Research Notes #5: The Neuroscience of Right Now, Right Here

How communicators can use a basic understanding of brain science to gain, and maintain, audience attention

Let’s think of attention as a currency. If you have the ability to capture and hold an audience's focus, then you’re a communications millionaire. A lot of things are important as we think about how to get people to hear, digest, and remember what we say: but I’d argue that in a set-piece situation such as a town hall or a speech, managing attention is the single most valuable skill for any communicator.

We intuitively know this, I think. If the people you’re addressing are focused elsewhere, then you have a very tenuous grip on the outcome of your communication. And as anyone who has heard me talk about communicating knows: we have to start with the outcome you’re trying to deliver. Because what else matters more than that?

It actually staggers me that most advice on public speaking (especially the first, say, 10 minutes of any guidance or coaching) remains rooted in performance—"stand up straight," "make eye contact," "project your voice." I think they do it because everyone is always looking for the shortcut, the magic ‘one thing’ that will suddenly make any speaker into a human sun radiating charisma, impossible to ignore.

Sorry. It totally ignores the biological reality of the room: a collection of brains that are actively, chemically, and neurologically deciding whether to listen to you or to finish today’s Wordle.

It’s critical to understand why a brain tunes in or tunes out. But the issue of audience attention is not one of manners; it is one of neurobiology. For people who really want to understand how to connect with a given audience – whether a news reporter, a group of graduate trainees, or your investors – we have to move away from simply presenting information to understanding how to command cognitive and chemical engagement.

The Brain's Default State: Threat and Filter

Before an audience can be "won," you need to understand what you’re up against. Our default state is not to be sitting there, all focused attention. It’s more one of energy conservation, and threat detection.

When you step on stage, the audience's brains are performing a rapid, subconscious cost-benefit analysis. The amygdala, a nut-sized part of your brain right at its centre and often thought of as the ‘threat centre’, can often take over and slam the override button on our finer instincts. The practical point is this: your audience is not neutral. They are scanning for whether this is worth their effort, whether they feel safe enough to engage, and whether you are about to waste their time.

This state of stress or anxiety is physiologically opposite to the setting that will deliver learning and openness, mainly because it diverts blood flow away from the prefrontal cortex—the centre for complex thought and reasoning.

Simultaneously, the brain is a truly astonishing filter. It has to be. It is constantly bombarded with stimuli, and as cognitive psychology demonstrates, the brain doesn't just passively receive sound; it actively enhances the speaker that they pay attention to, while it suppresses the ignored ones. Your audience is not a blank slate; they are actively suppressing you until you give them a compelling, neurological reason not to.

The Hook: Dopamine and the Power of the ‘Prediction Error’

To break through this filter, a speaker cannot just present information, without context or perceived value. They need to trigger the brain's reward system, and the key to unlock this response is the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Understanding how dopamine works is critical for communicators, because it helps you understand why you’re encouraged by coaches like me to change certain things when you stand in front of an audience. None of which is ‘stand straight’.

But there is a common misconception that dopamine is a "pleasure" chemical. Academically, it is more accurately described as a 'motivation' or 'anticipation' chemical. It is released not when we get a reward, but when we anticipate one. This is the neurochemical engine behind the "compulsion loops" of social media, online games, and slot machines; the power lies in the unpredictability of the reward.

That’s why the start is so critically important: you’re going to game the audience’s brains by knowing how they will respond. A boring, predictable opening—"Hi, my name is Bob, and today I'm going to talk to you about..."—signals to the brain that no novel reward is forthcoming. Cognitive resources are promptly allocated elsewhere. Like Wordle.

A neurologically effective hook, however, creates a "prediction error." This is a gap between what the brain expects and what it experiences. How does this look in concrete terms?

• A shocking statistic: "By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish."

• A provocative question: "What if everything you've been taught about productivity is wrong?"

• An introduced story: "My phone rings, waking me up at 3 a.m., and I know before I answer it’s not going to be a good call..."

  
  

Hooks like these probably work less like a ‘magic dopamine switch’ and more like a pattern-break: it gives the brain a reason to wonder what happens next. The brain was expecting to be bored (most probably). Now it’s anticipating a valuable resolution to this ‘error,’ so it floods the system with one type of dopamine, which essentially yells at the prefrontal cortex: ‘Pay attention! This is actually important, even though we thought it was going to be really dull!’ The speaker has successfully hijacked the reward system to get audience focus.

 Maintaining the Loop: Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Load

The job of getting attention is assisted by dopamine. It puts you in the driving seat for the start of the race. But maintaining it is a neurolinguistic marathon. Neurolinguistics is the study of how the brain processes language, and it provides some useful guides for sustained engagement.

