PSY102 Chapter Notes -Beach Ball
Document Summary
I"ve had several questions lately about how neuroscience can help extend an audience"s attention span and better engage the brain. What follows is a quick primer five insights into the world of public speaking and how to succeed better through an understanding of the human mind: get your body language sequence right. It"s counterintuitive, but we gesture before we think, consciously. Or, to put it another way, we gesture to find out what our unconscious minds really want us to do. So the proper sequence of gesture and speech is to gesture first, then speak. The difficulty is that if you"re thinking about your gestures consciously, that will tend to slow them down. Thus you"ll be likely to gesture after the idea or word you"re relating the gesture to. Audiences don"t pick it up consciously, but unconsciously it looks stilted and insincere. They"ll be likely to rate you low on authenticity, engagement, and so on.
