Carmen Simon, PhD

With the growth of a global economy, conducting business across borders is inescapable. And given the wide adoption of virtual selling, addressing a global audience is fairly easy. But it can become harder as business content becomes more complex.

In this session, Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, shares her neuroscience research on handling complex content while dealing with culturally diverse brains. Join us to learn practical guidelines for addressing intricate content and find out clear and practical answers to these questions:

• Do some audiences prefer details while others don’t want to “get in the weeds”?
• What do people from different countries remember better: a simple or a complex sales presentation?
• How can you resolve deep-seated cultural differences when presenting complex content?
• What elements influence how the brain processes complex content and makes decisions?

Persuasion is pervasive, and harnessing its power can help an organization achieve meaningful goals. While persuasion has been abundantly studied from a behavioral perspective, in this keynote, Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, shares tactical guidelines on persuasion based on her neuroscience research.

The research examines existing communication habits and reveals practical answers to relevant questions, such as:

• If you use the most current business jargon, does your message come across as smart and sophisticated or empty and insincere?
• What type of emotional words are most effective for persuasion, and how much emotional language is necessary to influence others?
• Is it worthwhile to share original images in your business presentations, or does the brain find comfort in the cliché?
• If you use one consistent theme across your business messages, does it make your communication coherent or boring?

We live in an era where algorithms rule. They are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and impact a lot of things in our lives, from package delivery to movie recommendations to finding a kidney or love online. Will there be a point where the robots take over? Can our humanity be automated?

It is helpful to strike a balance between robots and humans because it’s the human brain that creates demand, which keeps the economy strong, and it’s the machine that augments our human capabilities. During this keynote, Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, addresses from a neuroscience perspective how to balance the human and the machine and create loyalty and better engagement with your internal teams and clients. Specifically, you will learn tangible and practical answers to these pressing business questions:

• Does the machine really have more power compared to humans?
• How can we help the machine and the human brain evolve together?
• How do we sustain our humanity in an engineered age?

There is no denying that your audience’s minds will wander. Ideally, they will not wander so far that they forget they are attending your Zoom call or reading your eBook. While mind-wandering can have a positive impact on leisure or creative activities, it has negative consequences in business communication because it is linked to less comprehension and more reliance on automatic behaviors. This means that changing customers’ status quo is harder.

In this session, Dr. Carmen Simon shares her neuroscience research on what to do (and what not to do) when the buyer’s brain takes a break. Specifically, you will learn practical guidelines related to:

• What happens in your buyer’s brain when it becomes decoupled from the external world
• In which medium the mind wanders more (is your bet on eBooks or Zoom?)
• What to do, practically, when your buyer’s brain cannot keep still

Selling is constantly marked by a hunger for authenticity. After all, who doesn’t appreciate an authentic customer-seller relationship? But it’s not so clear, scientifically, what it means for someone to be perceived as authentic. Are you more authentic when you speak your mind because you value being yourself or when you’re choosing not to say what’s on your mind because you value kindness and politeness? There is a debate in the science of authenticity: on one hand, authenticity happens when acting in informal, often non-conformist ways, but on the other, it can happen when acting in formal, socially desirable ways.

To settle the debate, Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, shares her latest neuroscience research on how buyers perceive sellers’ authenticity in virtual contexts. During this session, you will learn practical guidelines related to these questions:

• What language is most effective: formal language, free of any style and personality, or informal language, marked by temperament and even cursing? Could influence have an indecent side?
• Which clothing style has a stronger impact: informal, business casual, or formal attire? Should you keep your gym clothes during a virtual meeting to exude a quiet, comfort style, or it is necessary to put on a shirt and jacket?
• Which presentation modeality do buyers appreciate more: formal slides, informal hand drawings, or something in between?

Motivating yourself, your teams, and your customers are important ingredients in successful selling, especially as AI is putting some pressure on the worth of human capabilities. But motivation, a complex process deeply rooted in the brain, is often hard to find and sustain. The good news is that the brain is constantly active and always motivated to do something. The question is: how do you motivate it toward something with positive consequences for yourself and your buyers or teams?

In this keynote, Dr. Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, shares her neuroscience research and provides techniques to supercharge motivation. You will have a clear, integrated model of motivation based on how your brain works. Through concrete examples and engaging media, Dr. Simon will help you learn how to:

• Explain the core science behind motivating yourself and others
• Discover the most important neurobiological factors that influence healthy motivational drive and motivation deficits
• Use science-based, practical techniques to turn yourself and others into go-getters and peak performers

Every business that operates in a competitive space has a pressing goal: to stand out from the competition. But how do you address standing out from someone else from the angle of how the brain works? If you want to appear different than your competition, your buyer’s brain must be able to detect that difference. Once that difference is recognized, their brain must then appreciate or value that difference. And to get your buyers to act, you need that difference to be memorable.

