Molecular
Biologist
We don’t
know how the brain works to pick up a glass of water and drink it or write your
name
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The
gap has been filled with lots of mythology
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10%
of your brain is being used is rubbish, it’s 40-50% when you are at rest
Human brain
designed to solving problems in outdoor settings in changing conditions
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Classrooms
and offices are the antithesis of this
How to
create a successful presentation:
1. The attentional spotlight
2. Three characteristics
3. Integrating text and pictures
1. The attentional spotlight
This is
where you can filter everything else out around you and focus on one thing
Attentional
spotlight theory – the brain is a generator and the speaker is the spotlight
controller
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Generator
effects: Time of day; Quality of Sleep; State of Hunger
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Spotlight:
Emotional stimulus;
Two key
parts of the brain in the Attentional Spotlight:
A. Medial Parietal – scanning across
your vision to determine if you have seen what you are seeing before and
whether it is important
B. Brodmann Area Ten (BA10): Allows you
to switch attention to something. Only allows one switch at the time.
Because
BA10 can’t switch more than once at the time – therefore you can’t multi-task
2. Three known characteristics
A. Chunking (temporal property)
a. If you present a string of information,
your brain looks for a pattern and then tries to create patterns
b. Your brain wants to be given time to
break up the information, store it and then take in the next amount of
information
i. How long is this? 10 minutes before
the brain checks out. Attention builds up over time up to 10 mins but then
drops off after 10 minutes
ii. Give 10 minutes presentations – or break
it up in to 10 minute chunks
B. Meaning before detail
a. Human brain processes meaning before
detail. It looks at the Tiger’s mouth and not the individual teeth
b. 6 questions of meaning for the brain
i. Will it eat me?
ii. Can I eat it?
iii. Can I have sex with it?
(reproduction rather than just fun)
iv. Will it have sex with me?
v. Have I seen it before? (pattern
matching)
vi. Have I never seen it before?
c. Resilience – Trauma at the genetic
level – genes are better at protecting you from trauma. You shouldn’t describe
the science – describe the resilience and why it matters
d. Pattern matching – if you detect
patterns your brain gives you a ‘dopamine lollipop’ ie a reward for
e. Have to give your audience an
emotionally competent stimulus every 10 minutes
C. The importance of narratives
a. Don’t know why the brain likes
episodic memory but it does!
b. You need 3 ingredients:
i. Timeline
ii. Character (maybe you)
iii. Event – often social but crisis
c. 63% of speech is recalled with a
story. 5% recalled a statistic
d. “The King died and then the Queen
died” – brain loses attention
e. “The King died and then the Queen
died of grief” – Brain lights up – you have a story
Rules for
the hooks
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ECS
should be short
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ECS
should be relevant – even illustrative
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ECS
more memorable if you can turn it in to a story
3. Integrated Text and Pictures
Text and
pictures should be present and if possible move
Rules
A. Limit the amount of text – brain still
wants to go through individual words and letters of the individual words
a. The eye spends time looking at each
letter and then the first and last letter. The brain doesn’t get better – words
act as a cognitive bottleneck
b. 140 characters is similar to the
amount of text information is put on to a slide
i. Replace text with picture
ii. 50% is vision, 2% auditory and 8% to
touch (% of cortex through surface area)
c. 256 images shown vs 256 words – wait
3 days and test with a set of images of what was seen before and not. Pictures
correct 90% - Text only 10%. For a year it is 63% for images, text is c. 10%
still
The little
that we know about brain science allows us to tweak presentations to make some
improvements – it’s not fully known yet though!
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