Microsoft Office

Robert Lane and Dr. Stephen Kosslyn posted an intriguing article on how to use brain research to built better powerpoint presentations. In you’re job or small business, you use Powerpoint, these are some great tips!

▪ Provide Detail: If showcasing a product, for example, have short video clips available that demonstrate its operations, along with pictures displaying various views, zooms, and environments. Obviously such imagery is especially helpful if the product is not available at the speaking location. Show and tell.

▪ Shape Emotions: You’ve been asked to give a talk about the dangers of tobacco use. A bullet list might do the job, but imagine the greater emotional impact provided by showing yellowed teeth, blackened lungs, and mouth cancers. Emotions can be powerful motivators and pictures tap directly into our emotions, at the deepest levels.

▪ Lay Down Context: You can provide a priceless benefit to audience members by grabbing a digital camera and documenting the environment and context surrounding your subject matter. Try to capture what you see through your eyes or imagine in your mind and bring that world to your audiences. They will relate to your topics and perspectives with greater ease.

▪ Simplify or Clarify Complexity: Those of you who present technical information are well aware of how confusing your specialty may be to people in related fields, or sometimes even to experts in your own field. Showing pictures, video, and animations to make topics more concrete will help viewers connect the concepts you express verbally with experiences they’ve already stored in memory.

▪ Give Examples: The phrase, “Here, let me show you what I mean”, is one of the most potent set of words you can utter as a speaker. It rivets attention in expectation of visual relevance, something the brain appreciates very much. Whether it’s warranted or not in this age of photoshopped illustrations, for most of us, seeing is believing.

▪ Reduce Learning Times: Are you a teacher? Most of us are in one way or another, or we wouldn’t be in front of an audience in the first place. Showing a well-timed visual, or sequence of visuals, can deliver instant understanding in some situations, and therefore substantially reduce explanation time.

▪ Enhance Verbal Stories: You may be thinking, “OK, but why should I be so concerned about using imagery if I’m a good storyteller? Storytellers ‘paint images in people’s minds’, right?” Yes and no. With words alone you can paint something in those minds, but exactly what will remain a mystery. Your listeners can attempt to see the image you are painting, but in doing so they must call upon the shadowy mental imagery currently stored in their heads, based upon past experiences. Their understanding, ultimately, may or may not look anything like what you see in your mind. It is a much safer bet to literally show them what you mean, in conjunction with telling a verbal story.

▪ Improve Memory Recall: A picture can enhance the ability to remember concepts and details, and such an effect tends to increase over time. One study showed that illustrated text was 9 percent more effective than text alone when comprehension was tested right away, but that it was 83 percent more effective when the test was delayed, thus implying the reader’s ability to remember the information better later, because of the illustration (Rusted and Coltheart, 1979).