turns them into little magnets, right? Water is a polar molecule and spins them like that. And it generates a magnetic field from that. And what they do here is deoxyhemoglobin and hemoglobin have different MRI signatures. And you can tell which parts of the brain are lighting up and demanding oxygen for that. And so when you give the gist of the story, when they tell these stories and when you don't, you get better retention of the facts. So kind of cool, I have found it that way. There's another kind of thing that relates to emotionally competent stimuli. Has anybody here heard of the 10 or 15 minute rule in presentations? Okay, all right. Well, let me tell you about the 10 or 15 minute rule. Okay. The rule began in 1976 with kind of a famous paper that basically talked about people lose attention after 10 to 20 minutes, basically the 15 minute rule, the 10 minute rule, et cetera. And this is a paper that actually says, this is, no, it says a personal view, but it's basically, it's a systemic review of all of the literature talking about this and nobody's been able to do it. They had medical students with clickers that every time they got bored, they would click. They had students that would tap their phones, you know, whenever they got bored, that kind of stuff. And they also had, they actually looked at how often they were looking at their phones without them, and it varied. We all know, we've all fallen asleep, you know, five minutes into a lecture, and we've all been to our lectures that were way too short. A lot depends on the presenter. A lot depends on the material, how familiar you are with it, how well it's couched, et cetera. But I wanted to bring this up because if you recall the conversion of short-term to long-term memory, it really does take some time for the information to settle in, and you really want to make sure that you're not burdening people with too many bullet points. I know when I began as a naive speaker, I literally thought if I could cram one more bullet point in, I'd really have done my job, you know? I got that cholesterol, and oh yeah, triglycerides, and you know, oh, gotta add all the other parameters that are gonna make this person healthy, and I was just putting people to sleep. I may still be, but it's really important for you to understand in between chunks of a presentation give some kind of break or give some kind of way of allowing people to absorb what you've just said, because it's pretty cool information, but they may not keep it. So what is the implication of all of this research with respect to structure for presenters? You know, if you can structure it in 10-minute increments, you can always do that, but it's hard to think of anything that you can't break up into, you know, part one, part two, part three, and present the gist first. Try and give the context, then talk about the details, then associate it with the gist or the context as much as you can, really important. If you have supporting ideas, explain how they fit, talk about something else, and then go back and explain how they fit again. Remember the priming effect, where if somebody's heard it and then they hear it again, sometimes you get this, oh yeah, yeah, that's how that works. And in between segments, you want to use emotionally competent stimuli if you can. So here's where this fits in what we've been talking about. Remember, there's repetition, emotion, and we were just talking about structure and the different ways of getting the structure into a talk, not exactly unobtrusively, but in a way that you won't be criticized for, hopefully. Oh, the other thing I didn't mention, you want to try to use real life examples. Everybody has life experience, and if you can give something that is similar to what the learner has heard or done before, and we've all ridden a bicycle, beyond a certain age we've all driven cars, et cetera, if you can kind of put a story in the context of things we've done commonly as people, you're gonna be a lot further than if you talk about climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro, which some have done, but very few. Okay, finally, multi-sensory input. This is really interesting. This is where the brain pulls in information, slams it out to the cortices, sends it back to the hippocampus, moderated by the amygdala, and when you go to retrieve that memory, it reverses the process. It goes to the amygdala early on, later on it'll go to the cortices for long-term memory, but it goes to the amygdala and says, hey, what about that event? And so it goes, oh, let's see, this event, think of like a bookkeeper sitting over a counter going, oh, yes, okay, and it goes and says, let's get the box from visual, let's get the box from auditory, let's get the box from kinesthetic, and let's line them up here, and let's give it back to you, and so the more areas of the brain you elaborate, pictures, sounds, have people touch stuff, the best is odors, they're hard to do, they have to be in context, but if you're talking about a movie theater, and you can get some, or movies, and you can get some popcorn odor, people are gonna remember it, they've done these kind of studies a lot better, and so when you have that kind of multi-sensory input in your presentation, you get better learning within the session, better learning in between sessions, and after sessions, and these are curves that basically talk about the difference between unisensory and multi-sensory, unisensory, multi-sensory is in the blue, unisensory is in the green, and this is how, within a session, you learn faster, across sessions, you retain it better, and if you have single-sensory thing, the red is like single-sensory without any embellishment, without any kind of standard teaching, it's