Years ago, I attended a lecture at UNC-Chapel Hill where the featured speaker was Noble Prize winner, James D. Watson. He told the story of how a textbook and a chance encounter led him to a historic scientific discovery.  
I remember the date of his discovery well. It was February 27, 1953 and he was very close to solving a long-standing scientific riddle. An error in his nucleic acid textbook had him running in circles to place hydrogen atoms in the right order. Then, by sheer luck, a visiting professor from Caltech pointed out to Watson the textbook he was reading was wrong, and a day later Watson discovered the structure of DNA is a double helix.
The major and minor details of this lecture are still with me today, locked in my memory alongside my old phone numbers, and a definition of osmosis (diffusion of water through a semi-permeable membrane) that I learned in the 9th grade. 
After 9 years the information is still as fresh as the day I heard it for the first time. Why is that?  Why did this lecture stand out among all of the other lectures I can hardly remember?
The reasons are clear and so important for those of us who plan for and create content: the information was delivered in a story, I had a deep and emotional connection to the story, and I’ve replayed this good memory again and again over the last 9 years so it has become repetitive, almost a habit.
That experience got me thinking about the neurologic techniques of creating memorable content. Here's a taste of what I've been applying to our work lately. 

WHY OUR BRAINS DON'T REMEMBER EVERYTHING

Substantial research tells us how memories are formed in the brain and how this applies to content. One of my favorite insights right now lies in an oldie but goodie blog post from Kathy Sierra.
In it, she explains the research by another Nobel Prize winner, Eric Kandel. He explains that a “switch must be thrown” to convert a memory from short-term to long-term storage. And we all want our brilliant content to reach the long-term memory for our readers, right? Well, our brains don't necessarily make that easy. Our brains contain a protein called CREB-1, the essential component for throwing the switch. However, CREB-2 guards the switch to prevent long-term memory overload. Without the CREB-2 protein, we'd remember everything we read the first time we read it. That’s good for exams but overwhelming for day-to-day life.
So if we can’t suppress our reader's brain chemistry to make content memorable, what other brainy techniques are available? 

TECHNIQUES TO MAKE CONTENT MEMORABLE

Content Chunking

If you haven’t read, Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish, or haven’t read it in a while, I highly recommend the section on chunking. What is chunking? By grouping information into small, manageable units, a reader can retain the information longer. And it makes content easier to scan as well. While there are many examples of content chunking on the web, this article is also one of them. Were you able to scan the content and gain a high-level understanding of its direction? I also used one of the more common characteristics of chunking to enhance your working memory more effectively by limiting the number of  techniques in this article to no more than 5. Studies show that users remember content more if they're not inundated with too much information. This is where the 7 +/- 2 and the 4 +/- 2 rules apply to not only designing for memory, but content as well. I see these rules as a guide and a gut-check before publishing. 
We still have to be careful with this technique—it can be a little tricky if applied to the wrong content (i.e. online dictionaries where user needs are a little different). 

Reminder + Orienting Content

This technique is used on many different websites, but I’ve found this to be especially true on e-commerce sites. Reminding users of their mission and keeping them engaged on their path to purchase is a tactic that goes all the way back to Jakob Neilsen’s Top Ten Heuristics.  He called it, “Recognition over recall” and even though Nielsen was applying this technique to design interface elements it also has an application in content, especially micropcopy. Ginny Redish covers this in her book as well. Layering means putting the most important content on top levels of a digital experience and making supporting content accessible in deeper levels. Recognition rather than recall is about keeping stuff visible and therefore a little more memorable. 

Emotional Content

For some companies, the idea of writing with emotion may cause, well, negative emotions. Telling someone they need to write with more emotion can immediately mean to them writing in ALL CAPS, or using more of those dreaded exclamation marks!, and, Heaven-forbid, a little cursing. Writing with emotion does have its place. Our brains are tuned to enjoy surprise, shock, counterintuitive mistakes, and yes, humor.

Humor in Content

If you can make readers laugh, you stand a good chance of making your content memorable. This was the idea behind my Friday the 13th blog post comparing traits of a content strategist to movie monster, Jason Voorhees. Have you noticed both are not easily distracted from their goal? Or, that they are not afraid to get their hands dirty? That’s comedy gold, folks! 

An Emerging Technique: Creating Habits in Content

This is a relatively new field for me that I’ll cover more in detail with another blog post. But, after reading Charles Dunhigg’s The Power of Habit, I’m convinced there is a deeper application for creating memorable content using his insights into habits. In the book, Dunhigg explains the habit cycle, which is made up of three components: cue, routine, reward.
Consider the act of brushing your teeth, he writes. We no longer think about putting toothpaste on the brush, scraping the brush across our teeth, and spitting out the paste. The cue is that we want our teeth to feel clean, the routine is what we do to clean them, and the reward is a fresh mouth. As we go through this routine, our brains power down so we don’t have to think about the process as if we’re learning it for the first time—we just do it, out of habit. And that’s where I think the application of content begins with his research.  If you can find a way to execute the habit cycle in your writing the payoff is content that is stored in the long-term memory of your readers. 
For content to be influential, it most surely has to be memorable. Whether you're ushering users through a shopping cart process, introducing a new product, or explaining a service there are more than a few brain-engaging techniques at your disposal. (You should know, I used a few of these techniques in this blog post!)