Made You Look: How to Use Brain Science to Attract Attention and Persuade Others

By Carmen Simon

A full-color, image-packed guide to developing highly persuasive content that attracts more customers than ever—all based on the latest brain science

There’s an overlooked but critical scientific fact that every marketing profession needs to know: Many decisions start with attention, and it’s your job to grab the attention of every prospective customer as effectively as possible. But in this increasingly fast-paced, busy, and noisy world, how do you capture people’s attention, much less persuade them?

To answer this question, cognitive neuroscientist Carmen Simon leverages insights gleaned from her use of advanced technologies to study where people look, for how long, what type of attention leads to memories, and what keeps the brain coming back for more, to determine the effectiveness of sales pitches, marketing materials, corporate presentations, training videos, and other business content.

In Made You Look, Simon presents her four-part framework for effectively attracting the attention of customers and impacting their buying decision:

• Automatic triggers: capture audience attention with the physical properties of an external stimulus
• Guided action: guide your audience toward their internal thoughts and prompt them to focus on something rewarding
• Introspection: orient their attention internally toward something they consider rewarding
• Visual search: direct their attention externally toward what they consider rewarding

Each section of Made You Look provides detailed guidelines you can use in your communication materials immediately. Attract attention and, as a result, influence memory and decisions with Made You Look, and lead your company to the top of your industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Apr 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781265131609

Book preview

Praise for

MADE YOU LOOK

There isn’t a book like this—one that explores how best to draw and retain others’ attention to our communications, in ways that are scientifically grounded and clearly implementable. In the English language, we are said to pay attention, which implies a fee in time, resources, and energy. Here, the cost would come from failing to attend to the enlightening lessons of this book.

—ROBERT CIALDINI, author of Influence and Pre-Suasion

Presentations are the most persuasive tools available to organizations. And yet, they backfire when they’re built and delivered poorly. I always dreamed of conducting research around this phenomenon, and Carmen did! This book is easy to read and packed with neuroscience-based insights to help you create attention-grabbing presentations to increase your persuasive power.

—NANCY DUARTE, CEO and bestselling author

In solving so many problems, attention on its own is not enough. But never forget that, without attention, none of your other arts can work at all. This is a fabulous and long-overdue book on a much-neglected topic.

—RORY SUTHERLAND, vice chairman, Ogilvy

Making something more observable makes it easier to imitate. So, a key factor in making products, services, or ideas catch on is visibility. I like to say that if something is built to show, it’s built to grow. Use this book as a practical guide to ensure your most important assets show and grow.

—JONAH BERGER, marketing professor, Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Magic Words

Made You Look is an essential book for anyone trying to persuade with words and images—and that means anyone in the business world. Go beyond intuition, which is often wrong, and discover the science that forms a sort of user interface for the human mind. Add this book to your talent stack and you’ll look to others as if you discovered magic.

—SCOTT ADAMS, author of Reframe Your Brain

Copyright © 2024 by Carmen Simon. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of publisher.

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To you—for paying attention

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Quadrant I

Automatic Triggers

CHAPTER 1

Priming the Brain for Attention

CHAPTER 2

Embodied Cognition

Setting the Mind in Motion

CHAPTER 3

The Right Amount of Wrong

Handling Provocative Content

Quadrant II

Guided Action

CHAPTER 4

The Psychology of Boredom

Engaging the Brain on a Level Beyond Flash

CHAPTER 5

Give Them Something to Think About

CHAPTER 6

Mastering Metaphors

Quadrant III

Introspection

CHAPTER 7

Mind Wandering

Help Them See When They Are Not Looking

CHAPTER 8

What Happens Next?

The Neuroscience of Predicting the Future

CHAPTER 9

Transitions

Help Them See Your Message When You Aren’t There

Quadrant IV

Visual Search

CHAPTER 10

The Decision to Look

Mixing Business with Pleasure

CHAPTER 11

Harnessing Complexity

CHAPTER 12

The Risks and Rewards of Collective Attention

CONCLUSION

Become a Choreographer of Attention

CHECKLIST FOR CREATING CONTENT THAT CAPTURES ATTENTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

REFERENCES

INDEX

Sam Kaplan’s photos make everyday items, like candy, gum, or salt, look monolithic, similar to grand sci-fi movie sets.

