Posted by Dorothea Stuart
Just after I had heard Baroness Susan Greenfield giving a lecture on the brain at the Royal Institution I came across a related blog post by Kathy Hansen. Susan Greenfield (an excellent speaker by the way) described the imporance of stories/narrative structure in our cognitive development. In her blog Kathy gives the example of the 2002 World Memory Champion Andi Bell who uses, what he calls his "location technique", a form of storytelling, to remember large quantities of information. In this example he learns the order of 520 playing cards in just 20 minutes.
Get a feel for Andi's approach in this video clip:
Read more on Kathy's storied career blog
As it says at the end of the video: scientists have discovered that the mind is better at remembering the route between locations than it is at remembering unconnected facts and figures. A good reason for using stories in your speeches if every I heard one. Maybe getting clear on the narrative thread is also a way to help remember your Toastmasters speeches.
Baroness Greenfield's lecture on the Neuroscience of Creativity can be found on YouTube.
