Stop Talking, Start Influencing: 12 Insights From Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome Dr. Jared Horvath. Jared is a cognitive neuroscientist based out of the University of Melbourne, specializing in human thought, learning, and brain stimulation. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scientific American, and other notable outlets. And he's the author of Stop Talking, Start Influencing, 12 Insights from Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick.

[00:43] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:45] SPEAKER_00:

Jared, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:47] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you so much for having me on.

[00:49] SPEAKER_00:

So tell us a little bit about the intended purpose and audience for Stop Talking, Start Influencing, because when you pick up this book, it is striking. Visually, there are lots of photographs, and as a grown-up, I don't get to read lots of books with photographs to myself, mostly for the kids. But talk to us a little bit about the purpose behind the book.

[01:09] SPEAKER_02:

So I was originally a teacher. So my passion is always in the classroom and still working with students. But back when I was teaching, that's when the brain stuff started to become super sexy. So I had this wonderful idea that if I go back and learn about the brain, that'll make me a tons better teacher. Little did I know, academia is a black hole. And once you're in, it is really hard to leave.

[01:30]

So the last about 12 years now, I've been studying the brain and psychology with the interest of saying, okay, how do people learn? And can we use that knowledge to influence our teaching practices. So this book is kind of a culmination of a long time of research. And it's meant primarily, it was originally called Stop Talking, Start Teaching. So it was meant primarily for teachers to say, okay, if we know students learn this way, how can we adapt and apply that to kind of drive our practices? But of course, once you get a book into a publisher's hands, they have bigger ideas and they thought the word teaching was a little too narrow.

[02:05]

So that's where the word influencing came. So it's kind of expanded now to include all levels of teaching. So if you're in leadership, if you're in business, if you're in marketing, anyone who's trying to influence somebody else by passing along information. we can now use these kind of concepts to drive those decisions.

[02:22] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And, you know, I think when we reflect on our own learning experiences as students and then try to apply those in our own teaching or in our own leadership and see the relationship between helping someone else understand something that we want them to understand and actually helping persuade them. You know, I remember reading Dan Pink's book, To Sell is Human, and really getting a lot out of that and understanding that this, you know, the idea of, Communicating and motivating and getting our message across to other people is something that we certainly have to do every day as leaders, certainly have to do every day as teachers, as parents, and just as human beings. Communication fundamentally is about moving other people, influencing other people, and yet often we think that just talking is enough. Like, I said what I was thinking, and now you know it, so we're good to go, right?

[03:10] SPEAKER_02:

And let's double that up. Let's throw a couple of slides behind me with a bunch of words that mimic what I'm saying to you. And this must be doubly good. Now you're going to learn. And that's where you realize now there's got to be a little bit more to it than that.

[03:22] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I remember the day I got a digital projector from my classroom. This is dating me a little bit, but we'd been overhead projectors, transparencies prior to that. And I was convinced that PowerPoint was going to change everything in my science instruction. And you already know the spoiler there. So talk to us a little bit about some of these big principles.

[03:41]

What are some of these big principles around communication and teaching other people about that neuroscience has informed that kind of challenged some of our traditional ways of thinking about communication.

[03:51] SPEAKER_02:

One of the big things I've learned coming through the neuro is that teachers and educators know so much more than we ever give them credit for and then a lot of them stand up for. So it's a lot of the principles I think people go, oh, yeah, that's a great principle. What the neuroscience can do is it can come in and explain kind of why it's working. And the idea then is once you understand the mechanisms, then you have a much better chance of playing with and having agency over that technique. So let's – if we just stick with, say, PowerPoint, one of the big ones then is it turns out that human beings cannot read while listening to somebody speak simultaneously. And what's happening is whenever you read something, if you actually pay attention, you hear a voice, your own little silent reading voice.

[04:37]

And it turns out to the brain, that silent reading voice is processed in exactly the same way as an out loud speaking voice. So just like you can't listen to two people speaking simultaneously, you can hear them both, but you can only pay attention to one speaker at a time. It's the same thing there. I can't read and listen to you speak because I'm essentially trying to listen to either me or you. So here's a mechanism now where we know the brain cannot process speech and reading simultaneously. So now as teachers, we can go back and say, okay, let's go to PowerPoint.

[05:09]

What am I putting on my slides? Am I asking the impossible of my students? Am I giving handouts and asking them to read notes while trying to listen to me? And then you go even deeper and you start to say, well, what does this mean for writing? What does this mean for taking notes? Can you write while listening to me speak simultaneously?

[05:28]

And it just keeps snowballing from there. So we know the basic principle. Now we get to play with, okay, how does that manifest in my class and with my students, with the people I'm trying to influence?