INTRODUCTION

Would you use your face cream as dressing on your salad and eat it? Insinuating that this is possible caught my attention when I came across Max Huber’s story in a magazine. He was a real rocket scientist, and his story is one of the most intriguing tales in the history of cosmetics, involving not only moisturizer you can eat with dinner but also Huber’s out-of-the-ordinary approach to beauty products. Max Huber is the aerospace physicist who crafted the legendary Le Mer moisturizing cream after he suffered extreme burns during an explosion in his lab and fully healed himself with his creation. He would recommend to anyone he met to use La Mer not just as a moisturizing cream for the face but also as a probiotic to mix with food and even as eye drops to soothe irritation. To craft his miracle potion, Huber did not rely on chemistry alone but also on physics.

After his death, when his daughter sold the brand, scientists tried to reproduce the zealously guarded formula but could not quite achieve the same potency. It was only when a scientist from the new team invoked a medium to channel Max (yes, a medium!) that they learned they had skipped two important steps: using light and sound energy to help with the fermentation process and seeding each batch with a culture from the previous batch, like yogurt. Many products La Mer makes today contain ingredients that can be traced back to Huber’s original recipe from 1989. With the astonishing mix of science and the paranormal, it was hard for me not to pay attention to that article. Given the abundance of stimuli around you, what has attracted your attention lately and really made you look?

In my case, it was also Sam Kaplan’s delightfully clever food photos. Kaplan is an artist who arranges cookies, candies, drinks, and common tools in elegant and hypnotizing geometric displays. Pyramids built out of ham sandwiches, deep pits of snack cakes, or gum sticks arranged with striking architectural symmetry are enveloped in atmospheric lighting. I was delighted when he gave me permission to include a few of his photos on this spread. Do they make you look a little closer?

Barry Rosenthal has also captured my attention. He collects thousands of pieces of trash in cities or at the beach, brings them to his studio, groups them according to color and type, and then photographs them. Shoe soles, plastic objects, glass bottles—arranged in aesthetically arresting ways—transformed into fine works of art. Take a look at his piece titled Sealife. It’s hard not to stop and stay for a while.

What else draws attention? Moving from the static canvas to live models, it’s hard not to look at Johannes Stötter’s art. I was thrilled when he agreed to allow us to display one of his photographs on the book cover. He is a master at creating just the right amount of illusion that makes you look and rewards you when you do. Did you initially see both people in his creation?

Edible face cream, monolithic candy structures, aesthetically pleasing trash, live painted models—they all attract attention and make us look. Most recently, AI-generated images, such as a real hippo sitting on a couch, smoking a cigarette, or R2-D2 being baptized, and a man kissing a blue deer, definitely attract attention. But you might ask: How do I compete with these when I try to draw attention to my business content? A corporate pitch deck about data analytics, governance issues, or cybersecurity may not have the same attention-grabbing power as the creations of a rocket scientist, gifted artist, or speedy AI that can remix images and text from millions of data inputs to create unusual outputs. We’re here to bridge this significant gap in practical ways. And it’s essential to solve the issue of attention to business content because attention paves the way to memory and decision-making, meaning that if your audiences pay attention and remember what you have to say, they are more likely to do what you say. A few years ago, I wrote a book called Impossible to Ignore, which addresses the importance of creating memorable content because memory fuels decision-making. This book is a prequel. One of the reasons people don’t remember and don’t decide to act is because they don’t pay attention to begin with.

Barry Rosenthal makes us look and confront a paradox of modern life. Can we live together in a world crowded out by our own consumerism?

Before we look at practical guidelines for capturing attention, let’s address some problems regarding attention because if we know the problems, then the solutions will be easier to understand and apply. And to solve any problem, we must first define what we’re talking about. So, what is attention?