In this keynote, Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, shares practical, neuroscience-based principles that enable you to:

• Help your buyer’s brain detect the difference between you and a competitor
• Create assets that are perceived by buyers as unique and valuable
• Use science-based techniques that help buyers to remember your value proposition, not your competition’s

Have you ever noticed a gap between what people say they will do and what they actually do after you talk to them? Lack of action and follow- through have negative consequences for the customer journey and business outcomes.

Using neuroscience, this session provides a unique approach to influencing and inspiring others to take action. During this interactive session, you learn how to:

• Connect three pathways to influencing others’ brains and understand how to approach people’s resistance to change
• Identify what your audiences’ brains find rewarding and appeal to these motivational drivers in your communication
• Use heuristics (mental shortcuts) to influence your audience’s actions in an effortless way

Everyone in business aspires at engaging others at some point, internally or externally. In fact, engagement is so widely addressed that it’s becoming a big word that often means very little. So, let’s define it meaningfully, by using science. What does it really take for the brain to be engaged?

An intriguing approach to understanding engagement is to view it from the angle of its absence. So, what do we know about the psychology of boredom? Is it possible for the brain to be bored in the age of overstimulation? The answer is yes. As scientists, we used to believe that boredom was defined by the absence of stimulation. Now, we are discovering that too much stimulation can have a similar effect. So how do we prevent the brain from getting bored – therefore staying engaged with your message and your cause? The good news is that the brain does not want to stay bored for too long. From an evolutionary point, we cannot afford to stay bored.

This keynote offers four evidence-based, practical guidelines, which you can use immediately to create meaningful engagement for your internal and external audiences.

Being memorable is critical in business because customers make decisions in your favor based on what they remember, not on what they forget. Unfortunately, in business contexts, people are more forgettable than they are memorable. Using EEG (electroencephalogram) technology, we can detect what happens in the brain when it’s exposed to a business presentation, and during studies we conduct monthly with corporate teams, we observe that people retain less than 10% of business content after 48 hours.

Join this session to learn what it takes to keep your audiences’ brains engaged and likely to recall. Specifically, you will learn:

• The reasons why it is hard for audiences to remember business content
• The habits that lead to forgettable content and how to avoid them
• The latest neuroscience insights into how the brain

A musician’s quote reminds us that “There is no such thing as a wrong note. It is always the note that follows that defines whether the first note is wrong or not.” The same goes for business content: there is no such thing as a bad slide, paragraph or segment in a video or in a conversation. Each segment in a message has the potential to impact the next segment.

This is called priming. Join this session to figure out how to prime your audiences’ brains properly and lead them to a decision that serves them well. Specifically, in this session, you learn how to:

• Avoid the brain’s tendency to habituate to the segments in your content and offer it a jolt for focus and engagement
• Create more dramatic “signposts” in your messages and be deliberate about what the brain remembers and acts on
• Determine what to withhold, what to reveal to an audience, and in what order, so the brain reaches a decision effortlessly

With the increase in virtual interactions, your audiences are most likely viewing many different vendor presentations as they’re weighing their options and deciding what to buy. But how do you influence someone to buy when they are not even in the same room with you? Several mandatory ingredients include forming a positive first impression and establishing credibility quickly.

In this session, Dr. Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions, shares guidelines from her neuroscience research on being persuasive even in a virtual space. Specifically, you will learn:

• The two universal dimensions of social signals you can use when you meet someone new and you’re not in the same room.
• Whether splitting your sales presentation with a subject matter expert helps or hinders credibility
• How to handle virtual introductions
• Why establishing credibility means removing an age-old approach and adopting techniques for the modern buyer’s brain

Every effective leader is an effective storyteller. But how do you know if you’re sharing stories that people will remember and act on them? Are all stories memorable and actionable? By now we know that the brain is “wired” for stories. We know the importance of setting, character, and action. And we realize that while bullet lists make communication efficient, it’s the emotion behind a story that counts. This is why we devour news, novels, and movies. We know all this. But there is so much more, as not all stories are created equal.

While we tout the “memorability” factor of stories, it is possible for the human brain to forget them. How many stories do you really remember from the past week? To become true leaders and influence others’ action, you must ask: what makes a story memorable? And what is the optimal amount of narrative to use when you speak about technical and complex content? After all, you want to be memorable and credible.

Join this interactive session to find out the latest brain science research on storytelling and how to apply it to your own leadership style to inspire and influence others.

Persuasion is pervasive. You experience it at home, at work, and in your social life. It can go wrong (ever had someone who pretended to be interested only to ghost you later?) but it can also go right. Harnessing the power of persuasion can help you achieve meaningful goals, so it is beneficial to examine what contributes to the success or failure of persuasion.

While persuasion has been abundantly studied from a behavioral perspective, in this session, Dr. Carmen Simon shares guidelines to amplify your persuasive power based on using neuroscience tools such as EEG and ECG.

The session presents a compilation of practical guidelines you can use immediately, especially when you’re persuading remote audiences. Specifically, you will learn:

• Why even one slide can weaken the persuasive impact of an entire presentation
• Practical and useful criteria for creating persuasive content
• Which delivery medium and skills are more conducive to persuasion