A Ten-Thousand-Character Guide to How Your Brain Likes to Be Spoken To | Feifan 08

What we’ll cover

Highly effective self-directed learning, memories that never seem to fade, dazzlingly good speeches, persuasion that can sway people’s minds… What do all these things have in common? The answer is that they have all mastered the trick of helping the brain take in information quickly and well.

In this book, the Harvard neuroscientist will answer, one by one, the stubborn questions about getting information across that arise when you have to learn, socialize, and work:

• Can you listen to music while studying? • Why do you forget vocabulary almost as soon as you memorize it? • How can you stop the people in the audience from playing with their phones during a meeting? • When you meet an important client, how do you make a deep first impression? • Why does making a PPT take so much time and effort, yet produce so little in the end? • What can you do when speaking in public makes you so nervous that your mind goes completely blank?

Twelve cognitive principles and four things the brain likes will give you a fresh perspective and make it easy to master the methods and strategies the brain uses to quickly remember, understand, and accept information.

You’ll hear about

• Learning to take in information more effectively and strengthen your learning and memory
• Understanding how to put information out there and improve your communication and self-expression
• Grasping the underlying logic of the brain’s cognition and gaining the ability to see through counterintuitive tricks

Key quote

Learning these techniques for taking in and putting out information isn’t just about becoming a better speaker or communicator, or an even more formidable top student… More importantly, they can help us understand ourselves and other people better.

Just put one or two keywords at most on a PPT slide. Don’t paste an entire sentence up there. The moment people start reading what you’ve written, they can’t hear what you’re saying.

The general rule is that the more your knowledge and skills are tied to one particular setting or one particular state, the harder they are to transfer.

About the author

Jared Cooney Horvath　Cognitive neuroscientist and educationalist; honorary research fellow at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. He has conducted research and given lectures at more than 250 schools around the world, including Harvard University and the University of Melbourne.