These days, I am reading a book called “Fluke,” by Brian Klaas. It’s about chaos theory.

You know chaos theory: Basically, “butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, and a hurricane hits the United States.”

A lot of people hear about chaos theory and think, “Boy, that sounds like a lot of pressure. You mean if I pick up this beer with my right hand and not my left hand, someone might die?”

But Brian Klaas has a different take on it, which is that while everything we do matters, we can’t analyze the ramifications of our actions more than a few steps down the road, so don’t worry about it too much.

One of the many presentation- and story-related things to take away from chaos theory is this:

The human brain is a pattern-creation machine. Evolution has been such that the brain gets rewarded for seeing patterns even when there really isn’t one there.

Keep this in mind when you are speaking to an audience. The brains of your audience desperately want to see patterns.

So one of the best ways to keep someone’s attention is to break a pattern, because it will cause them to think:

“How on earth is this person going to put things back together?”