The Mental Post-It Note

Do you feel that your employees are not listening or tuning you out?

When you deliver your next presentation remember that the "brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things", writes scientist John Medina. It does pay attention to an “emotionally charged event”. Medina explains “The amygdala is chockfull of the neurotransmitter dopamine. When the brain detects an emotionally charged event, the amygdala releases dopamine into the system, because dopamine generally aids memory and information processing, you could say the Post-it note reads, “Remember this!”

According to Medina, if you can get the brain to put what amounts to a chemical Post-It note on an idea or a piece of information, the item will be more “robustly processed” and easily remembered. As you could imagine, this concept applies to business professionals as well as.