WORKSHOP 2: The Science of language
Hi, all SciCommers!
If you were unable to attend our face-to-face workshop at the Royal Society of Victoria, fear not—this is your go-to page for the summary of the workshop flow, presentations, and fun science communication activities that took place.
What is Anxiety?
Who gets anxious before a presentation? Or going to a new place? Or even meeting new people? That’s right: Almost everyone does!
There are four aspects of anxiety:
The feelings involved
2. The thoughts leading to anxiety
3. The threat felt
4. The brain areas involved in this unwelcomed feeling
Feelings:
The most common physical symptoms associated with anxiety are an increase in heart rate, the feeling of butterflies in your stomach, and finally, perspiration (excessive sweating).
Thoughts:
If you get rid of the thoughts, anxiety feels physiologically identical to excitement. So, what makes it so bad? It’s the thought process. Anxiety tends to be future-oriented; we are anxious about uncertainties and we don’t want to expose ourselves to threats.
When you’re feeling anxious )such as when you are doing a presentation) your body physiologically is responding as if there’s a life-threatening danger— just as our ancestors did when coming across a lion in the Sahara desert. It is a life-preserving system designed to protect you. However, when giving a presentation, there is no real threat; it’s just a thought!
Brain Areas:
There are three main brain areas involved with anxiety:
1. The brainstem
2. The limbic system, which includes your hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala—also known as your ‘emotional brain’.
3. And finally, the frontal lobe—which is commonly known as your ‘thinking brain’. That’s why you can’t think straight when you’re anxious.
Relaxation tip:
Whether you’re lying down right now reading this, or even on the tram, take a moment to close your eyes and take three long, deep breaths.
How do you feel now?
This technique stimulates your vagus nerve. This is the main nerve in your parasympathetic nervous system. And what is the parasympathetic nervous system? It is what regulates fight-flight response. This nerve controls your digestion, heart rate, and immune system—common things affected by anxiety. So, by doing this diaphragmatic breathing, you are relaxing your fight or flight system.
Ums and Uhs:
‘Ums’ and ‘uhs’—also known as filler words—are your brain's way of filling in short pauses. You need to find better ways to fill in the space of these filler words. Even though these words may be considered normal in day-to-day conversations, you certainly do not want to overuse them in a professional final presentation!
So, how do you get rid of these ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’?
If you want to have a look at a great example presentation done coherently and fluently, have a look at Dr Jill Bolte Taylor’s presentation on Ted entitled My Stroke of Insight. This is one of the most-watched videos on the channel and is a great example of science communication done right!
But for now, what can you do to improve your public speaking?
One strategy is to practice saying your speech in front of a mirror and then record yourself. This way you can see how you look and sound from the outside perspective, and where necessary, you can adjust your presentation style. (You can pick up on some of those anxious mannerisms you might not have noticed!)
Another way to improve your presentation is to have audience interactions. This can be done by getting your audience to answer a question, raise their hands, or do a short activity together. Finally, another strategy is to have sentence openers that attract your audience’s attention. Some examples of sentence openers include telling an anecdote regarding your topic, sharing a powerful statistic, or asking a poignant question to the audience.
So next time instead of saying “Hi my name is blah blah”… how about you get your audience to scream like we did at our workshop?
Visualisation
Visualisation is a really valuable and underutilised tool in hijacking your brain to believe in itself.
Practice is essential to building muscle memory and freeing your brain to focus on performance instead of content, however there is still a big difference between practicing an experience and living it. People that practice a speech over and over, or practice catching a ball, can still stumble over their words, and can still drop the ball when it becomes a pressurised environment.
When speaking in front of a crowd, you are now confronted with new stimuli everywhere. Harsher lights, eyes watching, open space, it all takes up space as your mind needs to adapt to it.
But what if you had already lived the experience? Is it as much pressure anymore?
The reticular activating system is a part of your brain that filters all the information coming from your senses and selects which inputs receive attention. For the brain, vividly thinking of an action is the same as doing it as it activates the same neural pathways. By practicing visualisation, you can train your brain to give attention to the things you want it to notice to get you to the outcome you desire.
You can train your brain to only pay attention to actions and beliefs that will lead you to success.
Instead of creating a vicious cycle of noticing your anxiety and, for instance, a symptom of sweat on your palms, triggering your body to produce more sweat and to amplify the feeling of anxiety, your brain can focus on the feeling of excitement and smiling, triggering this feeling and symptom to continue.
This also means that if you can’t think of your desired outcome, you aren’t going to achieve it. You will subconsciously do all the actions that will get you to the outcome you believe will happen. If you can’t imagine yourself speaking well, then you believe you won’t and so you may stutter, have a mental blank, or be late.
If you can't think of your success, your brain won't believe you can have that success and so you won't. Your brain will focus on the actions that will lead you to the outcome of your belief.