[05:38] SPEAKER_00:

if we think about bad professional development, like, oh, there's a required training on the new assessment system and the software platform that comes with it. And everybody has to go to a required training and you get there and there's a PowerPoint and the presenter has decided that it would be a great idea to read the PowerPoint for the entire two hour training. And that's when we wanna like poke our eyes out with forks, right? When we know we're gonna have to sit through somebody reading word for word off of PowerPoint slides. But you're saying it's not just that, like, first of all, let me clarify, you're saying, If I'm reading verbatim off of a PowerPoint slide to you, are you reading along with me? Are you hearing two different voices, my voice and your own internal reading voice?

[06:18]

Is that what you're saying?

[06:19] SPEAKER_02:

Bingo. So we can take it two directions. That one is yep. So if you're saying the same words that I'm reading, it turns out you can speak at a certain pace. So let's say maybe 80 to 100 words a minute comfortably. I can read about 200 to 300 words a minute.

[06:36]

So if you're simply reading a slide, almost immediately I start to read out of sync with you. So now I'm trying to pay attention to your voice and my voice, which means once we're out of sync, it's one or the other. I can either close my eyes and just listen to you or block you out and just read the words. But it gets even worse when you say, okay, I'm going to teach you something and then I'm going to have a slide with a bunch of bullet points that may or may not be exactly what I'm talking about at this moment. So they could be relative but tangential. Just in case I forgot to mention a point, it's up there on a board.

[07:09]

Now you're in a double whammy where seriously I can't listen to you and read that slide at the same time. So what I try and do is jump back and forth. So hear your words, then read the slide. Then hear your words, then read the slide. Can never do both simultaneously. And when I start jumping back and forth, I start losing information from both.

[07:30]

So it would have been better in those instances, I always say – If you turned off the projector, people will have learned more. Or if you just printed out your slides and never said a word and just let everyone silently read, people will learn more. So if you're going to be playing with a tool like PowerPoint, knowing these principles becomes important because you're not just making it harder to learn, you're impairing people's ability to learn when you use the tooling correctly.

[07:55] SPEAKER_00:

So what is optimal? I mean, I know I've heard a lot of just straight up anti-PowerPoint messages over the years that say, you know, maybe we should just completely get rid of it. But let's say we do have information that we need to impart to a group of people or, you know, we need to give a presentation like that is a format that's required for some reason. What's the most effective way to communicate with that? You know, if we can't just get rid of it completely or send a handout, and say, you know, we're going to spend the next 15 minutes reading silently. How do we do the best we can with that tool?

[08:23] SPEAKER_02:

So I think there's a number of cool techniques, kind of ideas you can use. But I think the kind of the three big ones are first ditch all the words you can have up to about we traditionally say seven words or fewer people can read without having to translate. So if you have, say, two or three keywords, fine. Anything over that, you're pretty much screwing your audience. So scrap the words. So if you can't have words, what then resonates well?

[08:48]

That's where you bring in things like images. So it turns out I can listen to you speak while looking at an image at the same time. This is why TV works so dang effectively. And more importantly, once I combine speech with an image, not only can I process both simultaneously, but in this instance, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. By combining these two things, I can actually boost memory, understanding, and comprehension better than if I only had one or the other in isolation. So this is what we mean by sensory integration.

[09:19]

All of a sudden, if all I was doing was listening to you talk, and I can memorize 20%, or look at pictures, I can memorize 30%, together I can now memorize 70%. I get a bigger boost by having a linked picture with the words you're saying. So we start to say, okay, start bringing in images, and here's where you get to go into fun ideas like, okay, how many images per slide? Turns out one is plenty. Turns out graphs and charts and those things aren't images. So if you throw a giant graph up there, that's more akin to words because the details are so important.

[09:56]

People need to expend effort to interpret a graph. So there are kind of rule breaks on what do I mean by images. And the third thing that we typically say is also we call it spatial predictability. So it turns out within two to three slides, if you're using the same layout, people can intuitively memorize that layout and that frees up attention for them to start focusing more on your words. As opposed to if every slide comes up and it's totally different, I now actually have to waste attention and cognitive resources just trying to interpret the next slide. So the more consistent you can get between slides, the more you're allowing me to actually start to engage with you as opposed to just trying to figure out what's going on.

[10:36] SPEAKER_00:

As you've been talking and I've been listening, I've been looking at your book and a lot of our listeners might say, well, you know, I certainly have sat through some terrible PowerPoint presentations, but I've also sat through presentations where I could read what's on the screen and listen. Are you saying when you say that we can't do those simultaneously, are we just switching back and forth rapidly? Is that what's going on there?

