When New York University psychologist Wendy Suzuki, PhD, was invited to give a talk about her research to thousands of business leaders in Moscow’s Olympic Stadium in 2018, she was nervous about speaking after renowned actor Richard Gere and award-winning author Malcolm Gladwell. Even though she had given the talk dozens of times, she was flooded with fear as she waited backstage and anticipated the planned fireworks that would light up the sky as she entered. Suzuki was determined to give a talk worthy of those fireworks and leaned on her extensive preparation for confidence as she walked to the podium.
“Exercise is the most transformative thing you can do to your brain today,” she said to open her presentation. The audience erupted in applause—something that had never happened at the outset of one of her talks. Suzuki, a professor of neural science, shared with her listeners that she began exploring the neuroscience of exercise after she gained 25 pounds and went to the gym to lose weight. The regular workouts started improving her cognitive function. Later in the talk, she invited the audience to experience the neurochemical changes for themselves by standing up to participate in two minutes of intenSati—a workout that combines cardiovascular exercise with positive verbal affirmations.
Although the talk may have seemed almost effortless to the audience, Suzuki was leveraging strategies she has honed for years to create presentations that are compelling and memorable. “Making the topic personal is very important,” said Suzuki, who has shared her research at psychology and medical conferences, on network TV, and in Ted Talks. “If you can’t convey the relevance of the research to the audience, then you have already lost them.”
Successful speakers agree that an exceptional talk has the potential to change the minds of listeners and motivate them to operate differently in the world, which is one of the most thrilling experiences a researcher can have. Yet it is difficult to give a talk of this caliber, acknowledged Don Moore, PhD, a psychologist in the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Presenters have to balance many goals that are in conflict,” Moore said. They have a deep desire to honor the scientific process, but they are expected to be fun and entertaining; they are eager to share the details of their studies, but it is critical to keep the message simple and clear. There may be a range of expertise in the audience about the material, and presenters must keep everyone engaged, explained Moore.
Research suggests that MRI data can reveal when presenters are successfully conveying their discoveries to listeners. In a recent study, effective communication of complex information in classroom settings was correlated with similarities in neural responses between teachers and students. The more closely a student’s brain activity mirrored their teacher’s brain activity, known as neural coupling, the better the student’s learning score on a multiple-choice quiz (Nguyen, M., et al., Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Vol. 17, No. 4, 2022).
Learning to create captivating and influential talks is not easy, but the rewards of developing this skill are numerous, including invitations to speak at esteemed conferences and meetings, promotions, better odds when applying for grants, and relationships with new collaborators, said Susan McConnell, PhD, a biology professor at Stanford University who coaches graduate students, biotech company employees, and faculty in how to design effective presentations. According to those who have experienced these rewards, the best talks often use similar strategies to capture—and keep—an audience’s attention. Here are a few tips from seasoned experts.
Simplicity is bliss
It is wise to suppress the impulse to impress the audience by sharing complexities of data and findings, said psychologist Barry Schwartz, PhD, a professor emeritus at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and a visiting professor at the Haas School of Business. Schwartz learned this lesson early in his career when he was invited to speak to a group of professors known for humbling junior faculty who were giving talks. Before giving his presentation, he asked a colleague for advice, and she encouraged him to keep it simple.
“She explained that this would allow the people who already knew my work to feel proud that they could explain it to others, and the novices would feel proud because they understood it,” he said. “It worked exactly as she had predicted, and simplicity has been my go-to strategy ever since.” Schwartz wants his audience to feel intelligent rather than to highlight his own prowess, so he focuses on one or two main points with many examples supporting those points. He tells listeners that he has made progress on the problem at hand, but more help is needed by other researchers. “This can invite others to use their research tools to help address the problem,” he said.
The best talks also often include slides with graphs, images, video clips, or other illustrations that reinforce the main point, rather than slides with tables and numerous bullet points, said Moore. In his talks about overconfidence, for example, Moore has included a video clip of a bicyclist falling while trying a difficult new trick. In a study with complex lab interventions, a photo or short video clip of participants solving a puzzle can be vivid and memorable, he said.
Keep the audience thinking
When Tom Gilovich, PhD, a psychology professor at Cornell University, talks about his research on counterfactual thinking, he shows graphs revealing that silver medalists tend to be less happy than the bronze medalists they have outperformed. Then he invites the audience to speculate about why this is the case.
“They are puzzling along with me to understand this unexpected finding, and the peak of the presentation is the resolution,” said Gilovich. He explains that it all comes down to comparison: Silver medalists are disappointed about being one step away from winning gold, while bronze medalists are pleased to be one step away from not winning a medal at all.
