It explains why we find reading incredibly painful (especially those thick textbooks!), it explains why power point lectures are very boring and sometimes quite confusing, it also explains why we tend to remember things better when presented to us in a visual manner.
When compared to forms of communication, such as oral presentations or text, pictures destroy the competition.
Here are some facts as quoted by John Medina:
*people remember more than 2,500 pictures with about 90% accuracy several days after exposure
*A year later, that accuracy was at 63%
*people remember 10% of what is said in an oral presentation
*picture + oral presentation = 65% recall rate
*power point is mainly text based; six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads - all words!
This sure brings real meaning to "a picture is worth a thousand words", doesn't it?
The question then becomes, why is reading so ineffective? Medina explains that the brain sees words as many pictures. In order to be able to read a word, the brain needs to separately identify simple features in the letters. "Instead of words, we see complex little art-museum masterpieces, with hundreds of features embedded in hundreds of letters." In short, text chokes the brain not because it not like pictures, but because it is too much like pictures. Weird, isn't it?
I find the following fascinating:
ReplyDelete"Instead of words, we see complex little art-museum masterpieces, with hundreds of features embedded in hundreds of letters."
This could explain why text/sentences choke the brain. A sentence is a sequence of words (or pictures) arranged to follow some rules of grammer. Comprehension or understanding requires that the brain recreate the relationships between these words (pictures). The rules of grammer put an artifical structure on these words, and brain needs to process these rules to reconstruct the relationships. The choking may be less due to large numbers of words/images but more from the need to process unnatural grammar rules to extract relationships bteween words (or concepts they represent) and create the relationships.
well, totally agree with you about a power of pictures , not words. I also find PPT presentations rather boring...although my latest presentation was much more with words, but it was supposed to be a weekly message for a member of our fb group, so I've made it in a form of a magazine in order to present info in a more natural way as we all read newspapres and magazings :)and also I find short presentations ( if they filled with words) more powerful, than long ones.People don't have a lot of time and it's better to present just some core information instead of writing "novels" ;) Or if it's impossible to make a short ppt, then it's better to fill it with images, etc, well, to make it really creative. Sometimes I find even ppt with images ...even these ppt don't captivate my attention, because ofthen they are made in a common way and what it's more important for every source of information is attract person's attention at the very beginning, if it's not, then there will be not impact or people will not read or watch it till the end, watch, etc. it ( as I do when I find some stuff boring :)))
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