[10:56] SPEAKER_02:

Bingo. So you think you're doing it well. And then as soon as we test your knowledge afterwards, you realize there are just massive gaps in what's going on. So it's actually a pretty easy fix. If you go tonight, so even with this podcast going, if somebody, one of your listeners picks up a book or a magazine or a newspaper and just starts reading while listening to this, they'll notice really quickly that they're doing one or the other. Never are they hearing our voices, and they're hearing our voices the whole time, but never are they understanding our words while simultaneously understanding the words on the paper.

[11:30]

So if you're jumping back and forth, now we've got this issue of multitasking. which is another thing we know no human being can do. Once you try and jump back and forth between tasks, what starts to happen is you start to lose information from both and you start to change the way you encode what you're learning. So most memories go through a very specific memory circuit. Cool. Once you're multitasking, that memory circuit tends to shut down and a secondary memory circuit fires up, which is really, we call it kind of a less reliable, more automatic system.

[12:04]

So even though you might be learning something, it tends to be almost subconscious what you're learning, very hard to access in the future. So you're essentially just killing your ability to do any learning by trying to jump back and forth. So I always tell people, if you're at a presentation and there's a speaker with a bunch of, they've given you a handout, you put the handout away. If they've got words on slides, close your eyes, focus your attention on just the speaker. The idea being that you're going to get more information from somebody actively talking about and discussing a topic than you will from their bullet points on the topic. And if you can just focus all your attention there and not try and jump back and forth, you'll do a lot better job of understanding and learning.

[12:43] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Jared, let's get into a little bit of the neuroscience behind learning, because for our audience of educators, obviously we're very interested in helping students learn, helping them learn through whatever instructional activities we're working on, helping them listen and learn. And we as educators take a lot of responsibility for monitoring student learning and responding when it's clear that students are not learning, catching those misconceptions, surfacing those misconceptions, because we know we don't just want to lecture and have kids write things down and hopefully retain it. But as you said, probably let a lot of that go out the window. What are some big principles for understanding learning and what role does error play in that learning?

[13:26] SPEAKER_02:

So believe it or not, turns out we've got kind of two different processing systems. And very rarely are we in what we'll call coder mode, which is when you're live, present, actively changing your brain and tweaking stories. The vast majority of the time, you're simply living in prediction mode, which is you use your understanding, your learnings from the past to just make a guess about what's going to happen. And so long as reality is even remotely close to your assumption, you just continue to live in that prediction. So for instance, right now, anyone listening to this podcast they're not actually hearing the words coming out of my mouth. They're about one to two seconds in front of me predicting the words that are going to come out.

[14:05]

And so long as those words are close enough, you get the prediction. So the thing that makes something like errors so powerful is you realize, okay, if I really want to impact you and influence you, one of my key things is I have to kick you out of prediction mode and into your coder. I need to take you out of what you think you know so you can actively start to change and update your programs. And when I mean change and update, I mean physically change your brain. That is essentially you learning. The easiest way, now there are tons of ways to get people into their coder, but the easiest way is through errors, through mistakes, through misconceptions.

[14:40]

As soon as one of your predictions fails, you don't have a choice. You have to access your coder, which means you zip into the present, all your attention and resources get focused on this moment, And now, congratulations, you are real easy to teach and you're ready to learn. Essentially, the system is primed. So when you make an error, so when a prediction fails dramatically enough to access your coder, it would be awesome if you did automatically learn. But it turns out we have this issue. At that moment, you can then enter a choice.

[15:11]

So love it or hate it, commit an error, your coder kicks in. You can feel it happening. But at that moment, you can then choose to connect with that error in which case learning starts to happen. We can watch your brain flip into a unique mode called theta, you're starting to learn. Or you could choose to ignore it. You can say, oh, I don't like this, turn it off, your brain flips into a thing called beta, and about three days later, you'll forget you ever made that error.

[15:35]

You'll go right back to your old predictions. Now, unfortunately, the vast majority of people choose to ignore errors. We all get the sensation, but as soon as we get that error alarm, that feeling, We shut it down because it feels very uncomfortable. So one of the big things we have to do at any level of teaching and learning is learn to trigger that error alarm and then learn to engage with it. How do we set up a context that allows people to feel comfortable around it and say, okay, that's just part of the learning process. Let's do it rather than running away from it.

[16:09] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And let's talk about the role of feedback, because obviously, as educators, we can notice sometimes when students do have a misconception based on a question they ask or how they answer a question. What are some ways that we can provide feedback to help students learn from those errors that come up in the course of learning?

