3 Brain Rules to Live By

As presenters, our ultimate goal is to get the information we share into the long-term memory of our listeners. This can be achieved many different ways, but there are certainly limiting factors. It’s important to understand the limitations your audience faces in order to deliver an effective message. There are three key brain rules we will discuss here to follow to ensure maximum absorption of the material you present.

Give the Working Memory a Chance

Working memory is the step your brain takes between first impression and long-term memory. When you intake information, your working memory can only process so much information before it’s overloaded. By consequence, anything your working memory cannot process does not make it into long-term memory. For this brain rule, the less your audience has to absorb, the better. Great ways to mitigate working memory overload are keeping text on the screen to a minimum, utilizing simple graphics, and avoiding “chartjunk.” If you feel this can’t be accomplished, consider breaking information out onto multiple slides, or using animation to show and hide information as you cover it. Be sure, however, not to read directly from your slides, as learning has been proven to decline with redundancy.

Balance the Channels

It’s important to engage both visual and verbal channels of the brain. Keep in mind that for this brain rule, text on the screen falls in the verbal channel. Text is absorbed by the ears as we read by listening. For instance, if you only have a presenter speaking and text on the screen during a presentation, the verbal channel will be overused and the visual channel will not be used at all. A great idea for balancing verbal and visual is adding images. Again, it’s important to limit what the brain must process, so simple visuals are best. Because they compliment each other, your brain processes information most effectively when engaged by both the visual and verbal channels equally.

Gain Attention Early and Often

Your audience is likely coming to you through a very busy schedule. They have a lot going on, and not grabbing their full attention from the start will create an uphill battle later on.  This brain rule will ensure your audience isn’t lost or distracted during your presentation.  Things like arrows, simple icons, and recognizable patterns make your audience’s working memory’s job much easier. This is called the signalling principle. If you let your audience know where to look, what to pay attention to, or the most important thing you will be saying, they will be better attuned to your message. So, get them excited about a certain number of take-aways. Try coming up with a mnemonic device to help them remember your key points. Easing them into your presentation by engaging them from the start helps ensure that when you get into data-heavy slides, they are still tracking.

Understanding how the brain works transforms your job as a presenter from a guessing game to a predictable pattern. Simple, audio/visual, engaging presentations are easy on the working memory. That is the goal of these brain rules. Making your presentation easy to absorb is ultimately more satisfying for you and your audience. You want to create a relationship even just for the duration of your talk where your audience doesn’t feel overwhelmed. Need more ideas for how to improve your presentation? Ethos3 is obsessed with every detail. Let us have a look at your deck, giving an outsider perspective, by reaching out for a free quote today.

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