The power of visualisation extends even beyond that. Here are some studies, although small, that show the potential impact of visualisation:
On muscle gain: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14998709/
On musicality: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747442/
On preventing muscle degeneracy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4269707/
Here is a video to help expand on this:
Here are some simple visualisation exercises to do at varying levels of time commitment.
Strike a powerful pose before an important event like before a speech, meeting, or an exam. Lift your chin, open your chest, smile. Imagine completing the event successfully and the feelings of joy, excitement, relief, etc. that this would give you. Hold this superman pose, these positive thoughts, your smile, and these feelings for a minute. Let go of the pose and tackle the event.
This is a great short-term way to give your brain a boost in the direction of success.
Journal your visualisation. For an event or goal you want to be successful in, write down what would happen if you succeeded. Write down what this success would look and feel like, what words you would hear, what you may eat to celebrate etc. Engage all of your senses. Be as detailed as possible. Now your brain knows what to look for.
It is also useful to journal the worst circumstance that could happen. This primes your brain to understand what would happen instead of speculating what could happen. Now that you have thought about it and understand the reality of the consequences, your brain will no longer seek to bring up scenarios that you are trying to avoid thinking of and exaggerating the consequences.
Overcommunication
Most experts agree that 70% to 93% of all communication is nonverbal. That means your smile, how you hold yourself, and how use your hands. In knowing this, we still focus more on the words we are going to say then how we are going to say them and engage an audience visually.
How you hold yourself, project your voice, walk, make eye contact, and use your hands are incredibly useful and important ways of communicating what you are trying to say.
In this workshop, we identified that feelings and characters can be guessed based on a person’s actions. This means being confident in expressing positive emotions is vital to attracting attention.
To be comfortable expressing yourself in front of an audience it is really useful to practice overexpressing yourself. Getting comfortable feeling weird and loud so being authentic is almost easy by comparison.
Tips and Tricks
When it comes to preparing for a speech there are a few tricks here and there that can level up your presentation.
Examples:
Watching examples of your favourite speeches and presenters can give you a wide range of inspiration. Try to think about how they talk, their pacing, what clothing they’re wearing and how their body language is.
Do they have any props? Are there images or slides that they are using to help assist their presentation? These are all great questions to ask.
Audience Interaction:
To engage with your audience there are various interactions you can incorporate within your presentation.
You can ask the audience a question
You can get the audience to raise their hands
Or you can play a short activity
Practice and Record:
Recording yourself or practicing in the mirror is one of the best ways to prepare for a speech. This way you can watch yourself back and analyse where you struggle with the most or edit parts of your presentation you may feel is too boring or slow.
Even practicing in front of a family member or friend can be useful as they can provide active feedback. Especially practicing with someone who is a non-expert to check that your explanation is easy enough to be understood by the general public. After your speech, ask them to ask you follow-up questions to help you think on your feet and to learn how to not repeat information from a script.
Sentence Openers:
“Hello. My name is abc and this is my presentation about xyz.” Is the most common and boring way to start a presentation.
The first 10 seconds of a speech can determine how engaged your audience is, especially if they have been watching a lot of presentations one after another. Wow your audience with a fun fact, an anecdote or even a question.
Activities You Can Try at Home!
Warming up your voice:
Practicing speeches over a long period of time can strain your voice. Warming up is one of the best ways to combat this.
Stand in front of a mirror and start with a whisper and progressively get louder. You may find that there is a difference between yelling and projecting. To make sure you are not straining you voice, breath in deep where your stomach expands rather than your shoulders clenching, then when trying to be loud envision the words projecting from the front of your mouth rather than the back.
Now it is a bit easier to get volume without exhausting your voice!
It takes some practice, but after a while you will be able to give speeches at a great volume in no time!
VISUALIZATION:
This activity can be as long or as short as you would like. The more time spent visualising and the more detail, the better the effect.
Do a visual mediation. Sit with your eyes closed and imagine this event occurring. Engage all of your senses. Similar to the journaling but instead of thinking about it to prime your brain, you will embody it to trick your brain. Once you feel you have lived the experience, move on to another possibility.
Before visualising the positive, it would be worthwhile visualising the negative possibilities so your mind is clear, alike to journaling the negative.
This activity is also increasingly useful with duration.
over communication:
Find a friend, family member or even a pet.
First tell them about your day in the more reserved way possible. Don’t make eye contact, sound flat, and even mumble.
Next tell them about your favourite thing ever! Jump up and down, speak as fast as you can, use extreme hand gestures.
Finally tell them about your STEMM idea in a casual and comfortable way. The middle ground between these two.
Did you notice how they reacted? Was your friend concerned about your day when you talked flat? Did you pet get startled when you jumped up and down too much?
How we communicate with our voices and body language is just as important as what we’re saying and can convey emotion. In fact, extreme emotions can sometimes be recognised as “contagious”. Now when writing your speeches, think about how you delivery information with your body and voice.
Photography by Sanjeeban Chattopadhyay and Michelle Nguyen