[16:26] SPEAKER_02:

Perfect. Yeah. So in the science of learning field, so when it comes down to pure learning. The entire role of feedback is to externally trigger someone's error alarm. So the vast majority of the time you're living in a predictor, anytime there's a big enough discrepancy between your prediction and reality, your error alarm goes off, your coder activates, you're ready to learn. So that's when you're going down your stairs and you think there's two left, but there's only one left and you do that stumble.

[16:52]

Cool, huge difference, you're there. Most of the time though, the prediction and reality, they're close enough that your brain just goes, you know what? The prediction's fine. You know what? It's 90% there. You're surviving.

[17:04]

Have a good time. And it won't trigger that. So you don't even notice you're making errors. What feedback then does is it's meant from a learning angle to help you recognize errors that your brain would otherwise just whitewash over and say, eh, you're close enough. So if you think about the three aspects of effective feedback, you say, where am I going? What's my goal?

[17:24]

How am I going? Where to next? The where am I going? What's my goal? What you're doing is you're setting up the prediction. You think you're doing X.

[17:32]

Your brain, yourself, you think X is your goal. How am I going? I now externally point at the discrepancy. You thought you were spelling the word this way. You actually spelt it this way. Now, what I've done through that feedback is I've caused that error alarm.

[17:47]

I've caused your coder to kick in because you will have otherwise missed it. And now I say, okay, where to next? Now I can say, how do we then start to update? Now that I've got you in this learning mode, what's the next step to update? And from there, you go then deeper where it's, okay, do I give you specific thing, ideas to fix it? And as you become a better learner, I can just give you strategies and then I can give you just metacognitive prompts.

[18:12]

So there's a giant trajectory to it. But at its base level, the entire point is for me to point out errors that you otherwise will have missed because your prediction was so strong your brain just said, eh, that's good enough. Don't worry about it.

[18:24] SPEAKER_00:

That reminds me of the importance of assessment, formative assessment, quizzes. And I think quizzes and tests have gotten kind of a bad rap in our standardized testing era, where we fear that we're over testing students. But I've also heard some very prominent educators and researchers argue that we're overlooking the power of quizzes and rapid feedback to help students realize what they understand and what they don't understand. What do you see as that role of maybe self-assessments or pop quizzes? I feel like the pop quiz has kind of died.

[18:58] SPEAKER_02:

I know. I love the pop quiz. I always thought that was the best. So we kind of got two angles on where the quizzes can sit. First, anytime you're quizzing, say, content knowledge like this, what you're doing is you're forcing the kid to recall that information. And we know that the key to forming a deep, lasting memory is accessing your memories.

[19:18]

We're always so focused on how am I putting it in. So if I just keep showing it to you, you'll learn it. Turns out that doesn't matter. You want a deep memory. You have to bring the information back up. So this is why I say take something like Game of Thrones.

[19:31]

I've watched it once, but I could tell you everything about it because I keep talking about it. I keep accessing that information. Or something like the periodic table. I've studied it dozens of times and passed quizzes on it. But because as soon as the quiz was done, I never pulled that information back up. that information is now dead.

[19:50]

So in this instance, one angle is that the quizzes, these tests, as a learning tool, they're incredible because all I'm doing is I'm forcing you to access information. I'm making those memories deeper for you. I'm bringing that fact back online. So I don't need to grade it. I don't need to give you a mark and rank you against other kids. I'm seriously just using the quiz to deepen your memory.

[20:11]

Now, the second line with that is then everyone goes, well, what if I'm into deeper learning? I don't really care about facts. It's a very sad but true concept in the science of learning that all learning starts with facts. You can't go deep until you go through the surface. You can't move into creativity and critical thinking until you have something to think about and be creative with. Input is everything.

[20:37]

So now bring back the quizzes and go, okay, cool. Why are we doing quizzes? A, it's to deepen your memory for this factual knowledge. Why would we want to do that? B, because it allows us to then move deep and enter into that real transformative learning that we truly care about. So skipping the quizzes, skipping the tests, I can see why people would say, hey, we want to go into this more project stuff.

[21:00]

But you can't do that by skipping those memory jogs, those fact surface-based learnings. You need that to make sure the other stuff has a home, has traction.

[21:11] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for saying that because I've been using this lately as kind of my rhetorical whipping boy here to talk about the oversimplification that we often bring to certain instructional practices. As leaders, sometimes we want good things to happen. And I've noticed in this case in particular that we have this tendency to push teachers to ask higher order questions. And we, as a profession, I've noticed this trend of giving teachers feedback that lower level questions, you know, the factual recall questions, whether that's lower in terms of Bloom's taxonomy or lower in terms of Webb's depth of knowledge, you know, whatever kind of framework we're using, we have been telling teachers that factual questions are bad. and that they're not rigorous and that they're not challenging and that we're just preparing our students, you know, to flip burgers and that, you know, that's the most they're going to do with their lives because they can't think critically and do analysis and synthesis if we ask them those factual questions.