just no contest, so you're really looking to try and get the users, kind of the listeners, your audience, kind of in a mode where they're seeing things, and think of like all of the, any time you go to a Broadway play, there's lights, there's sound, there's music, there's people stomping their feet and crying, it's an amazing experience, and you remember that. This has, of course, been a long tradition, I believe Montessori was an individual, is that right, Kent, he was a, yeah, and he started 90 years ago, multisensory learning experiences, that basically where people would have visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and all these different kind of approaches for their schools, and they would really be in a mode to try and sort of learn, holistically is the only word I can think of, sort of a neutral word, but what's happened is Montessori's gut feeling 90 years ago is now documented with real research, so kind of interesting, so, so far, we've talked about repetition improves memory, emotion improves memory, and gives you a kind of a leg up, not only an interest during the time, but later, structure gives you much better recall, again, all this is documented with evidence-based information, and multisensory exposure increases the recall of the input, and you bring in multiple areas, the other thing is, if it was a visual thing, and an auditory thing, and a kinesthetic thing, any one of those can trigger the whole set of memories, so when you come back, so that's kind of cool, so if you're gonna do that, I mean, a place where you can commonly see this are TED Talks, they really do an amazing job pulling together all kinds of creative, and otherwise, experiences you might not normally have. So, it's easy, it's obvious, and you can start using it today for your presentations, if you'd like. Really, that's it, here's what we covered, and, and I'll say it, why? Not because you haven't heard it, but because you have heard it. Repetition increases memory. Emotion increases memory and recall. Structure increases memory, and multi-sensory exposure increases the recall of the input. And are there any questions? A stunned crowd, they're all asleep, oh no, this is terrible. Bob, yes. I'm gonna ask, well, give an anecdote, a story, and then ask a question. Okay. So, I was at the Commercial Space Conference earlier this year in January, which is called Space Com in Orlando, it's a fabulous experience. Mainly engineers go there, and one of the presenters was talking about the space race. His name was Robert Katz, and he had a company, I think he had an academic affiliation as well, and when I walked into the room for his lecture, there was music playing. And when I walked into his lecture, he was standing at the door, and he shook hands with everybody who came in that door, and there were about 40 or 50 people in his particular. Brilliant, brilliant. And I thought, that is a terrific way to do this, and I actually tried to replicate it when I was speaking to the medical students earlier this year. Didn't work very well, because I had technical problems, obviously. I hadn't tested it well enough in advance, so that's a hint for if you do that sort of thing, you need to test it in advance. That is really, really wonderful. And if he could have added odor, like a thing of perfume or something, again, that would have been, literally added more recollection to their knowledge of the event when they thought back on it. So that's my story. Now my question is, let's assume that everyone in the medical school had your lecture, and had my story, and decided to do what I did, and so that every single lecture that the medical students received, you had music playing when you walked in, you had the professor giving handshakes, and the experience itself in terms of the slides. I mean, the slides obviously were brilliant. This was a brilliant guy. How is that going to change the overall equation of learning? Is that a good thing, or is that a bad thing? You know, there's probably an example of this at the Montessori schools. I don't know the answer, but my speculation is, you have the priming effect, but then of course, if you continue the same stimulus, it kind of goes down. And so if you have the exact same thing, you then start getting a mental background. This stuff that I'm talking about really takes creativity. I mean, you really have to kind of go and kind of think, gee, you know, what's gonna interest them? You know, where's their head at? Know the audience, et cetera. By the way, speaking of which, to get ideas, you can go to ChatGPT, and you can put in things like, what's a good joke of neuroscience? And I got a few jokes. They're kind of corny, but you can do that kind of thing. And so that's really the answer. It really can't be the same every time. It has to be varied to be effective. And that's my answer. Thanks, Bob. Quick question. In the CME world, everything comes out the outcome. You know, performance, patient outcome, and so on like this. But they're also looking at return on investment. You know, we invest money in this educational activity. How do we know that this is gonna provide value to the institution? Now you're having targeted CME for population, subgroups of population, because there's a gap known in this institution, or deficiencies, or you notice that these group of physicians are not performing up to a certain level of caliber. How would you structure, I mean, all these things into a thing? How would you approach that? Well, you're asking a really great question. I'm gonna take it on two levels. The first is, how do you, everyone in this room, when you give a presentation, know if it's worth your time? To do all this stuff takes a lot of time. You know, you gotta put the jokes in, you gotta, you know, make it flow. If it's in a very important talk, you know, if you're gonna be, you know, merging with the new hospital, and you gotta get them, the board to really understand what's going on, it's worth the time. But not every talk is worth the time. And that's one answer to your question. At the other level is sort of really are asking outcomes, you know. Right now, the presumption underlying this whole presentation was that if people recollect your call, your talk, excuse me, if they recollect your talk, if they remember it two days later or four days later or four months later, it's of value. But that was an assumption. