[padobson]

"[A] person hearing a talk can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it."

This is where discipline enters. When a speaker says something that fires a massive neuron in your brain, ignore the next five-ten sentences the speaker is saying and start writing.

When you're in school, you take notes on lectures to pass a test, so you have to listen to every sentence. School trains your brain to do this, and you need to untrain it.

When you're at a conference, you're listening to the speaker so you can do something (hopefully) excellent with the information they're giving you.

When the speaker provides you with a spark of inspiration, that's when you need to disengage from the talk and let your own brain take it from there. You'll only miss a handful of sentences, and you'll pack a thought-food lunch for later. You'll get more out of the talk then if you try to consume and register every sentence - many of which won't be nearly as useful.

[cperciva]

FWIW, as a speaker I use point-form (aka. "powerpoint", although I do them in LaTex) slides for exactly this reason -- if someone gets distracted and misses a few sentences of what I'm saying, it helps them "resynchronize" with me.