By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
The experience of language and meaning isn’t something bottled up in one drawer of the brain’s filing system. Instead, it is something that dances across your entire brain, using the full canvas of your cerebral cortex. And that sentence is a good example. It is visual and it is active. So as you read it, your brain isn’t just drawing upon the gray matter dictionary to discern and process the definition of each word and the meaning of the full sentence. Instead, your brain is using all of the regions associated with the visual and physical perceptions invoked by the words themselves: drawers, filing, dancing, painting. Scientists used to think there was something called a “language center” in a discrete region of the brain, but now know that all kinds of regions of the brain are active in response to the language used. That reality has implications for those, like legal persuaders, who use words to do their work.
One test of good language can be found in this question: Could you, if you had to, draw a picture of the sentence? If you can at least make a conceptual sketch, then you are using good visual language. If you can’t, then chances are you are being too abstract. Drawing (did you catch that?) from a recent research report on National Public Radio (NPR), this post will illustrate (yes, there’s another one) a few ideas for picking language that perks up your listeners’ visual engagement.
Can You See What I Mean?
Last month, NPR ran a health news feature on how our words take shape in our brain. The piece reported on the emerging understanding of how language works, driven by discoveries in the 1990’s. Speaking to researcher Benjamin Bergen of the University of California, San Diego, the report covers the results of fMRI experiments on what happens when the brain hears and responds to words. “They found something totally surprising,” Bergen noted. “It’s not just certain specific little regions in the brain, regions dedicated to language, that were lighting up. It was kind of a whole-brain type of process.” Rather than just treating language as a symbol and processing its meaning based on our knowledge and past experience, the brain is simulating the experience as if preparing to act.
Bergen used the example of the sentence, “The shortstop threw the ball to first base.” According to this latest understanding, you process this kind of sentence “by recreating in your vision system what it would look like to perceive that event and recreating in your motor system what it would be like to be that shortstop, to have the ball in your hand and release it.”
This emerging understanding should affect how we think about and use language when we’re trying to influence the listener’s experience. Language that easily engages the visual or motor centers will simply work better to hold attention, engage an audience, and communicate an experience. That is a point that should be taken to heart by legal persuaders as well; it isn’t just about describing the facts, applying the law, or assembling the arguments. It is about creating an experience in your target audience that allows them to see your case as you and your client see it.
Use Language to Make Your Point Visually
By nature, any language can be processed visually, but it stands to reason that some language is easier to see than other language. Here is a quick side by side comparison of some ways of phrasing a legal argument that are more visual or less visual.
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Less Visual |
More Visual
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| We must follow the law. | Everything we do in this courtroom takes place within a big envelope with the label “the law” on it.
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| The defendant failed to take reasonable care. | The defendant created a cliff, then removed all the warning signs, and then looked the other way to avoid seeing if anyone would drive off of it.
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| The negligence was a proximate cause of the injury. | Each of the defendant’s choices was a link in a chain, and link by link, that chain led inexorably to this injury.
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| The plaintiff’s quality of life has been impaired. | Mary will never be able to walk on a beach or climb a hill to see the sunset.
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| The other side has never answered this point. | And what have they placed on the other side of the scale from this argument? Nothing. Not even a feather’s weight of evidence.
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In each case, what sets the language on the right apart from the language on the left is that it is possible to draw a sketch of it. That is what invites the brain to engage in some form of visual processing when it understands and applies the expression, making it simultaneously more interesting, engaging, comprehensible, and personal.
Of course, good communicators are already familiar with this difference. But with the pressures of trial and the haste of covering everything, it can be easy to forget some of these basics and just rest on the assumption that, “well, it’s clear enough.” But clarity isn’t the same as involvement, and when we’re talking about the brain’s involvement, that is facilitated by language that at least potentially paints a picture. This is also a reminder that effective language is at some level a metaphor in the sense that it creates new meanings from a reliable toolbox of associations that are already familiar. That means that you aren’t really planting pictures in your audience’s heads. Instead, you are composing using the pictures that are already there.
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Other Posts on Visualization and Meaning:
- Talk to the Eyes: If It Can’t Be Visualized, It’s Not a Story
- Learn From Memes
- Go Ahead and Talk with Your Hands, But Know What You’re Saying
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Image Credit: Torley, Flickr Creative Commons