The concept might appear easy on the surface. However, the more we learn about the brain, the more we discover that attention is one of the most misleading and misused concepts in cognitive science. This is because we now know that attention is not one coherent set of cognitive or neural operations; there is no such thing as an attention system in the brain. We know this because multiple structures come together to account for several attention types, most of which are based on the selectivity that has evolved to enable us to achieve goals and avoid negative outcomes. With this spirit of selectivity in mind, consider these attention types:

•   Focused attention: Selecting external events for further internal processing

•   Selective attention: Focusing on some stimuli while ignoring others

•   Spatial attention: Prioritizing the processing of events in the context of a particular location

•   Visual search: Looking for a target event

•   Divided attention: Performing multiple tasks at the same time

•   Feature integration: Selectively integrating information belonging to one event within and across sensory modalities

•   Goal-centered attention: Prioritizing one goal over others

•   Sustained attention: Maintaining concentration over time (There is no short attention span for the healthy brain.)

A long (and not exhaustive) list like this might seem like good news because you may think that getting attention is easy when there are so many attention types. Unfortunately, this is not the case. At any given moment, our field of vision captures only a small area in focus. It would not be efficient to pay attention to everything in our environment. Your audiences are not any different. They get only a glimpse of what you offer.

Use Brain Science When Determining How to Get Attention

As a cognitive neuroscientist focused on helping business professionals attract attention and persuade others, I frequently analyze the brain’s reaction to corporate content, such as sales and marketing presentations, e-books, training materials, websites, corporate videos, and business apps. I use EEG (electroencephalogram) technology because of its high temporal resolution, meaning we can detect the brain’s reaction to a stimulus, such as a Power-Point slide, precisely when it happens. We need this feature because cognitive and emotional or affective processes are fast and fleeting. Processing an idea can occur within tens to hundreds of milliseconds, and it may span a sequence that takes hundreds of milliseconds to a few seconds. You cannot capture what happens in these short time frames by asking people after the fact how they felt or what they thought.

Bypassing self-reports is also helpful because thoughts and emotions are often unconscious, difficult to describe, hard to remember, and in the case of negative experiences, such as tension or embarrassment, susceptible to social desirability, meaning that people might tell you what they think you want to hear. In behavioral research, this often leads to distorted or even invalid self-reports. Incidentally, I asked an AI tool what captures its attention, and it responded: As an AI language model, I don’t have personal preferences or emotions like humans do. Its answer correctly ties attention to preferences and emotions, and even though humans have them, they are often hard or impossible to express. Using neuroscience tools helps us overcome these drawbacks.

When we analyze EEG data, we create colorful brain maps that show brain activity during engagement (or lack thereof) with a specific stimulus. When content creators, such as sales, marketing, or training teams, are able to view an EEG topographic map of a customer who participated in their presentation, it serves as a powerful tool they can use in conjunction with other traditional techniques (e.g., training, big data analysis) to create and deliver attention-grabbing content.

In addition to EEG technology, I use tools such as ECG (electrocardiogram) electrodes, eye-tracking, and GSR (galvanic skin response) devices to detect what happens in the brain and body when people view business content. Unlike other methods of investigating the brain, such as PET or CAT scans or fMRI, this research uses no radiation, does not induce claustrophobic feelings, and can be done in convenient, comfortable, and, most importantly, realistic settings, such as offices and conference rooms.

This is a participant in one of my studies, watching a Zoom call while her EEG, ECG, GSR, and eye activity are recorded. Some people ask me: But isn’t the person behaving differently because they are aware of these tools they are wearing? They are initially aware, but this awareness is short-lived, as people habituate quickly, and their focus goes to the tasks they need to complete. We aim to create content that is attention-grabbing, and the experiments are also fairly short. In the future, I am sure that these technologies will be even less intrusive, and research time can extend over an hour.

The variables I study with these biometric tools have practical business consequences. For instance, in terms of cognitive variables, I analyze the following:

•   Attention: Particularly the type of attention we defined earlier as the process of staying focused across time. This comes from the EEG signal. The eye tracker also gives us a measure of visual attention.

•   Motivation: Let’s define this as the desire to keep working to obtain something.

