The Heath brothers tell a story in their book, Made to Stick - Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, that affirms how what you say is not what others hear. It’s based on tappers and listeners and Elizabeth Newton’s 1990 PhD thesis at Stanford. Tappers were given familiar songs … such as star Spangled Banner and Happy Birthday … to tap on the table. Listeners were asked to guess the tunes. 
Surprisingly tappers got their message across only one in 40 times, based on 120 tapped tunes. Listeners guessed only 3 of 120 tunes correctly. Here’s the interesting part. Tappers were asked to predict how many would get the correct tunes and they predicted 1 in 2 would ace the test.
Does that study show you why lectures work against the brain, and affirm why the brain rarely hears much of what the speaker speaks? What do you think?
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