How to Craft a Memorable Message, According to Science

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Every week, I carefully curate inspiring articles and share my thoughts, accompanied by motivational quotes. I hope you enjoy this next edition of my Monday Motivation, and I eagerly anticipate hearing your feedback and suggestions for future topics.

This week, I would like to reflect on questions I have been asked by friends and family about what I would study if I were entering university today (and whether I would enter university).? I have pondered this a lot, but I don’t like to provide explicit advice in terms of areas of study.? Rather, I usually respond that we should not underestimate the value of storytelling and an ability to convey a message clearly and memorably.

Today’s article, How to Craft a Memorable Message, According to Science, focuses on exactly this area. Research has shown that we forget much of what we experience in a day. Knowing this, how do you create messages so there is a better chance of people remembering them? The author uses concepts from memory science to help you craft messages — whether it’s a presentation, an email, or a speech — that will be likely to stick. The key to memorable communication lies not in conveying the answer, but in establishing a compelling question. The author highlights the four C’s of memorable messaging which we will look into below.

Chunk it up.

The human brain can only keep a limited amount of information in mind at any given time. That limit, or what psychologists call “working memory capacity,” might be as small as three to four pieces of information. This bottleneck significantly constrains the amount of information you can expect your audience to take in. Fortunately, there is a key loophole: There is no fixed definition for what constitutes one piece of information. To get around working memory capacity limits, we can use, "chunking," in which we explicitly tie together the points that we want to convey under the umbrella of a central idea. With this approach, your listener can stitch the pieces together in a meaningful way and build a rich memory for that material.

Make it concrete.

When communicating about a complex topic, you can make your message memorable with a concrete example. Research shows that people find it harder to memorize an abstract concept like, “justice,” than something that we can easily visualize or imagine, like, “gavel.”

Provide callbacks.

Recalling something that we previously learned can make it stronger and easier to access when we will need it. In one study, researchers showed that when people were trying to memorize words in Swahili, studying the words to retain them was not as effective as trying to recall them on a test. Consider explicitly connecting the dots with terms like “As we saw earlier” or “Building on what we learned previously”. As a bonus, it helps people chunk the new information with what they've previously read, which also helps readers remember.

Spark their curiosity.

If you only focus your presentation on leading up to a final message, you are missing a huge opportunity. Research suggests the key to stimulating that dopamine bump is to highlight a knowledge gap. We all have gaps in our knowledge about the world, but we are often unaware of those gaps. By highlighting the gap between what your audience knows and what you want them to know, you can elicit a little error signal in their brains, leading to a state that is conducive to new learning.

I continue to be convinced that humans will remain at the center of society, business, politics and the like for a very long time. Therefore, the ability to convey a message and call to action will continue to be a critical skill to develop for a successful future.

Stay on the beat with me and have an amazing start to your week ?

Yours,

Mark

Source

Ranganath, C. (August 28, 2024) How to Craft a Memorable Message, According to Science. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2024/08/how-to-craft-a-memorable-message-according-to-science ?