TLDR: Your audience is going to forget almost everything you say—that’s not an insult, it’s just how our brains are wired. The secret to making your message stick isn't to talk louder or add more data, but to strategically break the pattern of your presentation to jolt their brains awake at key moments. In today's edition, we'll show you how to use this powerful 'Isolation Effect' to make your ideas unforgettable.
Your audience will forget 90% of what you say. The question is, which 10% do you want them to keep?
Most presentations are a data dump. We leave it to the audience to sift through the noise and find the message. That's not a strategy—it's a mistake.
The best communicators don't leave memory to chance. They use a psychological trigger called the Isolation Effect to make their key ideas unforgettable. By strategically breaking a pattern, they put a spotlight on what truly matters.
In this edition, we'll show you how to use this principle on your slides, in your delivery, and with your data, so your ideas don't just get heard—they get remembered and acted on.
What's a lonely apple got to do with it?
The principle gets its more formal name, the Von Restorff effect, from the psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff, whose research in the 1930s first formally showed that when you're presented with a set of similar items, the one that differs from the rest is the most likely to be remembered.
The classic example is simple: If you see a list of numbers—9, 17, 4, 32, Apple, 12, 28—your brain instantly latches onto "Apple."
When you look at that list, the outcome seems obvious. Of course "Apple" stands out. This doesn't exactly feel like groundbreaking information. And yet, for as simple as this principle is, it’s rarely something we think about consciously when we build our presentations.
As you've learned in past editions, our brains are built for efficiency. To save energy, they get incredibly good at recognizing and processing patterns. A deck full of text-heavy slides is a pattern. A speaker talking at the same pace for 20 minutes is a pattern. Once your audience's brain senses a predictable pattern, it settles into a low-energy mode. They might be hearing you, but they aren't truly processing the information with any priority.
The Isolation Effect is your tool for deliberately and strategically breaking that pattern at key moments. Each time you introduce something unexpected, you force the brain to wake up, spend a little extra cognitive energy, and pay attention. You’re essentially putting a flag on a specific piece of information, signaling to the subconscious, "This is one of the important ones. File this away."
Putting the isolation effect to work
This principle is one of the most satisfying to apply because the results are so immediate. Here are a few ways to use it for your key points
1. Isolate Visuals on a Slide. This is especially powerful for data that tells a story. Imagine a bar chart showing a full year of sales data, but your core message is that the third quarter's outstanding results drove the year's success. Instead of making all the bars the same color, you would make every bar a muted gray except for the Q3 bar, which you would make a vibrant, contrasting color. This instantly anchors your entire narrative to the most important fact on the slide, ensuring the audience sees the main takeaway unequivocally.
2. Isolate Key Slides in Your Deck. Your presentation's structure is a pattern. If you have three core pillars in your argument, introduce each one with a slide that breaks the established visual pattern. For example, in the last Stripe Sessions keynote, John Collison broke a long sequence of text/data based slides with a single, full-bleed photograph of penguins. The stark visual surprise was used to underscore the main message that their technology unlocks truly unexpected outcomes. This technique creates a powerful, memorable "chapter heading" for each key idea.
3. Isolate Moments in Your Delivery. Just as you can isolate multiple visuals, you can isolate multiple moments. For each of your main points, you can use your voice as the isolation tool. Right before you state a critical takeaway, pause. A full two seconds of silence before each key message creates a series of anchors, giving each point its own space and gravity.
A word of caution: The risk of misplaced emphasis
The Isolation Effect is a powerful tool, but like any tool, it can be used in the wrong place. Its effectiveness depends entirely on what you choose to isolate.
Be mindful of these common traps:
- Isolating the trivial: If you use a dramatic pause or a vibrant color to highlight a minor supporting detail, you risk signaling to your audience that this is the main point. You're inadvertently telling them to remember the wrong thing.
- Overusing the effect: If you try to make five different things on one slide "pop," you create visual noise. The Isolation Effect works because it creates one point of difference against a consistent pattern. Remember: when everything is special, nothing is.
The goal is not just to make something stand out, but to make the right thing stand out. Before you apply it, ask yourself: "If they remember only one thing from this slide, what do I need it to be?" Use the effect on that, and only that.
Wrap up
A primary goal of most presentations is to ensure the audience walks away with the handful of key ideas you need them to remember. The challenge is that the default for most communication is for everything to blur together. We focus on sharing all the necessary information, leaving the work of prioritizing it to our audience.
The Isolation Effect changes that. It gives you a tool to intentionally build a structure of memory for your audience. Each time you use it—by changing a color, a slide layout, or your vocal pace—you are building a "mental signpost" that says, "This is important. Pay attention to this."