The new science of neuromarketing has a good deal to offer public speakers who want to succeed with their audiences by delivering memorable speeches.  In their book Neuromarketing:  Understanding the “Buy Buttons” in your Customer’s Brain, marketers Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin give a simple, lucid account of the basics of brain science as applied to marketing.  Public speakers can use a great deal of it to enhance both their talks and their delivery of them.

The basic shape of our new picture of the human brain should be familiar by now to readers of this blog.  The unconscious mind is far larger, faster, and more powerful than the conscious mind.  Most of our decision-making is controlled by the unconscious mind.  Our conscious minds are easily overwhelmed by everyday experience, and we rely much more than we realize on our unconscious minds to handle most of our important thinking chores.  The basic role of the unconscious mind is to keep us alive and safe.  As such, it constantly scans the immediate neighborhood for threats to our safety and opportunities to eat and mate.   We signal what we find to the other humans in our area and they pick up on our emotional attitudes through mirror neurons that cause them to experience the same feelings we do. 

All of this basic wiring causes problems for us when we stand up to give a speech.  Our natural nervousness — because we find a large crowd in front of us — causes our unconscious minds to signal danger.  The audience picks up on that danger and goes into similar paroxysms of fight or flight thinking.  The only way to fight this is with a positive ‘script’ that causes you to send out happy messages to your new friends in the audience instead of messages of terror. 

Renvoise and Morin get most of this right, though they don’t go into as much detail as necessary to truly understand why we behave the way we typically do in front of a crowd.  Instead they focus on how to construct messages that will engage your audience and keep them interested – as befits their roles as marketers. 

For example, they offer the six triggers that what they call the “old brain” (the unconscious mind) responds to:

1.    Me (the brain is most interested in itself)
2.    Contrast (we respond quickly to clear contrasts – new vs old)
3.    Tangible Input (keep it concrete; avoid abstract words)
4.    The beginning and the end (that’s what we remember)
5.    Visual stimuli (we respond to pictures)
6.    Emotion (emotion is memorable)

Fill your speeches with these triggers and your audience will be hanging on your every word.  The book is positioned on the simple end of the complexity spectrum, but it’s a useful read for all public speakers nonetheless.