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Communicating effectively is one of the most important skills today. And most people are not particularly good at it.

In this post, I am going to give one very simple and effective technique that will significantly improve your talks or documents or presentations or blog posts.

Whenever possible, give specific examples.

That's it. That is the technique. It is very easy, and yet most people ignore it. You were probably going to ignore it too, except that I am now going to convince you with an example.

What I am said above was a little theoretical and abstract. It sounds interesting, but it hasn't really had a significant or lasting impact on your brain.

So here's an example. Consider the following paragraph from a random blog post:

We would like to profile women who we consider an inspiration to others. These are women who are on the way to living their best life. What they have to say is of great value to the forum. We will be featuring these write-ups from time-to-time. It is also a great opportunity for them to highlight what they do/ what works for them.

Compare that with this:

Did you know that Asha Joglekar, owner of 'Bhakri' restaurant spends two hours a day in just dropping and picking up her kids from school? How does she do that and manage a restaurant? Reema Shourie is an accomplished painter and has held three exhibitions of her work inspite of having a full-time job in a software company, and having two kids. We would like to profile such women who are an inspiration to us. These are women who are on the way to living their best life. What they have to say is of great value to the forum.

The second one definitely has more impact, because when the reader is reading the second part of the paragraph ('women who are an inspiration' etc) she has specific examples in mind that makes the rest of the paragraph easy to relate to, remember, and understand at a deeper level.

Don't take my word for it; there's scientific research backing up this claim

This is not just my gut feeling. There is psychological research showing that people understand "thematic" and "concrete" stuff better and faster than abstract things. This was first proved in a famous experiment called 'Wason's Selection Task'. Instead of describing the experiment, I'm going to run it on you.

Here is a puzzle for you. I'm going to show you 4 cards. Each card has a number on one side, and a color on the other side. The rule for the cards is this, "If one side of the card has an even number, then the opposite side of the card MUST be RED." Your job is to figure out whether any of these cards violate the rule or not. I keep the 4 cards on the table in front of you. You can see one side of each card, and what you see is: '3', '8', 'BROWN' and 'RED'. Your job is to determine whether there is any violation of the rule or not by turning over the minimum number of cards. So, to be sure, how many cards do you need to turn over, and which?

Time yourself. How long did it take you to solve this?

And you probably got it wrong. 73% of the people do. The correct answer is: you need to turn over 2 cards. The one with '8' on it, and the one with 'BROWN' on it. If you got anything else, you're mistaken. 8 has to be turned over to check that it's back is RED. BROWN has to be turned over to ensure that it's back is not an even number. '3' and 'RED' do NOT need to be checked.

Now here's a different puzzle:

You are a policeman in a bar. You have to ensure that all the drinking happening there is legal. The rule is, "If a person is drinking beer, then he must be above 21 years of age." You can see 4 people at a table drinking. The first person is drinking a coke, but you can't guess his age. The second person is drinking a beer, and you can't guess his age. The third person is obviously a teenager (i.e. he's definitely under 21), but you're not sure what he's drinking. The fourth person is an old man, easily above 50, and you can't tell his age. Now, to be sure that the rule is not being violated, whom all do you need to check. (Here check is defined as asking for an age proof, and checking what drink he's drinking.)

Again, time yourself.

Within a few seconds you must have gotten the right answer: you need to check the age of person #2, who's drinking the beer, and you need to check whether person #3, the teenager,  is drinking beer or not.

Here is the amazing part: both puzzles are identical! Yet most people get the first one wrong and the second one correct. And, it takes them much less time to do the second one.

Now do you understand why your talks need examples?

Posted via email from Navin’s posterous

Apparently, we are less creative when trying to solve our own problems. There's this concept of "psychological distance" which partially controls our creativity. And this psychological distance can be created artificially by simply changing the way we thinking about the problem. For example, consider this study where participants were given a problem to solve, and it needed a creative insight (an "Aha" moment):

participants were told that the questions were developed either by a research institute located in California, "around 2,000 miles away" (distant condition), or in Indiana, "2 miles away," (near condition).  In a third, control group no information regarding location was mentioned. As expected, participants in the distant condition solved more problems than participants in the proximal condition and in the control condition. Because the problems seemed farther away, they were easier to solve.

This pair of studies suggests that even minimal cues of psychological distance can make us more creative. Although the geographical origin of the various tasks was completely irrelevant – it shouldn’t have mattered where the questions came from – simply telling subjects that they came from somewhere far away led to more creative thoughts.

These results build on previous studies which demonstrated that distancing in time – projecting an event into the remote future – and assuming an event to be less likely (that is, distancing on the probability dimension) can also enhance creativity.

Posted via email from Navin’s posterous

Why do we keep checking twitter, almost compulsively? Every refresh that brings a few more items gives us a little high. It's called "seeking", and turns out that rats in the scientists' labs are pretty much the same.

In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. They would stick an electrode in a rat's brain and, whenever the rat went to a particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong place, and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to the corner where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.

There you go. If you didn't have actual work to do, you would keep hitting refresh on your twitter client until you collapsed. (It's true, isn't it?)

And, apparently, this little corner of the brain is not the pleasure center. The high that you get is not similar to the one you get after eating chocolate or after sex (or both). This is a different high, characterized not by euphoric satisfaction, but rather by excitement of finding something, and craving for more.

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

And the best part is this:

Later experiments done on humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.

Exactly. Describes you perfectly, doesn't it, my dear twitter/rss/email/sms addict?

Read the full article, if you're scientifically, or neuroscientifically inclined.

I found this article via http://twitter.com/sandygautam, someone whose twitter and friendfeed stream you must follow (and refresh compulsively) if you liked this article.

Posted via email from Navin’s posterous