Brains and communication: How to implant your brand

Why a basic understanding of neuroscience is a must for all marketers

The human brain is amazing. It is the most powerful computational device ever created.

The average brain has around 80 billion neurons and somewhere between 100 trillion — 1 quadrillion neural connections.

Despite this awesomeness, we’re rubbish at one-time learning. Flash a telephone number on a screen and most of us would only be able to recall four, maybe five digits.

For optimal recall, the brain has to create new neural pathways. Yes, the meat in your brain has to physically re-arrange itself…and that takes time.

But once learning is ingrained, often through repetition, it becomes robust.

You’ve probably heard a statistic that goes something like this: it takes 10,000 hours of practice / learning to become an expert. For an expert, their understanding has become ingrained. Yet this often leads to the tyranny of knowledge — that we assume others know what we know. We present information on this basis and wonder why we’ve failed to communicate effectively… Remember that last jargon-filled presentation you sat through with impenetrable technical content? Can you recall anything? Nope, me neither.

Yet, in the right context, leveraging ingrained learning can be incredibly powerful.

We often only have seconds to communicate information. According to a Microsoft study (client), our attention spans are now c. 8 seconds — that’s goldfish territory.

Leveraging our ingrained knowledge to help the mind cognitively fill in the blanks enables us convey a lot more information in a short space of time. The secret then, is knowing your audience and what ingrained knowledge is universal.

If I hummed the tune to ‘happy birthday’, for example, your brain will probably come up with the words in your mind. I’ve activated ingrained knowledge through an aural trigger.

Metaphors also work well, building on existing knowledge to explain or interpret a new concept. Ridley Scott’s pitch for the film Alien was famously simple: ‘Jaws in space’.

But the real key to accessing memory is visual.

40% of your brain is dedicated to interpreting visual / spacial information and you typically process visual information 8–10 times faster than language or written text. Your brain loves processing stimulating images, releasing dopamine as a reward.

So whether recalling or storing knowledge, visual stimuli are extremely important. Memory champions, for example, use visual cues to store and retrieve an incredible amount of information.

And if we start to connect memories through stories, then we have a winning formula: visual storytelling.

Having a basic understanding of neuroscience is a must for all marketers. And remember, an idle visual cortex is the devil’s playground for cognitive understanding and effective communication. So here’s a picture of cute kitten. Next time you see a similar one, think of this blog post.