Power Through Presentations by Andy Balser

Author:Andy Balser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

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THE RIGHT AND WRONG WAYS TO FEED A BRAIN

“The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.”

— George Jessel

Congratulations. If you’ve made it this far, you’ve passed the basic curriculum. It’s time to join the advanced class with the smart kids. And what better place to start than with a study of how that big brain of yours works?

Have you ever seen a picture of a brain? It’s a disgusting heap of goop. Yet it’s a heap of goop that every idiot has, so you should learn a few tricks about how the brain works and how it likes to be fed.

Let’s start by thinking about how you feed yourself. Pretend there is a big plate of food in front of you — food you want in your belly. If you start shoveling it down as fast as you can, half of it is going to end up on your shirt and you might even find yourself being the lucky recipient of a Heimlich Maneuver. Your audience’s brains work in a similar way, so slow down and let them take it one bite at a time.

There are three basic parts to your brain’s memory function:

Sensory memory: this takes in all the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures. At any given time your sensory memory is taking in a lot of information (just think of how many megapixels there would be in a digital picture of the room you’re sitting in now), and most of that information stays in your memory for less than half a second before it evaporates.

Short-term memory: a very small amount of sensory information makes it through to short-term memory. Only about five to nine things can be held there at any given time, and they stay for less than a minute. George Miller wrote a highly touted psychology paper back in 1956 called “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” that sums up this capacity quite nicely. You’ll choke this part of your audience’s brains if you try to feed them too much too fast, and it is the part you need to manage if you want people to remember what’s in your presentation.

Long-term memory: this is the “belly” of the brain and where you want all of your information to end up. It holds a ton of information for years and years, as long as you can get that information through the short-term memory. If you want your audience to retain what you’re saying, your goal for your slides should be to help get information into this part of the brain.

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