Your Brain Rules!

Want to learn more about what's going on inside your own head? Check out Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School by John Medina. The site (linked to above) has lots of pretty cool, short videos explaining why our brains work the way they do. Working for XPLANE, I especially liked Rule # 10: Vision Trumps All Other Senses, and it contains this rule of thumb for presenters:

You'll get 3x better recall for visual information than for oral. And you'll get 6x better recall for information that's simultaneously oral and visual.

Here's why:

• We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65%.
• Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.
• Why is vision such a big deal to us? Perhaps because it's how we've always apprehended major threats, food supplies and reproductive opportunity.
• Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It’s text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads—all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones.

Wow!

Comments

[Chad Bordeaux]

I am beginning to hear a lot about this book and will have to read it soon. I like all the rules, but the one that sticks out for me is Rule #1: Exercise boost brain power. As a resident couch potato, I know that when I get up off the sofa and actually get moving around, my mind begins to work much faster and generate many more ideas then it does when I am sedentary. The website suggest taht the best business meeting would have everyone walking at 1.8 miles per hour. In my opinion, this is on the money. Some of my best discussions with my business parter (my wife) are accomplished in evening strolls around the neighborhood (at a little less than 2 miles an hour).