I used the slides below for a presentation I gave to an advanced writing course this past September. It was created in Keynote and I presented it using the Pointer app for the iPhone as the clicker.

It won’t make much sense to you by looking at the slides alone, because these slides were simply a visual enhancement to what I was saying as the presenter. This is an important concept to remember when designing your own presentations: the students should pay attention to you, the teacher, and should only refer to your slides when you want them to.

I am working on a stand-alone presentation for Slideshare that will introduce Brain Slides without the need for my explanations as you click through the slides. I will post it soon!

This post is a summary of the information in the 10th chapter of Brain Rules and the accompanying website, BrainRules.net, by John Medina

Eyesight is the body’s primary sensory input. In fact, half of the brain’s resources are devoted to processing vision. This should come as no surprise. Consider little children: their eyes light up when they see their mommies’ faces; their eyes widen when something catches their attention; and they learn to read by looking at picture books! What is surprising is that as they grow up, they are nearly forced to stop reading books with pictures.

Text is Inferior

Primitive man didn’t have a written language – or did he? Cave drawings, carvings, and hieroglyphs actually were a form of written language that happened to consist of pictures. In fact, the type in this post consists of hundreds of little pictures – letters, numbers, and punctuation. That is why the brain takes longer to process text – it has to recognize characteristics of each individual letter before it can decipher a word. Indeed, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Retention

The human brain is incredible at remembering pictures. If information is presented orally, most people can recall about 10% of it three days later. If the information is presented visually, most people can recall 35%. That is more than 3 times the retention! The results of combining the two are even more impressive, however. When information is simultaneously presented orally and visually, recall shoots up to nearly 65%. (63% accuracy a year later. Nickerson, RS (1968). A note on long-term recognition memory for pictorial material. Psychon. Sci 11(2): 58)

Animation

As it evolved, the human brain learned to pay attention to movement. Almost anything threatening, edible or otherwise interesting could be spotted because it moved. The brain still pays attention to motion, which is why animated cartoons and movies are so entertaining.

In many of the articles on this site I frequently refer to Brain Rules. A brief introduction will help you understand what Brain Rules are and how they relate to presentation design.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Home, Work, and School is written by Dr. John Medina, a developmental biologist and faculty member at both the University of Washington School of Medicine and Seattle Pacific University. He studies the brain – how it developed, how it works – and what that means for us in our day to day activities.

A brain rule is “something that scientists know for sure about how the brain works.” For example, scientists know that the brain requires sleep to function well, so Sleep is a Brain Rule. Dr. Medina examines 12 of these principles and discusses how they should influence our daily actions: Because scientists know that sleep is very important, we ought to make it a priority in our daily schedule.

What is astonishing about the book is the realization that most people in our society are breaking nearly all of the Brain Rules! For instance, it is not news to most of us that we need sleep to function well, yet very few people make sleep a priority in our daily schedule. At the end of each chapter Dr. Medina offers simple suggestions on how society’s habits can be changed to accommodate Brain Rules.

So what do Brain Rules have to do with presentations?

In fact, nearly all of the Brain Rules at least indirectly affect some aspect of presentations, teaching, and learning. Rule #1 states that exercise improves brain function. Rule #4 teaches us that we do not pay attention to boring things (i.e. most PowerPoint slides) and Rule #10 emphasizes the importance of Vision and explains why text is inferior to pictures.

To sum up the relationship between Brain Rules and presentations, take a look at this Slideshare presentation done by presentation guru, Garr Reynolds.

To learn more about Brain Slides, buy the book on Amazon.com:

Visit the Brain Rules website, or stay tuned for more posts on how Brain Rules should play a key role in how you design your presentations for the classroom.

This post is a summary of the information in the 4th chapter of Brain Rules and the accompanying website, BrainRules.net, by John Medina 

Probably the most important Brain Rule for education has to do with attention. It is what students struggle the most to give and what teachers struggle the most to get.

Multi-Tasking Myth

The brain receives inputs from all of the body’s senses and it decides how to allocate its attention. The brain cannot pay attention to two things at once. That’s right: multi-tasking (when it comes to attention) is not possible! The brain can change it’s attention very rapidly, however, but this comes at great expense. Whenever the brain shifts its attention, it must first disengage from the current task before it engages in another. Although these shifts in attention occur very rapidly, they can add up quickly. Imagine a student who is listening to music, checking Facebook, instant messaging, and talking on the phone all at once! The brain is constantly shifting its attention between these tasks.

Research shows that so-called ‘multi-taskers’ take up to 50% longer to complete a task and commit 50% more errors when compared to those who focus solely on the task at hand.

Meaning Before Details

The brain evolved to understand the bigger picture before it comprehends the details. Comprehension and recall both improve when key ideas are presented before specific facts. This is because the brain records information hierarchically in categories. Without the big picture, the brain doesn’t know where the little details fit and loses interest.

The brain also looks for information that is useful or relevant to survival. When primitive man came in contact with an animal or plant, the brain would ask itself three questions:

Can I mate with it and will it mate with me?

Can I eat it or will it eat me?

Have I seen it before?

Based on those questions, it would decide whether it was worth paying attention to. Similarly, the modern human brain seeks to understand whether information is worth remembering. The brain may pose questions such as:

Can I use this knowledge to impress a girl?

Will this knowledge help me get a job?

Have I learned this information before?

By effectively asking, “What’s in it for me?” the brain determines whether the material being presented is worth the effort to pay attention to, process, and retain.

Emotion

Stories are a wonderful way of transmitting information. Many cultures have used storytelling as their primary method of passing on their histories. Stories are effective for two reasons. First, as explained above, even if the details of a story change, its meaning can remain intact. More importantly, though, stories are effective because they evoke a very primitive and powerful force: emotion.

As almost anyone will confirm, emotional events are remembered better than emotionally neutral events. Action packed sports games, tear-jerking movies, and funny commercials can be recalled quickly and easily.

10 Minutes

Multiple studies, as well as common classroom experiences, show that most brains cannot pay attention to the same thing for very long. The attention span generally lasts between 10-20 minutes, but rarely, if ever, spans the full 50 minutes of a regular college lecture.

It is interesting to note that the brain doesn’t require much to restart the clock, so to speak. A brief diversion of a few minutes is enough.