How our brains receive messages & implications

Do you have trouble communicating your ideas or land your sales pitch? Do you understand why human attention is fleeting & difficult to maintain? Read on because this entry may give you an answer.

Before I move on, I want to give a shout out to the book “Pitch Anything” by Oren Klaff. Everything I am saying below is based on this really interesting book that can have a tremendous impact on readers’ professional and personal lives.

Humans brains drive communication as that’s where messages are developed, presented, received and processed. Anatomists will say that a human brain is highly complex, but for sake of simplicity, consider it having three main parts: Neocortex, Midbrain and The Old Brain or Crocodile Brain.

The Old Brain/Crocodile Brain is responsible for the initial basic filtering of all incoming messages. As a physically weak and small species compared to others in the wild, our ancestors, for their survival, relied on ability to detect threats early. This Crocodile Brain is the part that does that detection job and tells the rest of the body whether something is a threat or not. Over the ensuing thousands of years, while our human body evolved a lot with the time and communication became more sophisticated and nuanced than just “yeah it’s dangerous/no it’s actually friendly” responses, this Old Brain hasn’t, staying largely as primitive as it was.

Above this Crocodile Brain are Mid Brain, which “determines the meaning of things and social situations”, and the Neocortex, which evolved with our society over time and allows us to reason and think in complexity. Neocortex is where we develop ideas, reasons to back those ideas up and language to present . In other words, everything that we can’t do with Crocodile Brain.

You can already see the root-cause reason why communication fails sometimes. In any exchange, a message that is developed by the most advanced or smartest part of the brain is initially perceived by the 5-million-years-old most primitive part. If the amygdala part of the Crocodile Brain considers a message as threatening to our survival, it will essentially shut down the brain and ignore the message in question. If the message is too novel and complex, the Crocodile Brain, which is high-maintenance, dumb compared to the Neocortex and lazy as it doesn’t like to work a lot, will get bored and refuse to let it go to the upper parts of our brain.

That’s why professional writers say that the beginning of an article or paragraph is super important in persuading us to keep reading. We tend to lose focus and attention quickly if something is not simple, easy to understand nor concrete. Our Crocodile Brain will shut down if it is forced to process jargon, remotely unknown words or abstract concepts.

That’s why you hear some professional presenters want us to open every presentation with a bang, something make us laugh, something that we can relate to or something that is positively shocking yet concrete (like a statistics). If a presentation’s first few slides don’t have a shock-and-awe element, the Crocodile Brain will get bored and attention will wane.

That’s why when a chart or a table contains loads of data and information, it’s better to highlight the part where audience should focus on. Remember, the Crocodile Brain is lazy. If you ask it to scan a lot of information quickly, it will get bored.

That’s why a relatable and known brand in business is a highly valuable asset. The Crocodile Brain will be more at ease when it recognizes a familiar logo or a familiar brand name.

That’s why in some cases even well-intentioned & well-reasoned messages aren’t received. They never get to Neocortex (Your bosses are NOT that dumb to not understand you. They just don’t receive the communication the way we want them to).

In short, what makes pitches difficult is that our highly developed Neocortex has to persuade a lazy, primitive and dumb Crocodile Brain, which only likes clear, simple, straightforward and friendly ideas. All the communication tips or recommendations are aimed to do one thing and one thing only: to get through the Crocodile Brain and to the Neocortex without triggering fear. There are tons and tons of tips and tricks out there on improving communication. I won’t be able to get to them all in this post. I hope that I gave you the root-cause problem so that you can come up with solutions accordingly.