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. That was basically an assumption we're making. But it's not probably far off the mark, because if you're trying to convey information and get people to act a certain way or do a certain thing, and it happens all the time in medicine, you know, procedures change, you know, you know, there was things that I did as an internal medicine resident at University of Maryland, if, you know, if I did them now, I'd lose my license, you know, things have changed. So we're constantly trying to get people to learn and remember. So that's about it. It's a vague answer. Of course, you can do studies of education, and you can follow kids for years through school to see if certain styles had an impact on their grades, on their test scores. But that's a huge undertaking and, you know, costs millions of dollars. So a vague, wandering answer, but I hope that helps. Yes. Hi. Good morning. My name is Carrie Johnson from Kaiser, Napa, California. And then this was a great presentation. And let me tell you why, because this is kind of boring topic, and we see patients every day. And my challenge is always, for example, patient MRI keep calling them, and then they don't answer the phone, and then they cannot make appointment with MRI. Especially I have a lot of patient who do not speak English, even though we have Spanish interpreter. So time after time, they just would not or cannot make appointment, for example, MRI. So we get stuck. So I had this challenging to remind patient. And so every time in the beginning, when I, the beginning of a few years, I've been there for 10 years. In the beginning of a few years, I would tell them, in the beginning of the visit, I say, please, this is MRI number. Please call them and make appointment. And I found out it did not work. So I kind of use a repetition. I tell them MRI in the beginning, and then three minutes later, again. And the end of the visit, I tell them again. And it works kind of better. But then I found out one thing that works the most is not only repetition, but in the end, I wrote on a huge piece of paper, A4, MRI and phone number, and I give it to them. So every time I repeat it, I go, this is the phone number you need to call. This is the phone number. Three times. So throughout the visit, I found that the most useful. So I just found this presentation very, very useful. You're a natural. That's great. Not for the presentation, but for helping my patient to move forward, to go see the next specialist, to go see the MRI. And I also use kind of hand gesture. So I tell them, this is very important, and this is a phone number. And think of what you're doing, that not only you're adding repetition, which is great, you're adding structure to it, so that every time it's there where they see it, and they think of you, they'll think of that. That's again how the brain associates ideas. And so you're helping yourself out and helping the patient out. That's great. Thank you. Thank you for the story. I appreciate it. Great presentation, by the way. My name is Fabio. I'm the Corporate Medical Director for Bayer from St. Louis. What I was thinking is, how much does change with different age group of employees? Because with the younger people, the attention span is much quicker. So I have a 16-year-old daughter, and if I'm going to talk something to her, if I spend more than like a minute to catch her attention, she's gone. I'm talking about something, and she's looking at the phone, and she's looking at the clock, so I'm tired. So what is your recommendation in terms of using the same science, but adjusting this for different age group population? Several things change. It changes a lot. And they've done, as you know, because of, you remember the waterfall with all the pedagogy was in there, and andragogy, the adult learning, was in there as well. And so it changes by age and what they respond to. Not only does that change, but the references change. You know, I mean, I wouldn't, I couldn't, my daughter's 32, and I can barely talk to her about, you know, kind of like, you know, I know TikTok, that's about it, you know. And so if I'm trying to come up with associations, et cetera, I have to study, and that's kind of one answer to your question, is you sort of have to understand their language. And it's not just, you know, each generation has their own language, it's also if you're going to come up with things that are going to associate with her brain, you kind of have to understand the context that you're giving the information to. So that's kind of one thing. Maturity, as you know. The other thing that happens is you get a much bigger library the older you get. And so you have many more associations that can happen that a 16-year-old just doesn't have, you know. And so sometimes you'll say things that make a ton of sense to you, but, you know, I recall distinctly I was, there was a time when I was doing some elementary school teaching and I had to describe the Beatles as Paul McCartney's old group, you know, it's like, because I grew up with the Beatles, and