You worked hard on your big presentation. You researched for days, you organized your content thoughtfully, you practiced more times than you can count, and now you are standing up front, giving it all you’ve got.
But the audience seems disengaged, distracted, and downright bored.
What Went Wrong?
If the audience is bored, it’s typically because the presentation content is logos-heavy. That means you’ve written a presentation that is jam-packed with facts and statistics and weighty information that appeals to logic. Which is good, but only to an extent. Logos by itself quickly becomes overwhelming and well, boring. To keep your audience interested, you have to balance logos with pathos, content which appeals to emotions.
The reason we need pathos is because emotion energizes our brains in ways that logos can’t. Research using electroencephalograms (EEGs) shows that large portions of our brains literally light up with electrical activity when we laugh or experience emotional triggers.
This doesn’t mean that you have to tell a joke every few sentences to keep your audience engaged. Rather, think about how you can creatively highlight certain information by addressing it in a way that engages the emotions of your audience.
In one of my college classes today, a student demonstrated this concept perfectly. He’s from Honduras, and he was giving an informational speech on his home country. In the midst of lots of logos-heavy content about the history of his country, he used pathos to add to the logos. He said, “You might have heard of the man who discovered Honduras because I think he did something important over here, too. His name was Christopher Columbus.”
That small joke make the audience chuckle. And that one line then stuck out amidst all the other information about the history of Honduras. That small dose of pathos helped to ensure not only that the audience heard his point (which was a fact, logos), but that they would be able to recall it for a long time.
Humor Sticks With Us
Not only does emotional material “light up” our brains and keep us interested, it also helps us remember material more easily. Recent years have seen an increase in scientific research specifically about how emotion is tied to recall. Here is what experts are saying about why pathos must be an important and balanced part of our presentations.
Paul J. Zak is a professor, author, and founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies. As a brain researcher, he found that “stories with emotional content result in a better understanding of the key points a speaker wishes to make and enable better recall of these points weeks later.”
Dr. Shahram Heshmat, author and professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield says, “A normal function of emotion is enhance memory in order to improve recall . . . emotion acts like a highlighter that emphasizes certain aspects of experiences.”
Scientific American recounts the research of psychologist Kristy A. Nielson who studied laughter and recall. She read a list of 30 words to participants and then showed some of those participants a funny video. A week later, the participants who had watched the funny video remembered 20% more of the words from the list.
The old cliché “laughter is the best medicine” might not be that far off. If you’ve written a logos-heavy speech, chances are, your audience will be bored. This doesn’t mean you need to be a comedian to be a great presenter. It just means that you need to remember that humans are uniquely attuned to and interested in emotions. With that knowledge you can develop more engaging and balanced presentation content.
At Ethos3, we back our training and tips with scientific research. Find out how we can help with your next big presentation.
