The human brain is engineered to ignore most of what it sees and hears, according to the neuroscientists I interviewed for the audio original Viral Voices. If that’s the case, how are you supposed to make a memorable impression?

The empowering news is that if you understand how the brain works, what it discards, and what it pays attention to, you’ll be far more persuasive than you’ve ever imagined. Persuasive people have influence in their personal and professional lives.

BRAIN RULES FOR THE WORKPLACE

“The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things,” says John Medina, a molecular biologist at the University of Washington and author of the bestseller Brain Rules. “If the brain is bored with something, it’ll move on to something else. It has a lot of stuff to do,” Medina told me.

According to Medina, our brains lock onto stimuli that evoke an emotion. Medina says this stimuli acts like a mental Post-it note, telling your listener’s brain to pay attention to you and your ideas.

Subscribe to the Daily newsletter.Fast Company's trending stories delivered to you every day

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

SIGN UP

Privacy PolicyFast Company Newsletters

Imagine being able to identify the exact emotional triggers that will hold your listener’s attention.

Well, thanks to scientific experiments in the lab, we now know what grabbed people’s attention when they lived in caves. It turns out the secret to effective communication isn’t new. It’s an ancient formula that can be traced back some 2,300 years to a really smart guy named Aristotle, the father of persuasion.

ARTISTOTLE’S FORMULA FOR PERSUASION

Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, said that a persuasive speech has three elements: ethos, logos, and pathos.

© Fast Company