it's like, no, there's no longer reference. So I don't know if that's really answering your question, but the answer is it does change. There's a ton of literature on sort of adolescent and teenage education theories and practices. So that's kind of, not a great answer, but that's the answer. Thank you so much. Hello, I'm Dr. Leffer, but I want to play on my experience as a father with bringing his 18-month-old to his first Montessori course. Yes, yes, please. I mean, everyone who's the parent of Montessori, they understand that at least in the preschool age, everyone is doing works, and they have little stations with 50 different, 60 different works, and everyone sort of goes to the work that attracts them and learns whatever they can from that particular work. So my son at 18 months in his Montessori program, the only work that he cared to go to was a plastic lawnmower that they had set up there. And I was very, the first time it was fine, then after the second or third time that he always returned to that lawnmower, I went to the instructor very upset saying, how is my son going to learn to count and do long division when he's focused on this lawnmower right now at 18 months? And what the Montessori, I mean, very experienced instructor said, they'll learn it when they're ready. And so sort of coming into what you're talking about, I mean, half of this we already talked about with the previous speaker talking about age, you know, age differences. But I would even go past that. Now I'm going to go to another example. I'm currently watching on Amazon Prime a television series called Mrs. Maisel. I mean, and it's the story of a woman becoming a standup comedian in New York City. And just sort of watching her, my takeaway from it was you have to play to each audience and every audience is different. And so obviously when you have a certain type of information that you're trying to get across, it gets more complex. But I would just suggest to throw popcorn if you have to, but also play to the audience and try to figure out some way. I mean, you can get a laugh as a comedian or not and figure out whether you're doing it right. But there's some other learning from the audience that I would hope would help us become better speakers for the particular show as well. Number one, empiric rule for presentations, know the audience. I mean, you have to start where the audience is. And to the degree, some of it is actually documented in that there are associations that you make that will then allow them to remember better, perceive it better. But you're 100% correct, yes, know the audience. Thank you. Hi, Dean. Hi. How you doing? So my name is Denise Clement, Patel retired. I want to bring in some tips from a totally different spectrum. Please, yeah. Which is sales and marketing. And what they know is it takes eight to 12 touches with someone to- I'm sorry, eight to 12 what? Eight to 12 touches. In other words, eight to 12 times that you actually contact somebody or touch them to actually get them to remember. So I'm going to bring in some tips from sales and marketing. And what they know is it takes eight to 12 touches with someone to- I'm sorry, eight to 12 what? Eight to 12 touches. In other words, eight to 12 times that you actually contact somebody or touch them to actually get them to remember. So I'm going to bring in some tips from sales and marketing. And what they know is it takes eight to 12 touches with someone to- I'm sorry, eight to 12 what? Eight to 12 touches. And what they know is it takes eight to 12 touches with someone to- I'm sorry, eight to 12 what? Eight to 12 touches. In other words, eight to 12 times that you actually contact somebody or touch them to actually get them to incorporate your message. Interesting. Yeah, GE has something similar to that. They say, like, you have to tell people seven times before you get even beginnings of behavior change. It's the same kind of concept. Same concept. And then the other thing is start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. If you can start with a story. There's actually a fair, again, there's just way too much, but there are actually things about narratives and they do EEGs as people are getting narratives and which parts of their brains light up and whatnot. If you think of what a story is, it combines a lot of these little nuggets of facts of how things are presented. You repeat things in a story. You have an emotional dimension to it. You structure it in a way where people can expect things and usually there's a little moral point to a good story. Exactly. Stories, they're good. They're complex, though, and not everybody can tell a story. Thank you, Denise. Dr. Peterson. What you're sharing certainly fits into a larger context that we hear more often and that is mind, body, emotions, and spirit. Now, I know you weren't going to talk about inspiration, but you did talk about mind and about emotions, but I think body is important too. Kinesthetic learning is so important. I will never forget Miss Merriman, my third grade teacher, because she let us become a tribe of Indians. We went out and we collected walnuts and we put them in a pot and we heated them up outside the classroom and we made a dye, a walnut dye. We brought sheets from home and we made little smocks that went over our shoulders. We dyed the smocks with the walnut dye. We made Indian diagrams on our smocks and colored them in with wax. We then learned to do dances. Later in the spring, she taught us as third graders to do square dances and our parents made us costumes and we learned to bow to your partner and alimand and do-si-do. I think that experiential learning, kinesthetic learning, is very, very important as well. Oh, gosh, yeah. Oh, very much