•   Approach/withdrawal: This is based on the EEG signal and reveals the emotional response to positive or negative stimuli.

•   Working memory (cognitive workload): The storing and manipulation of information in short-term memory until the completion of a cognitive task.

•   Fatigue: A decrease in alertness that can impair efficiency, performance, and memory retrieval.

I also monitor affective variables, such as valence, which is an emotional state within a pleasure-displeasure continuum that ranges from positive to negative. Valence refers to whether people like or dislike what they view. And I also record participants’ arousal, which means their general level of alertness and wakefulness, ranging from calm to very intense.

Speaking of attention in specific, I am constantly humbled by how much the brain does not see in a business setting. For example, imagine you’re sharing a series of slides with an audience. In many instances, I notice that when people view a presentation, especially in a virtual setting, they direct 10 to 12 percent of their attention to the presenter and about 60 percent to the slides. In a face-to-face environment, the presenter receives 11 to 21 percent of attention, and slides or other items in the environment receive 17 to 30 percent of attention. So, in both scenarios, 40 percent of the presentation—or even more—is never seen!

The screenshot on the next page was taken during a Zoom call simulated during one of my research projects; it shows a seller and his team sharing with a potential client the merits of their company’s platform for managing customer success. The heat map at the top of the screenshot indicates through the more intense red spots that viewers are paying attention mainly to one of the speakers and are barely looking at the information on the slide. As a result, very few participants in the study could remember the four steps to customer success.

This heat map is a reminder that people direct only a fraction of their attention to business content at any given moment.

Why Business Audiences Don’t Pay Attention

When I conduct neuroscience experiments to discover what attracts people’s attention and makes them look, I first ask participants to stare at a beige wall or screen for 30 seconds to take a baseline of their brain when they are not stimulated. Then they view a presentation, video, handout, or app, and I observe what happens in the brain when they should be stimulated. Calculating the difference between baseline and stimulus often reveals a rough reality: We often don’t notice a statistically significant difference between the stimulus and baseline. This means that most business content you come across is not much better than staring at a beige wall.

When content is not that stimulating, there is another consequence. Take a look at this person who was participating in one of my studies. What you don’t know about him is that he is asleep. Not intentionally. The experiment started strong, and he was attentive and engaged. But at some point, drowsiness set in. After hearing the presenter’s voice for a while and seeing some pleasant pictures and motion, his brain started drifting away. I always study cognition in the wild, meaning we might set up a pop-up lab at a client’s site or conference. This means that people might be tired from a night of networking or from a day of dealing with customers or coworkers. I mention this because sometimes you might offer stimulating content, but people are simply sleep-deprived.

Sometimes getting attention is hard because you’re dealing with pickier customers who demand higher-quality content. They are used to seeing it in their personal lives. With movie franchises such as The Avengers, Star Wars, and Harry Potter grossing billions of dollars at the worldwide box office, and beautifully produced shows on streaming services, today’s viewers are used to content that is faster, louder, and literally out of this world. Some business content creators can never compete with media moguls who have the budget and resources to capture and sustain attention.

This is a sleepy participant during one of my neuroscience experiments. He could easily be your client.

Getting attention is also difficult because of abundant choices, which can also reinforce people’s status quo bias. As I write this, I just received an ad presenting 16 options for boiled egg holders. There is one that looks like a flamingo, another like a bear, and another like a bunny. There is a dinosaur looking over his shoulder to make sure the egg is OK, and another is a squirrel eating a nut. I could also get a bearded man to hold the egg, a sheep, and the most obvious, a hen. It’s easy to pay attention to the options at first, but after a while, the extra stimulation can lead to boredom and cause the viewer to look away.

Many content creators we work with in our neuroscience research share that it is challenging to create something truly attention-grabbing. You think you’ve captured something special. But when you put it all together, it’s just striking how similar it looks to other content in the market. I often experience this feeling when I review a large inventory of slides we’ve created for customers over the years and realize that so many of them could be taken from one client’s deck, placed in another’s, and no one would know. At times, it’s easy to give up and just find comfort in this similarity, sacrificing attention along the way.

Then there are times when you create the