3 rules to express your thoughts so everyone understands
Monday, December 5, 2022
5:31 PM
https://bigthink.com/the-learning-curve/3-rules-express-your-thoughts-clearly/
1. Make no more than three points
The human brain can only store so much information in short-term memory. The oft-repeated number is seven items (or chunks). That number comes from research in the 1950s and has been reinforced in our collective subconscious by the fact that so many things happen in sevens. Consider that before the advent of cell phones, people spent lots of time memorizing seven-digit phone numbers.
However, follow-up research suggests that short-term memory is far less robust, maxing out at a meager three to five items.
If you’re old enough to recall memorizing phone numbers, you’ll recognize some truth in this. No one digested every digit at once. Instead, they broke the number into smaller chunks which they learned separately — most often, area code (three digits), prefix (three digits), and subscriber number (four digits). Only with time, repetition, and application would a number enter long-term memory as a single entry in someone’s mental Rolodex.
Short-term memory performs no better with ideas or thoughts than telephone numbers. It can only hold so many topics and tangents, and once it’s at capacity, it needs to erase old information to upload anything new.
Alda agrees. He advises you to limit your conversation points to no more than three, allowing you and your partner to focus on the thought at hand while avoiding disruptive additions.
2. Explain difficult ideas in three different ways
As Alda said in his interview: “If I have a difficult thing to understand, if there’s something I think is not going to be that easy to get, I try to say it in three different ways. I think if you come in from different angles you have a better chance of getting a three-dimensional view of this difficult idea.”
One way to tap into this strategy is through metaphor. When Barbara Oakley was writing her book A Mind for Numbers, she reached out to professors who were highly ranked for their teaching skills. She discovered that across disciplines, the best professors were metaphor tacticians. They analogized key concepts or difficult ideas to better explain them.
According to Oakley, metaphors work by building on existing neural patterns established from previous learning. Those existing patterns then help create new neural networks for incorporating the new information. A physics teacher, for example, may explain the mind-boggling concept of the expanding Universe by comparing it to how raisin bread expands as it bakes. Such a metaphor helps students connect the cosmologically large with something previously experienced on Earth.
This strategy doesn’t dumb down the concept but instead makes it relatable and therefore easier to understand — getting at that “three-dimensional view” Alda champions. Other useful strategies can include examples, visuals, changing the frame of reference, and providing a this-not-that comparison.
3. Make important points three times
Repetition is a powerful communication tool because it helps us identify key information and transfer it from short-term to long-term memory.
When it comes to learning, the best kind of repetition is spaced out. Whether you’re memorizing a phone number or a complex physics equation, revisiting and applying the information over several weeks cements it in your brain by developing and strengthening the neural patterns where the information is housed. This process explains why flashcards are such an effective studying tool.
In some close-knit relationships, spaced repetition is a phenomenal tool. Teachers, parents, psychiatrists, or team managers can use it to return to and reinforce difficult ideas across many conversations.
But time is more limited in other relationships. Even so, repetition is still a useful tool. Anytime you repeat something, it signals that this information is important, so pay attention. It’s why song, speech, and soliloquy writers use repetition so liberally. Think Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the many soliloquies of Shakespeare, and, of course, Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.”