The verbatim effect is the ability to paraphrase and condense material heard into just the general idea or gist of what was said, rather than repeating information word for word (which would be repeating it verbatim). Most of us have played the game “telephone” while growing up where a group of people sit in a circle and one person starts a “conversation” by saying something into the person’s ear next to them and that person is supposed to say the same thing to the person next to them and so on until it gets to the last person. Typically, what happens is that the “conversation” is very different than what it was when it started, even though the meaning may still be essentially the same.