Pinning down the impact of communication at the neural level is difficult. The reason is what Stephen Hawking called the central challenge of the twenty-first century: complexity. It prevents neat causal chains like “this word, in that context, produces this effect in that person.” That would be deterministically boring anyway and would drain our work in communications of the creative tension that comes from experience paired with the courage to try something new.
Looking at the current state of neurobiology, neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology, there’s plenty we can infer for content, storytelling, and campaigns. Researchers are closing in on phenomena like consciousness and subjective perception.
Mark Solms offers a particularly compelling account in his book The Hidden Spring (German edition: Warum wir sind, was wir fühlen). He explores where and how consciousness arises – especially in the human brain. On page 214 of the German edition, he focuses on thinking with words – that is, language, “the distinctive hallmark of human cognition.”
Here is an attempt to draw on consciousness research to understand the impact of one specific aspect of communication: the superpower of human language, abstraction.
As an editor, I advise: write concretely and avoid the abstract. Abstractions are taxing, likely because they carry more information and take more effort to process. The point here is this: the abstract is better described in words than visualized in images. Bread is easy to picture. Culture? It works mainly through language. In all its complexity, culture is fuzzier than bread, but it reaches farther in the brain.
To give these ideas more substance, here’s a perception experiment Solms cites. In “continuous flash suppression” (CFS), one eye sees a picture of a familiar object, for example a dog, while conscious perception is blocked by showing visual noise to the other eye. Strikingly, participants report seeing the dog image more often after hearing the word “dog,” even more often than after hearing dog barking. “Abstraction has greater reach.”
Me being an editor, I’m glad to see Solms go further: “Words have the power to boost entire semantic categories.” And: “Language acts as a top-down amplifier of perception, pushing an otherwise invisible image into consciousness when information linked to verbal labels corresponds to ongoing bottom-up activity.”
Applied to text–image communication, it means this: when a campaign’s visual and words add up to one idea, the impact is strongest. Call it text–image synergy. That’s not new. But just as attention research shows that fresh, relevant information and creative expression make content more effective, the neural findings Solms cites show how language heightens perception.
We tend to grasp complex information and relationships faster through visuals. The deeper processing and real understanding happen through language. Inner speech, in other words thinking, labels and categorizes information.
What does this mean for our work as a communications agency? The right word matters. Good writing is worth it. I wrote about my ChatGPT experiment: the model calculates language from probabilities and cannot perceive meaning. (Solms explains the difference between intelligence and perception very well.) That is why GPT copy reads thin. Bottom line: if you want strong writing, hire strong writers. Let's get in touch ;)
P.S. Thank you, mc-quadrat team, for the wonderful book!