We all kind of know about the left brain/right brain thing, which researchers call hemispheric lateralization. The broad thinking is that the left hemisphere of the brain processes logical, linguistic, and analytical data (the "what" of an idea). The right processes visual, emotional, and if present, the metaphorical and contextual information (the "so what" of that idea).

If you drone on with a fact-torrent and slides full of bullet points, you’re only engaging the left hemisphere of your beleaguered audience. The right hemisphere, starved of stimuli, gets bored and signals the prefrontal cortex to check out. If you want to avoid this (and you do), you need to maintain "whole-brain" engagement, constantly oscillating between engaging these two hemispheres. In our training we always talk about the mix of evidential support for a given idea or theme. How that works:

1. Logic (Left Brain): Present a key data point or a logical argument (‘hard’ evidence)

2. Emotion (Right Brain): Immediately illustrate it with a story, a powerful image, or a sensory metaphor (‘soft’ evidence)

I often have to persuade people (looking at you, engineers) that ‘soft’ does not mean worse, weaker, or less valuable than ‘hard’. Because this use of metaphor, for example, is not just fluff; it is a complex cognitive tool.

Research identifies "Neural Metaphor Networks" as being highly integrating, connecting abstract concepts to sensory and emotional experiences. Saying "23 people have left to go to competitors," is left-brain data. Saying "the future of this company is walking out of our front door," is a right-brain metaphor that triggers a visual, emotional (and thus more memorable) response.

You have probably heard it before, without knowing it, but semantic priming – where exposure to one word or idea subconsciously influences the response to a later one – is a useful construct to further your ability to generate attention. By carefully seeding a "lexical field" (e.g., using words like "battle," "fight," and "victory" when talking about a challenge), a speaker creates a coherent, subconscious neural association that makes their theme feel more integrated and powerful.

This is all well and good, but there is a limit to what you can ask strangers’ brains to cling onto. There’s a thing called Cognitive Load Theory, which posits that you can’t just keep stacking ideas and words up, and hope they all land. The brain's working memory is finite. If a speaker presents too much information, too quickly, or in a format that is too complex (like our old favourite, a slide covered in text and multiple charts), they induce "cognitive overload." At this point, the brain simply gives up. It doesn't matter how compelling the dopamine hook was; the processing cost is too high.

Effective communicators act as cognitive concierges, managing the audience's mental load. Which, again, is why we put a lot of time into helping leaders assess the right amount of information, and its structuring, before we get onto things like how to stand up. Funny how much better people are at delivering when the other two elements are covered.

The Attentive Brain: Conclusion

Attention is a finite. It’s like a wind-up torch, that will shine brightly for a while then needs some mental crank to get it set for the next bit of illumination. It’s also a biologically expensive resource.

A speaker who asks for an hour of it is asking for a significant neurochemical investment from every person in the room. To earn that investment, you have to be more than a presenter, a speaker, or a panellist; you need to be a guide to the content, which also means being a guide for your audience’s brain chemistry.

It also involves building a start-to-finish process for the audience's brains to engage with. It starts by eliminating that threat we talked about in the opening – let’s call it the ‘Bob Gambit’. Sorry for any Bobs reading. Whatever your first 30 seconds is, you need to align it to the reward system with a dopamine-triggering hook – a reason to engage with a positive dopamine ‘prediction error’. You maintain engagement by feeding both the logical (left) emotional (right) parts of the brain. And you do that by harnessing neurolinguistic tools including metaphor and priming. Finally, your process has to respect the brain's limitations by carefully managing cognitive load, ensuring ideas can be processed without friction – leaving the outcome in no doubt. Which is where we came in.

Ultimately, you need to stop thinking of attention as something an audience gives. Instead, it is a biological state of engagement that you, as the speaker, can create.

Matt Guarente, a former senior journalist, has two decades of experience helping senior leaders and their teams deliver more effective communications. We use finding from academic studies, as well as our own original research, to better inform the coaching work we deliver and the training courses we build. GuarenteCo.com

Reference list:

Klemm, W. R. (2020, January 14). What is cognitive load? Psychology Today.

Haynes, T. (2018, May 1). Dopamine, smartphones & you: A battle for your time. Science in the News, Harvard University.

Batsak, B., & Orlov, O. (2018). Visual metaphor comprehension: An fMRI study. Paper presented at the 30th European Congress of Radiology, Vienna, Austria. https://doi.org/10.1594/ecr2018/C-1289

Dixon, M. (2023, January 3). Does the amygdala hijack your brain? Psychology Today.

Fernandino, L., & Conant, L. L. (2024). The primacy of experience in language processing: Semantic priming is driven primarily by experiential similarity. Neuropsychologia, 201, 108939. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2024.108939

McDermott, J. H. (2009). The cocktail party problem. Current Biology, 19(22), R1024–R1027. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.005