New research shows that speaking can enhance your career
February 16, 2009
People perceive someone who speaks up as a competent leader – regardless of whether they actually are competent. That’s the finding of a fascinating research study that has just been reported online at Time.
The research study
68 students were divided into teams of four. Each group was tasked with organizing an imaginary nonprofit environmental organization. The level of influence and competence of each group member was then rated by: [Read more]
New research: warning about story-telling
January 2, 2009
The guru of multimedia learning Richard Mayer has just published a new paper that all presenters should take note of. The paper is called “Increased interestingness of extraneous details in a multimedia science presentation leads to decreased learning”.
The research
Students received one of two PowerPoint presentations about how a cold virus infects the human body.
Both PowerPoint presentations included interesting but irrelevant details about viruses. In the first presentation the details were of high-interest eg: the role of viruses in sex and death. In the second presentation the details were of low-interest eg: health tips about viruses. [Read more]
New scientific research on memory
December 16, 2008
I love having scientific back-up for the way we do things as presenters. So I subscribe to a number of cognitive science blogs to keep up-to-date. Here are two research studies on memory. The first one backs up what we already know – we’ve got a great memory for visual detail. And the second has a new twist on the impact of novelty on memory.
1. Don’t use cliched photos
Your audience can instantly recognise photos and images that they’ve seen before. And most people, when they see something they’ve seen before will say to themselves “Seen that before, boring”. That’s not the kind of impact you want. [Read more]
Are you stuck within the Overhead Projector Paradigm?
November 22, 2008
In the days of overhead projectors, we’d slide a piece of paper down the transparency to reveal information step-by-step. That’s the Overhead Projector Paradigm.
When you’re stuck in this paradigm, you’re not using the full power of PowerPoint. What are the signs that you’re stuck in the Overhead Projector Paradigm?
- You bring on elements one-by-one
- You add elements to the slide from the top to the bottom of the slide
- You never have an element leave the slide
- You never have an element move on the slide
- You never have an element get bigger
- You never have an element get smaller.
New scientific evidence for banning bullets from your PowerPoint slides
October 17, 2008
Many of us know intuitively that having lots of bullet-points on our slides isn’t effective. But it’s useful to have some scientific evidence to back up that intuition. New research on multitasking may provide that.
In the research carried out at the University of Michigan and reported on the NPR website, subjects were asked to perform different tasks while lying in an MRI scanner. The research shows that multitasking is a human delusion. In fact we switch rapidly from one task to another. One of the reasons for this is that similar tasks compete for use of the brain. Neuroscientist Earl Miller at the University of Michigan said:
Think about writing an e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time. Those things are nearly impossible to do at the same time. You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That’s because of what’s called interference between the two tasks. They both involve communicating via speech or the written word, and so there’s a lot of conflict between the two of them.
Mice show that you can overcome fear of public speaking
October 15, 2008
If you get nervous about speaking in public, the recently published results from a scientific experiment on mice, should give you some hope. The experiment showed that mice that had been trained to feel calm, coped better with stressful situations.
The mice were trained to associate a specific sound with safety. They were then subjected to a stressful event – a mouse swimming pool that they could not escape from. The mice would eventually give up swimming as if they had given up hope. But when the “safe” sound was made, the mice started swimming again.
The lead researcher, Eric Kandel said: [Read more]
Are our brains wired to enjoy stories?
August 2, 2008
Presentation experts extol the power of telling stories in presentations. A recent Scientific American “The Secrets of Storytelling” explores why stories are so powerful. It looks at three theories from the fascinating field of evolutionary psychology.
Stories are simulations for real life
Keith Oatley, is a professor of applied cognitive psychology and a novelist. So he’s got a special interest in the psychology of fiction. He describes stories as “simulations that run on minds”. He says that just as pilots-in-training spend time on flight simulators, stories may act as flight simulators for real life.
The power of anecdotal evidence
July 26, 2008
In your business presentations, you may be tempted to stick to hard, proven facts and statistics to persuade your audience. But a powerful anecdote can trump objective facts.
The power of the anecdote
1. Vaccinations and autism
The three benefits of gesturing – it’s not what you think
June 20, 2008
Why is it, that when you’re speaking in front of a group you suddenly become aware of these great clumsy appendages at the end of your arms – your hands?
Why do you suddenly wonder what to do about them?
Gesturing is natural
Make your pictures concrete too
May 18, 2008
The more concrete and specific you make your words, the more persuasive you will be to your audience. The same applies to the pictures you show. Recent research backs this up. Students were given short fictional news stories to read:
One story claimed that watching TV was linked to maths ability, based on the fact that both TV viewing and maths activate the temporal love [of the brain]. Crucially students rated these stories to be more scientifically sound when they were accompanied by a brain image, compared with when the equivalent data were presented in a bar chart, or when there was no graphical illustration at all.
