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Bait the hook
After 9 minutes and 59 seconds, the audience’s attention is getting ready
to plummet to near zero. If something isn’t done quickly, the students will
end up in successively losing bouts of an effort to stay with me. What do
they need? Not more information of the same type. Not some completely
irrelevant cue that breaks them from their train of thought, making the
information stream seem disjointed, unorganized, and patronizing. They
need something so compelling that they blast through the 10-minute barrier
—something that triggers an orienting response toward the speaker and
captures executive functions, allowing efficient learning.
Do we know anything so potentially compelling? We sure do. An
emotionally charged stimuli. So, every 10 minutes in my lecture, I decided
to give my audiences a break from the fire hose of information and send
them a relevant emotional charge, which I now call “hooks.” As I did more
teaching, I found the most successful hooks always followed these three
principles:
1) The hook has to trigger an emotion.
Fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, incredulity—the entire emotional
palette can be stimulated, and all work well. I employ survival issues here,
describing a threatening event, a reproductive event (tastefully), or
something triggering pattern matching. Narratives can be especially strong,
especially if they are crisp and to the point.
What exactly do these hooks look like? This is where teaching can truly
become imaginative. Because I work with psychiatric issues, case histories
explaining some unusual mental pathology often rivet students to the
upcoming (and drier) material. Business-related anecdotes can be fun,
especially when addressing lay audiences in the corporate world. I often
illustrate a talk about how brain science relates to business by addressing its
central problem: vocabulary. I like the anecdote of the Electrolux vacuum
cleaner company, a privately held corporation in Sweden trying to break
into the North American market. They had plenty of English speakers on
staff, but no Americans. Their lead marketing slogan? “If it sucks, it must
be an Electrolux.”
2) The hook has to be relevant.
It can’t be just any story or anecdote. If I simply cracked a joke or
delivered some irrelevant anecdote every 10 minutes, the presentation
seemed disjointed. Or worse: The listeners began to mistrust my motives;
they seemed to feel as if I were trying to entertain them at the expense of
providing information. Audiences are really good at detecting
disorganization, and they can become furious if they feel patronized.
Happily, I found that if I made the hook very relevant to the provided
content, the group moved from feeling entertained to feeling engaged. They
stayed in the flow of my material, even though they were really taking a
break.
3) The hook has to go between segments.
I could place it at the end of the 10 minutes, looking backward,
summarizing the material, repeating some aspect of content. Or I could
place it at the beginning of the module, looking forward, introducing new
material, anticipating some aspect of content. I found that starting a lecture
with a forward-looking hook relevant to the entire day’s material was a
great way to corral the attention of the class.
When I started placing hooks in my lectures, I immediately noticed
changes in the audience members’ attitudes. First, they were still interested
at the end of the first 10 minutes. Second, they seemed able to maintain
their attention for another 10 minutes or so, as long as another hook was
supplied at the end. I could win the battle for their attention in 10-minute
increments.
But then, halfway through the lecture, after I’d deployed two or three
hooks, I found I could skip the fourth and fifth ones and still keep their
attention fully engaged. I have found this to be true for students in 1994,
when I first used the model, and in my lectures to this day. Will my model
work for you as well as it works for me? I can’t guarantee it. All I know for
sure is that the brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things, and I am as sick
of boring presentations as you are.
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