Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques 272. Say What Sticks: The Neuroscience of Memorable Communication
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Mar 16, 2026 
Carmen Simon, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of Impossible to Ignore, explores why people forget most of what they hear. She digs into attention versus memory, why surprise beats novelty, how priming prepares the brain, and why communicators should choose and repeat one key 10% message. A sharp look at making ideas stick.
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Attention Has Two Levers You Can Design For
- Memory grows out of attention, but attention itself has two levers: where people look and who prompts the looking.
- Carmen Simon says changing stimulus properties like size or volume can redirect attention outward and raise the odds of later recall.
Surprise Beats Novelty For Capturing Attention
- Surprise is often more practical than novelty because it recombines familiar things in unexpected ways.
- Carmen Simon says the brain learns from the gap between expectation and reality, so communicators should twist the familiar instead of inventing something totally new.
Prime Key Moments Before You Deliver Them
- Prime the brain before your key point so people are more ready to notice and remember it.
- Carmen Simon advises placing unusual or emotional elements right before the message that matters most, rather than wasting them elsewhere in the sequence.
