The other day a friend sent to me a link to a video on YouTube, “How Anthony Jeselnik misdirects the audience.” Anthony Jeselnik is an American comedian. I hadn’t heard of him before, so don’t worry, if you don’t know his name it doesn’t mean your knowledge of American pop culture is fatally insufficient or anything.

The video was basically about how Jeselnik makes a statement, pauses long enough to let the audience members’ brains extrapolate the pattern they think probably follows, and then he breaks the pattern and people laugh.

That got me to thinking about chaos theory (remember chaos theory? I was banging on about that a few weeks ago), and how chaos theory isn’t so much about chaos as it is about our inability to fully understand the systems in which we exist.

Which means that we don’t understand the world nearly as well as we like to think we do. In fact, the human brain, over the past million years or so, has been rewarded for seeing patterns where they don’t really exist.

Overcoming a habit that has been engrained in us over a million years isn’t easy, but I tried to do it with a phrase I kept repeating to myself while I was walking across Turkey: “Every day be born a dumbass anew.” And what I meant by that phrase was don’t forget everything you know about the world, just set it aside (don’t worry, it’ll still be there when you need it) and let the world speak to you as it is, not as you think it is.

This is surprisingly hard to do, and here, over ten years later, I’m still telling myself every day to every day be born a dumbass anew. I don’t think we ever fully learn that skill, because imagining patterns where they don’t really exist is so inextricably tied up with being human that in order to permanently get away from it, we would have to become not human.

Anyway, here’s what that has to do with presentations: Remember that the brains of your audience desperately want to see patterns, so much so that your audience members won’t rest until a pattern is restored.

So tear a page from Anthony Jeselnik’s playbook: If you want to hold your audience’s attention, remind them of a pattern, break it, and let them watch as you draw a new one.

BTW, yes, I’ve given this advice recently, but it bears repeating (there’s a good pattern-related word!).