Why are some speeches and books so inspirational? Somewhere on the journey from written page through the mind of your audience, the words have become transformed from mere text into something that touches people. And this is where a little neuroscience can help us figure out how it happens, and how you can use it to improve your writing.

How your senses work

Smells and tactile stimuli are routed immediately through the amygdala the emotional seat of the brain most responsible for the fear response. To give you a simplified explanation, this means that smells and touch can evoke much more vivid memories and emotional responses than sights or sounds.

Sights and sounds are shunted first to the thalamus. The thalamus deconstructs your vision into basic chunks of information: shape, size and color. Audio signals are similarly reduced to information about volume and dissonance. Only after this has happened does the signal get passed to the amygdala and the frontal cortex. As a consequence of this slightly more circuitous route, visual and auditory cues often trigger emotions that feel less intense than those of smell and feel.

Reading books and browsing the internet are exercises in very visual mediums that are only rarely accompanied by sound, touch or smell. If you’re trying to communicate through either of these mediums, you are immediately handicapped out of three senses. Unfortunately they are the three senses that work best to connect with people. So how can we fix this?

How to stimulate the 3 offline senses to connect emotionally with your readers

If you are writing on the internet or preparing a presentation you should already be using vivid images to accompany your words. If you don’t, you’re making a hard task more difficult, like carrying your groceries up 20 flights of stairs when the elevators are working fine.

1. Audio/Video. If you’re working on the internet then this one is a little easier than the others. Podcasts are easy to make, and have widespread appeal. Anyone who goes through the trouble of downloading your voice is already primed to be receptive to what you have to say; combine this with compelling content and passion in your voice and you have the next best thing to being there with them.

Getting visitors to your page to click on a video is even easier than getting them to download and listen to your voice. The caveat here is it’s harder to do right than audio – a bad video will generate an emotional response in your visitors and very effectively disconnect you from your audience. With a podcast you can talk with passion about the things you love, mix it with appropriate music and have a show. But if you are just a talking head or have jarring poor quality video, that sensory input is going get forwarded to the amygdala with a big fat red F and you either won’t be remembered or you won’t be remembered fondly.

2. Smell. If you can learn to use video effectively then it’s one of the best ways to convey senses of smell. You can’t put the sound of a rose in your audio podcast, but if you see a close up of someone smelling it and their expression, then you generate empathetic response in your visitors. This activates all the same brain regions in your subjects as it would if they were smelling it. And this brings us to the key to making any of this work; memory.

3. Memory retrieval. Memory is at the heart of all these techniques. I describe at the beginning of this article that all of your senses first get routed through the thalamus or the amygdala. But it doesn’t just end there. Eventually they are fed through the hippocampus, which is the organizational center for memory formation and retrieving those memories. If you try and remember right now what it’s feels like when you’ve burnt your hand or felt a strong emotion like love or sadness, it’s pretty easy. Without even knowing it you might also now be rubbing the finger that was scorched, or have a different expression on your face. This is because to retrieve a memory the hippocampus kind of works in the reverse of the way it made the memory the first time. Instead of the thalamus or amygdala sending signals to the hippocampus, the hippocampus can activate the thalamus to help interpret memories of sights and sounds and the amygdala for touch and smell.

This is useful to us, as it gives us a way to present new content to our readers but allow them to react emotionally to it based on their previous experiences. Here’s an example: How would you describe in words the color red to someone who was color blind and had never seen it? You might say:

Red is the paint of my rage, it burns inside me and flushes my cheeks till I am only a passenger of my own thoughts, no longer in control. Red is the angry scream that rises from the pit of my stomach but won’t emerge past my lips, unfulfilled and searing like acid in my throat. Red is the hand that presses my mind into a single point of burning flame through which I can see nothing else.

It’s the same principle with books and the words you’re reading on this site now. Draw on your readers experience and memories to paint a picture in their mind that’s like the one you see so clearly in yours.

4. Connections work best when they are combined. It should be obvious by now that great writing comes from combining text, images and memories of smell or touch rather than any of these in isolation. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not easy to elicit an emotional response from a jaded internet browser, or a bored audience member. Experiment with what combination works best for you. You may annoy some people but worse than generating a negative response you can learn from is not generating a response at all. If you can’t evoke memories and feelings then you are sunk. Boredom is the enemy of the hippocampus.

So if anyone can work out what subscribing to an RSS feed smells like, then you are onto a winner my friend. In the meantime I’ll just have to do it the hard way and ask you to click to subscribe to our RSS or Email updates.

Image credit SallyBayRye

January 9th, 2009