One of the mysteries of the brain is why our conscious minds are so slow.  We process on the order of 10 – 40 bits of information per second consciously – but up to 100 million bits of information per second unconsciously.  (Zheng et al., 2024) So what’s happening to all that information?  Wouldn’t it make more sense if we could at least think at 50 or 5 million bps consciously?  It would certainly be handy when it comes to getting tedious things like your taxes figured out, or giving a dazzling number of reasons to an obstinate teenager as to why “they” can’t borrow the car.

One theory about the disparity is that we do remember everything, stuffed into our vast unconscious minds, but that our retrieval systems are relatively poor – especially for modern life.  Everything is stored in a vast mental filing cabinet, but the labels are mostly unreadable or non-existent.  I’ve lost track of the number of passwords I have forgotten; let alone the ones I’m still trying to remember.  And don’t get me started on two-factor authentication.  At least I don’t have to remember the 6 digits for more than a few seconds, but the other day some site I was visiting threw me a curve – a mix of letters and numbers.  That brings the total number of possible combinations to over 2.1 billion, if AI is to be believed. And then there was the site that asked for 8 numbers and letters.

That’s modern life and our brains, which retrieve memories based on emotion, are sadly ill-equipped for such shenanigans.  Our old, slow conscious minds with poor retrieval processes apparently evolved to follow linear paths and evade saber-tooth tigers.  For that you don’t need speed; you need focus.  That rare moment when the shadow of a saber-tooth flitted through our peripheral vision was when the emotion of fear prompted instant recall, access to the unconscious mind, and evasive action at speed.

For communicators, the slow processing speed of the brain means that the moments when we would love to be fast – the quip, the response, the answer to that annoying question, thinking on our feet in general – we only occasionally can be.  Mostly, we’re stuck looking like a particularly obtuse deer caught in the headlights of rapid response.

Is there anything that can be done about this?  There is, and it involves connecting with our emotions as a conscious technique of preparation for public speaking of all kinds.  When you have a speech ready, then mark the emotion that you want to convey every few minutes during the talk.  Don’t do too many; unless you’ve had years in acting school or Improv, this will take some practice.

If you can deliver not only a series of words, but also a series of emotions to go with them, then you will be leveraging your unconscious mind along with your conscious one.  And you may find, as you get more fluid conjuring up emotions with practice, that your access to your unconscious mind improves.  Then you may have the witty rejoinder at the ready, as French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau famously did when he quipped, “The good Lord had only ten!” in response to President Woodrow Wilson’s long, apparently tedious speech about his Fourteen Points for the post-World-War-One world order.

These are the moments great speakers live for.