so. It's great to have you remind us of all of these elements that create a memorable experience. I would ask everyone here, can we think of the memorable teachers and what they had us do that were so memorable? There's a reason that people learn MBAs by doing case studies, not by reading books. There's a reason that people become doctors by studying cases and bedside rounds and CPCs rather than simply learning books. The experiential, practical-oriented learning are the things that really stick. Thank you. Thank you, Kent. I remember a teacher I had that this is biochemistry, he's discussing circular dichroism. That's where you put, I guess, a polarized flat plane of light into a solution and it twists it and he came out and he had a yardstick hanging down from a pen and he went like this and like this and he says, what happens is you change the frequencies of the light until finally and then the pens start going around, finally it hits that frequency that's exactly where the molecules are. That's how you know what the molecules are. I remember that, it's been more than 10 years for sure. But you absolutely can. Yes, please. My name is Ghazala Qazi. I have two questions. Sure. One is what about the colors? You think color also makes a difference in the memory? If the different color slides or something? Yeah. Your background color was yellow and it was taking more, you know. There's a whole, there's books about matching colors that are complement versus contrasting. Depends on what effect you're trying to get. You have to take into account 5% of your male audience won't see a red laser pointer because they're deuteropes, you know, they're not color blind, they just have a red-green color deficiency. Color is very fascinating but it adds to the visual dimension and when it's pleasing, you're going to remember it. I mean, again, you remember pleasant things, you remember emotionally controversial things but at some point you can't keep that up so you want to kind of then go into something pleasant. So colors are very important. Do you do anything for colors in your slides or? No, I was just thinking. There's books that have color wheels that kind of show you what colors go with what. I'm a deuterope so I can't, you know, I always assume I'm seeing something other than what other people are seeing but. My second question is that we were always taught to use neutral language, you know, not emotional language. Yes. So, you know, what do you think of that? Well remember, emotional doesn't have to be, you don't have to go into againstness. You know, you can, if you have emotional language, you know, it can be pathos, it can be sympathy, it can be, you know, aren't we all feeling this terrible disgust for this thing? You know, in other words, it doesn't have to be some horrendous gut-wrenching thing that's going to, you know, turn people off, you know, I concur. But again, people remember it maybe because it's unpleasant. I mean, that's just, you know, that's how we grew up in evolution, I guess. One, okay, I think we're, one more question. Yeah, please. One last quick question. Sure. Since I've got to plan a session for next year at this conference. Do you take a different approach or in general, are we taking a different approach in giving lectures of instead of teaching people facts and information, are we teaching them more concepts, approaches, strategies? And you know, does it matter, you know, that concept based on what you presented today? As I've spoken to our TED speakers about, sometimes you just got to go through the facts. If you're doing like the 14 steps of putting in an interjugular line, and if you miss one, you're going to kill somebody, you just got to go through the facts. I mean, that's just the reality of it. There's also a concept from electronics called impedance matching, you know, where you're putting a current through a wire, and if it's too little, it doesn't charge, the light bulb doesn't go off, and if it's too much, it burns out everything. And people are like that, you know, they, has anybody here ever seen Lucille Ball, the chocolate factory, you know, where the conveyor belt's going by, and her job with Ethyl is to wrap each one and put back on the conveyor belt, and this stern person goes here, if you miss even one of those, you're fired, and she walks out, and so Lucy and Ethyl are, you know, doing it, and it's going on, they're saying, hey, we got this, and the supervisor comes back out and goes, looks like things are going fine, speed it up, and so they start doing it, and finally they start, like, stuffing them in their hats, and putting them in their hats, very funny, but that's like our brain, you know, it can only take so much, you have a huge advantage if people come and sit in your presentation, they have a motivation to do that, you know, and usually in a conference like this, that motivation is free will as opposed to, you know, court ordered, you know, you must go to your lecture, so, so, if you, you know, Steve Jobs had this notion that everything had to be in threes, you know, anything, and my impression of the way minds are is that people, you know, count one, two, three, many, and that's, so if you start adding more than that, you know, if they're highly motivated, you know, they're medical students, they got to know this stuff, fine, but if it's an audience that you're trying to move or persuade in any way, if you overload them, you risk sort of missing the message, so that's, those are my thoughts, I hope that helps. We are at time, I want to thank you all for coming, I really appreciate it.

presentation skills

communication

message effectiveness

repetition

emotion

structure

multisensory exposure

memory improvement

audience understanding