Well, that escalated quickly
Lauren Silbert had promised one boy she would go with him to prom. Then she met someone else.
When Lauren was a freshman in high school, a British junior named Charles asked her out. He picked her up in a beat-up white Toyota that had two tapes: Queen and Oasis. When she asked if he only listened to English bands, he got offended, and she figured the romance was over. She was surprised when he asked her to prom a few weeks later. She accepted.
That weekend, she met Amir, a good-looking senior, at a party. They hit it off and started going out. Two months later, when prom came up, Lauren had forgotten she’d already said yes to Charles. Then Charles approached her in the quad: “I want to talk about our plans for prom. She felt bad. She decided to keep her promise to Charles and meet Amir at the after-party.
On prom day, Lauren and her family were finishing a scuba diving certification when the boat broke down. It took hours for a tugboat to rescue them. By the time she got home, Charles was pulling into the driveway. Her mom brushed her hair while her sister did her makeup around the goggle marks on her face.
At the prom, Amir and Charles got into a fight. Amir was drunk and about to punch Charles, so Lauren dragged Amir to the parking lot to calm things down. Amir tripped over a curb and landed on his face. By the time she returned with paper towels, he was already a bloody Jackson Pollock painting.
Lauren took the keys, and Amir climbed into the passenger seat and started playing air guitar. Driving slowly on a busy road, she approached a fender bender. Amir launched into an aggressive air guitar solo, knocked her arm, and caused her to turn the wheel and hit the cars.
A police officer working the scene took one look at the bloody, air-guitaring Amir and asked Lauren for her license and registration. She handed over her learner’s permit and the registration. She was convinced she would go to jail for driving without a license.
Twenty minutes later, the officer returned sheepishly and handed her back her permit. The wind had blown the registration out of his hand. He couldn’t find it, so he let her go.
Inside the Scanner
Years later, Lauren told this unrehearsed story while lying in an fMRI scanner as a graduate student in Uri Hasson’s lab at Princeton. Researchers recorded her voice and brain activity, filtering out the scanner's clanking.
Volunteers then listened to the recording inside their own scanners. Their brain activity aligned with Lauren's in similar regions and patterns, typically following a few seconds behind. Researchers called this neural coupling.
In some regions, listeners' brain activity got ahead of Lauren's. This anticipatory coupling suggested that listeners were processing the story and predicting what came next. Greater anticipatory coupling was associated with better comprehension. Their brains were working to make sense of the story as it unfolded.
When Words Mean Nothing
To test whether this alignment depended on understanding, researchers played a different story told by another speaker in Russian. None of the listeners understood Russian. Their brains still registered the sounds, but the broader speaker-listener coupling largely disappeared.
Neural coupling is often cited as evidence of storytelling’s power. But knowing that listeners’ brains can synchronize with a storyteller’s doesn’t tell us how to communicate more effectively. The more useful question is what helps listeners follow, anticipate, and make sense of what they hear.
The Role of Attention
In 2021, researchers associated with the Paris Brain Institute measured people's heart rates as they listened to Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Listening separately, their heart rates rose and fell in similar patterns at corresponding moments in the story.
Researchers also tested dry instructional videos. Heart rates still synchronized when people watched attentively. When participants were asked to silently count backward while watching the videos, the synchrony dropped.
These findings measure something different from neural coupling, but both point the same direction: what the audience pays attention to matters. A story doesn't guarantee understanding just because someone tells it.
Three Ways to Help People Make Meaning
1. Protect attention
Your audience may be looking at you on a video call while answering a chat, reading ahead on a slide, or thinking about their next meeting.
Try this: Identify the one moment people need to understand. Clear space around it. Pause notifications and remove distracting slides. If an idea requires sustained thought, don't bury it in a crowded agenda.
2. Invite people to predict
In the neural coupling study, listeners' brain activity sometimes anticipated the speaker’s. You can invite a similar kind of active thinking by giving people a question to consider before revealing the answer.
Try this: Before sharing a result, ask people to make a prediction. What do you think happened to retention after the change? In a strategy presentation, start with the problem or question and give people a moment to consider it before sharing your approach.
3. Stop speaking Russian
Leaders can be fluent in the language of their business and still sound foreign to their audiences. Acronyms, abstract priorities, and familiar phrases make complete sense to the person saying them. The audience may hear the words without understanding what they mean in practice.
Try this: Take one sentence from your next presentation and ask, “What would this look like in someone's actual work?” Translate “drive accountability” into a decision someone needs to make. Translate “customer centricity” into a moment when a customer experiences the difference.
The Message Isn’t the Finish Line
Lauren's prom story draws us in because we can picture the chaos and anticipate what might happen next. We’re actively making sense of the story as we hear it.
The same challenge applies when you’re explaining data, introducing a strategy, or leading people through change. You can deliver every word, and people can still leave without the understanding they need.
Don’t measure a message by what you said. Find out what people understood.
Ask someone to explain the key message in their own words. What they remember, how they connect the ideas, and what they think it means for their work will tell you more than a room full of nodding heads.
Your message isn’t finished until someone else can tell it back.
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Karen Eber is an award-winning author, TED speaker, and storytelling keynote speaker. She is the author of The Perfect Story and her TED Talk on how the brain responds to stories has been viewed more than 2.25 million times. As CEO and Chief Storyteller of Eber Leadership Group, she helps leaders communicate ideas that inform, influence, and inspire.
