An explainer video can be powerful only if it is memorable. It can be the key to capturing the imagination of potential customers and driving conversions as long as it tells your story or explains your concept in a way that people want to watch. Even high quality, compelling video is wasted if people don’t remember your brand or the key points you are trying to communicate. To become memorable, you must code your information in a way that makes it easy for the brain to build memories.
In my ebook, 60 Seconds:How to tell your company’s story & the brain science that makes it stick, I present some of the latest findings on brain science as they apply to the process of making successful videos. Now some exciting new research is shedding new light on the memory formation process, thanks to medical treatments of epilepsy. The University of California Davis recently reported breakthroughs in our understanding of memory formation.
Arne Ekstrom, assistant professor at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience has been working closely with results from Dr. Nitin Tandon, a neurosurgeon at the Memorial-Hermann hospital in Houston’s University of Texas Medical Center. Dr. Tandon uses electrodes on the surface of the brain to capture electrical patterns when an epileptic patient has seizure. Tandon explained, “Before we can even understand how we would come up with prosthetic devices that we may be able to use to supplant certain brain functions that have been lost, we have to model those and understand those at a computational level.”
That level of detail has brought new insight for Ekstrom and his team at UC Davis. “Previous work has focused on one region of the brain at a time,” said Ekstrom. “Our results show that memory recall involves simultaneous activity across brain regions.”
In a series of experiments, patients navigated a virtual city on a laptop, with Dr. Tandon’s electrodes recording brain patterns. Later the subjects were asked to recall the routes they mapped out. Their memory recall set off waves of patterns across multiple connected brain regions simultaneously, not sequentially. Unexpectedly, memories of places and times were recorded with different frequencies but at the same time. For example, “What shop is next to the donut shop?” generated a separate set of frequencies than “Where was I at 11 a.m.?”
Ekstrom summed up his findings, “Just as cell phones and wireless devices work at different radio frequencies for different information, the brain resonates at different frequencies for spatial and temporal information.”
One of the biggest contributions to this new interpretation of neuroscience data comes from graph theory, a relatively new mathematical field designed for studying how networks operate. “Previously, we didn’t have enough data from different brain regions to use graph theory. This combination of multiple readings during memory retrieval and graph theory is unique,” Ekstrom concluded.
Read more about how the brain works and Dual-coding theory in 60 Seconds, which you can download right now or have delivered to your door in a hard copy. We’ll be watching these developments closely to make sure our videos are the ones people remember.
