My good friend Mitch Joel and I share a trait:  we’re both infovores.  An infovore is someone who “indulges in and desires information gathering and interpretation,” according to some online dictionary I ran across while googling information about the number of people who died during the plague outbreak in Europe in the middle ages.  It seems like a number one should know, right? (It’s 75- 200 million — more than I thought. And quite a range.)

In fact, Mitch introduced me to the term, and I thought he had invented it, but it turns out that accolade belongs to two neuroscientists, Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel.

Recent research reveals that there’s a reason why Mitch and I are addicted to information – the brain rewards information bites in the same ways as it rewards food and money.  We hunger for all three – and in the same way.  When we get food, or money, or information, a study shows, we get a dopamine hit in two places, the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, aka some of the “pleasure centers” of the brain.

It’s why Mitch and I – and everyone else with a mobile phone – keep checking those phones.  There might be a little bite-sized bit of information to snack on.

Here’s the irony – we like information in the same way we like food, whether it’s good information or not.  There’s junk information, just like junk food, apparently.

And when we’re curious about something – when we want to know whether the royal baby is a boy or girl, say – then we overvalue the usefulness of the information, and get more pleasure from learning it, even if it’s junk information.

Thinking about the brain in this way yields several useful strategies for speakers and their speeches.

First of all, create curiosity.  Like Dan Brown, we need to get good at building suspense by teasing what’s going to come next and creating interest within the talk itself.  Perhaps even before the talk, in the advance marketing for it – “Find out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin in X’s upcoming speech.”  “X will reveal to this audience for the first time how to make lemonade when life hands you lemons.”  This curiosity creation is why clickbait is so addictive and works so well even though we should know better by now.  “What John Lennon said to Paul McCartney the Week Before He Died Will Astound You.”

Second, keep the information bite-sized.  The urge to tell an audience everything you know is difficult to resist, especially because one of the first things most speakers do when they learn that they have an upcoming speech is to research like crazy in order to learn everything possible – so that they know more than the audience will.  Then, they overdo the data dump and tell the audience way more than it wants to know.  Keep your information drip to the audience simple, fun, and easy to manage.

This points to a deeper way you can help the audience:  provide it with hierarchical thinking.  Rather than just launching into all the causes of the American Civil War, for example, say, “The most important reason for the Civil War was the question of slavery.  All other reasons pale in comparison.  Beyond that, there are three further reasons, but added together they are not as important as the first one.”  Help the audience by creating orders of importance, hierarchies of detail, and phased lists of content, rather than just telling that poor, information-addled group all that you know.

Third, mix up the kinds of information you offer.  I had a math teacher in college who was absolutely brilliant at providing his oft-baffled students with fascinating little bits of biographical information about the mathematicians we studied, in order to spice up the meal with a bit of variety in lieu of yet another formula.  He explained polynomial theorems to us, for example, enlivened with details of Évariste Galois’ tempestuous life and death in a duel.  To this day, I’m weak on polynomials, but fascinated by Galois.

The more we learn about how the brain works, the better we can create speeches (and any kind of information) that fits the way the brain likes to consume information, whether you’re also an infovore or not.