100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People

THE UNCONSCIOUS DIRECTS ATTENTION

Imagine you’re walking down a path in the woods when you see a snake on the ground. You freeze and jump backwards. Your heart races. You’re ready to run away. But wait, it’s not a snake. It’s just a stick. You calm down and keep walking on the path. You noticed the stick, and even responded to it, in a largely unconscious way.
Sometimes you’re aware of your conscious attention, but often what you pay attention to is directed by your unconscious.

People Can’t Resist Paying Attention to Food, Sex, and Danger

Have you ever wondered why traffic always slows when people are driving by an accident? Do you moan about the fact that people are attracted by the gruesome, and yet find that you glance over too as you drive by? Well, it’s not really your fault that you (and everybody else) can’t resist looking at scenes of danger. It’s your old brain telling you to PAY ATTENTION.

People Have Three Brains, Not One

In Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click, I talk about the idea that we really don’t have one brain, we have three. The new brain is the conscious, reasoning, logical brain that we think we know best; the mid-brain is the part that processes emotions; and the old brain is the part that is most interested in your survival. From an evolutionary perspective, the old brain developed first. In fact, that part of our brain is very similar to that of a reptile, which is why some call it the “reptilian brain.”

The old brain asks, “can I eat it? can I have sex with it? Will it kill me?”

The job of your old brain is to constantly scan the environment and answer the questions “Can I eat it? Can I have sex with it? Will it kill me?” That’s really all the old brain cares about. When you think about it, this is important. Without food, you’ll die; without sex, the species won’t survive; and if you’re killed, the other two questions don’t matter. So animal brains developed early on to care intensely about these three topics. As animals evolved, they developed other capacities (emotions, logical thought), but they retained a part of the brain that’s always scanning for these three critical things.

The old brain won’t let you resist it

What this means is that you just can’t resist noticing food, sex, or danger, no matter how hard you try not to. It’s the old brain working. You don’t necessarily have to do anything once you notice it. For example, you don’t have to eat the chocolate cake when you see it, you don’t have to flirt with the attractive woman who walked into the room, and you don’t have to run away from the big, scary guy who walked in the room with the good-looking woman. But you will notice all of those things whether you want to or not.

The old brain is easily distracted

Because of this unconscious directing of attention, your audience is going to be easily distracted during your presentation. You have to minimize these distractions.
If you have any control over the setup of the room, try to prevent having a door that people come in and go out of in the peripheral vision of the audience. Every time someone comes in or goes out, the unconscious will look to see who it is (that is, will look to see if a scary animal has entered the room).
Avoid mentioning or showing pictures of food if you are speaking near a mealtime. Although your mention of food will initially get attention, the audience is likely to keep thinking about food from that point until the end of your presentation.
If it is appropriate to use pictures of attractive people or dangerous situations, go ahead and use a few of those images. They will certainly grab the audience’s attention.

EXPECTATIONS OF FREQUENCY AFFECT ATTENTION

Farid Seif, a businessman from Houston, Texas, boarded a flight in Houston with a loaded handgun in his laptop case. He made it through security without a problem. Seif was not a terrorist. The gun was legal in Texas; he simply forgot to take it out of his laptop case before his trip.
Security at the Houston airport did not detect the gun. It should have been easily seen by security personnel looking at the x-ray scanner, but no one noticed it.
The US Department of Homeland Security routinely tests the ability to pass security screening with guns, bomb parts, and other forbidden items by sending them through with undercover agents. The US government won’t release the figures officially yet, but the estimate is that 70 percent of these tests fail, meaning most of the time the agents are able to get through security, like Farid Seif, with objects that are supposed to be spotted.
Why does this happen? Why do security personnel notice the bottle of lotion that is too large, but miss a loaded handgun?

You can see an ABC News video on this topic at https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/loaded-gun-slips-past-tsa-screeners/story?id=12412458

A Mental Model of Frequency

Security personnel miss the loaded handguns and bomb parts at least in part because they don’t encounter them frequently. A security officer works for hours at a time, watching people and looking at the scanner screen. He develops an expectation about how frequently certain violations occur. For example, he probably encounters nail clippers or containers of hand lotion fairly often, and so he expects to see those and looks for them. On the other hand, he probably doesn’t encounter loaded handguns or bomb parts very often. He creates a mental model about how frequently any of these items will appear and then, unconsciously, starts paying attention accordingly.
Andrew Bellenkes (1997) conducted research on this expectation and found that if people expect something to happen with a particular frequency, they often miss it if it happens more or less than their expectations. They have a mental model of how often something will occur, and they have set their attention to that mental model.

People Habituate to Stimuli

Have you ever visited with someone who had a clock that chimed every hour? You’re lying in bed about to doze off, and there goes that darn clock again. “How can anyone get any sleep in this house?” you wonder. Yet everyone who lives in the house sleeps just fine. They have habituated to the sound of the clock chimes. Because they hear it every hour, they don’t pay attention to it anymore.
Your unconscious mind is constantly surveying your environment, making sure there is nothing in it that is dangerous. That’s why anything new or novel in the environment will get your attention. But if the same signal occurs again and again, eventually your unconscious mind decides it is not new anymore and therefore starts to ignore it.

Keeping Things Unpredictable

Because people habituate to stimuli, it helps to keep things at least a little bit unpredictable. If your presentation gets too predictable, people will lose attention. This goes against the adage “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” I give an alternative to that structure in the chapter “How to Craft Your Presentation.”
Although it is important to have an organized presentation, you need to build in some surprises. If you use the aforementioned mini-breaks, you will be making things a little bit unpredictable.