[22:05]

I love what you said about you can't go deep until you go through the surface.

[22:09] SPEAKER_02:

Take all these kind of competencies, these C21 skills. They're fantastic. I mean, everyone, I want my kids to be able to critically think, to be creative. The question then no one asks is, cool, how do you develop that? How do you get there? And it turns out these competencies can't be directly taught because they necessarily are tied to the field, the discipline, the knowledge you're trying to apply it to.

[22:34]

So for instance, creativity changes depending on if I'm in, say, an artistic field or a scientific field or a medical field. Creativity subtly changes, and I can't apply it until I have those facts. So there's nothing to be scared about with facts so long as you don't stop there. The issue is you can't skip there. So I think the big problem is kind of like you were saying, I think we swung the pendulum way too far in one direction where we said, well, we were scared of doing only surface knowledge. So now we're doing only deep knowledge.

[23:05]

And the trick is, nope, it's trajectory. You've got to do both. Just know when you're doing one, know how you're trying to move it into the other. So if you take something like critical thinking, All of your listeners will be able, they have the skill of critical thinking. They use it all day, every day in their job. That's what makes them so effective and efficient.

[23:24]

They're listening to this. I guarantee you they're digging holes and finding cracks and adapting this for their own practices. Awesome. So with the understanding that we all have this skill and use it every day, I now want to tell you just a quick story. So two days ago in the Journal of Brain Research, a story was published that said the mesons and the medial temporal lobe were spinning at an anti-clockwise fashion. And somehow that was generating a radio signal strong enough to be picked up by an fMRI machine.

[23:54]

So what I want you to do, trusting that we all have our critical thinking skills, I want you to now apply those skills to this paper and tell me, A, what was probably methodologically wrong with this study that we would get those radio signals? Or B, if there was nothing wrong with it, what does that say about MRI recording? and what we've been doing incorrectly statistically for the past 30 years. So please go ahead and apply your skills to that problem.

[24:18] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm great at critical thinking, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Exactly.

[24:23] SPEAKER_02:

So it doesn't matter how deep a skill is. If you don't have the facts, you can't apply the skills. But now if we spent the next couple weeks looking at fMRIs and learning that surface knowledge, now we can come back to this deep question, and now we can start to use it. So I can't just teach you how to critically think. I need to teach you content, a field, a discipline, and then we can start to apply skills to that information.

[24:49] SPEAKER_00:

I think we've separated those for too long. We've said we want students to leave with skills and knowledge is kind of a necessary evil, but not very necessary. And it sounds like you're saying it's incredibly necessary, like it's central to the whole shebang.

[25:03] SPEAKER_02:

Human beings, I think Dan Willingham made a really good analogy at one point. He said, We've got calculators where a calculator works by you have a function or a skill and then you have data and input. And so long as you have that skill assigned to a button, you can put any data input you want in and you can still use that skill. So it doesn't matter what numbers I type in, I can always use that multiplication key. But in human beings, facts and skills are intimately correlated. There is no such thing as a standalone skill that once you have it, you can apply it everywhere.

[25:36]

So take even just the instance of driving a car. I was a wonderful driver growing up. And as soon as I moved to Australia where the shifter was on the other side, I couldn't do it. Six months of completely messing up my shifting, I eventually just got an automatic car because I couldn't apply that skill down here. I didn't understand the new context. So there is no such thing as a standalone skill or competency devoid of knowledge.

[26:02]

Everything we can do is tied intimately to what we know. So you can't skip one or the other.

[26:08] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Stop Talking, Start Influencing, 12 Insights from Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick. And Jared, if people want to find the book, obviously they can do that on Amazon. Where's the best place for them to go online if they'd like to learn more?

[26:23] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, there's more learning material at a website called lmeglobal.net. So that stands for learning made easy. So lme global.net. And if you just Google science of learning, there's a lot of great information and research.

[26:37]

coming out in this field that I think people love to tap into.

[26:40] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. Well, it's been a blast to talk about it, to get into some of that learning science. And I think it's something we all need to do occasionally. If we're in the business of learning, we are taking action to help students learn. And sometimes I think we just need to dig into the science and realize in so many cases how what we thought we knew has been turned over by more recent research and just has been a blast to talk about that with you today. So thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[27:07]

Thanks for having me on.

[27:08] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.