Science Quote by Keith Henson

Getting “higher than a kite” from a public speech is a deliberately unglamorous way to describe something we like to dress up as confidence or charisma: attention is a drug, and the hit is physiological. Keith Henson, writing as a scientist, smuggles a behavioral argument into a casual image. He’s not praising eloquence; he’s pointing at reinforcement. The rush after a talk isn’t just pride, it’s the reward circuitry lighting up because a room full of people just treated you as signal, not noise.

The phrasing matters. “Anyone who has ever had the feeling” is an invitation and a trap: if you’ve felt it, you’re implicated; if you haven’t, you’re excluded from the data set. Henson turns a common experience into evidence, nudging the reader away from moral judgments (“Some people are vain”) and toward mechanism (“We’re built to crave status cues”). The subtext is that attention can quietly reprogram behavior. Once you’ve tasted it, you start optimizing for it, sometimes without noticing: you tailor your ideas to applause lines, pick riskier claims, chase bigger stages, confuse being watched with being right.

Contextually, this lands in a world where public speaking is a prestige pipeline and where media systems reward visibility over accuracy. Henson’s scientist voice keeps it grounded, but the implication is culturally sharp: we treat attention as currency, then act surprised when people counterfeit it. The quote works because it punctures the romance of public recognition and replaces it with a testable, slightly uncomfortable premise: what feels like meaning might just be a feedback loop.