Читать книгу Power Cues - Nick Morgan - Страница 17

Another misconception that I frequently hear as a speech coach is the idea that PowerPoint helps because all people are one of the following: visual, kinesthetic, or aural learners. Neither idea buried in this generally accepted, appalling misconception is true!

First of all, we’re all visual learners.¹ As I indicated in the introduction, we can handle up to 10 million visual bits of information per second, far more than anything else our minds can process. We’re also all kinesthetic and aural learners. We get information in those other ways, too. Just not as much. Of course, there are individual variations, but most of us are average, and that means we’re mostly visual beings. Unlike, say, cats and dogs, which have vastly more developed senses of smell. For us, it’s visual.

Second, PowerPoint doesn’t help; it distracts. All the research on multitasking shows that we can’t do it.² We first pay attention to one thing, and then another. Moreover, the research on how our brains process visual information, as I alluded to in the introduction, indicates that we don’t actually see what’s in front of us, but rather an approximation of it that our brain matches to reality based on its memory banks.

So what really happens when we’re confronted in a meeting or a presentation with a speaker and a set of slides is that we look at the speaker—because we’re inherently more interested in people than pictures—and when our attentions start to wander, then we look at the slides. Now, reading slides and looking at people occupy two different parts of our brain, and there’s a lot of inefficiency in switching back and forth. So when we’re looking at the speaker, we’re getting one set of cues. When we look at the slides, we get another set. When we switch, we lose a bit of either information stream.

So the result is two incomplete sets of information. That’s tiring and indeed annoying for us, so we get cranky and tune out.

That’s what PowerPoint (and any similar slideware or presentation program) does. With some exceptions, it adds to our information load, overwhelming it even faster, and causing us to tune out.

Don’t do it.