Great communication isn't just about what you say; it's about designing your message so the right parts are remembered. This intentional approach makes your key insights feel significant, gives your arguments a clear structure, and ensures your audience walks away with the takeaways you intended. Today, we're unpacking the Isolation Effect—a powerful psychological trigger for memory—and giving you a simple framework to add weight and clarity to your most important ideas.

How do you ensure your audience walks away with the three points you need them to remember, and not a random assortment of details?

Most communication leaves this to chance. We present the information and expect the audience to do the work of prioritizing it. This is a critical mistake.

The most effective communicators build a memorable framework for their audience intentionally. They use a principle called the Isolation Effect to strategically break patterns and put a neurological spotlight on their most important ideas.

In this edition we're exploring the psychology behind it and giving you a clear, actionable toolkit to apply the Isolation Effect to your slides, your delivery, and your data, giving your ideas the weight and staying power they need to influence outcomes.

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."