Like Gilovich, Princeton University’s Tom Griffiths, PhD, a psychology professor who gives talks about computational models and mathematical concepts, helps audiences stay engaged with technical content by asking questions that allow the listeners to start thinking on their own. “I’m not telling them about the things I have thought a lot about,” he said. “I want a more cooperative experience where we are thinking together.”
In his presentations on Bayesian models of human cognition, he asks people to predict how much money they thought a movie would make if they heard on the radio that it had made $10 million so far. Then he asks them to imagine meeting a 10-year-old boy and predict how long he would live. Most people guess that the movie would make a multiple of $10 million and that the boy would live many decades longer. Then he explains how their answers reveal that human cognition follows a statistical formula called Bayes theorem: They use prior knowledge to predict probability. “Whenever I talk about something technical, I spend an equivalent amount of time surrounding it in something concrete that people can relate to,” Griffiths said.
The magic of narrative
Crafting a research talk that tells a story is another vital tool, said McConnell. “Researchers are usually uncomfortable with leaving things out or diverging from the sequence followed in a scientific paper, but it’s important to break the assumption that your talk is like your paper,” she said. “It can be liberating to play with the order.” She teaches researchers that there are two ways to tell a story: One method describes the exciting discovery at the outset and then justifies the evidence; the other creates a mystery that ends with the finding.
Unexpected results can become the most compelling elements of the story, said Hopi Hoekstra, PhD, a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. “You are holding the hands of audience members and taking them on a scientific journey,” she said. “Too often I hear talks with shiny results without any insights into the scientific process or hints that some experiments didn’t work.”
MRI studies of the brain are shedding light on why storytelling is such a powerful method of engaging audiences. Princeton University’s Uri Hasson, PhD, has recorded the brain activity of people telling stories to other people and found evidence of extensive neural coupling. The brains of both the speakers and listeners showed patterns of activity in the same areas (The Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 31. No. 8, 2011).
Ainissa Ramirez, PhD, a former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Yale University, has perfected the art of telling scientific stories that engage the public. She developed a program called Science Saturdays at Yale to expose middle school students and their families to interesting new research and other discoveries. This experience, along with many others like it, motivated her to leave academia to pursue her passion for increasing excitement about science among the public.
“With this type of audience, you have to work hard to keep their attention because they have other things they can focus on, like social media,” said Ramirez, who works independently as an author and speaker and has been featured on CBS, CNN, NPR, and PBS. “Rather than telling listeners that I have something to teach, I ask a question: ‘Did you know the telegraph shaped language? Did you know that artificial light modified our health?’”
Describing characters in the scientific journey is another critical element of storytelling, she said. When talking to audiences about her new book, The Alchemy of Us (MIT Press, 2021), which explores how eight inventions shaped the human experience, she personalizes inventors by describing idiosyncrasies, tragedies, and mistakes that were part of their journeys.
Stage presence
Researchers giving talks can also learn from the techniques actors use onstage, said psychologist Alison Gopnik, PhD, who studies cognitive development at the University of California, Berkeley. Gopnik performed in plays throughout her childhood and during college, and she has transferred skills learned there, such as projecting her voice, using gestures, and moving around, to maintain an audience’s attention as a presenter. Good lighting on the speaker is also important, she said, and she discourages presenters from dimming the lights to help listeners focus on slides.
Successful speakers also agree that rehearsing is a critical element of the preparation process. “I don’t think anyone is a natural,” said Griffiths. “It takes a lot of practice.” He started feeling more comfortable giving presentations once he began teaching regularly. “I would spend 10 hours preparing for one hour of lecture, and that built up my speaking muscles,” he said. Practice with colleagues to identify the awkward moments and to perfect the timing, he said. And don’t be afraid to record yourself to catch any distracting habits you may be unaware of when speaking, added McConnell.
Another golden rule for speakers is to know the audience, said Hoekstra. The most embarrassing stories of talks gone awry often relate to situations when presenters were not prepared for a specific group of listeners. Hoekstra is haunted by a lecture she gave about the genetics of behavior to a public audience. “I lost them in the beginning because I didn’t set up the big question of why this was important,” she said. “I was talking about findings in mice, but I didn’t show how the findings were important for human behavior.” Only one person asked a question after the talk, and then it was quiet. “I still wake up in the night and get a knot in the pit of my stomach when I think about this talk.”
Hoekstra’s invitation for questions is usually met with a host of raised hands in the audience—people who are eager to clarify their understanding or raise important considerations. These moments are in fact vital interactions that lead to the advancement of science and new ideas, Hoekstra said. “The questions may help me organize my thoughts for a paper or spark a new set of experiments,” she said. “It’s a time when we can share our excitement about science.”