Regular readers will know I’m not a fan of PowerPoint for two reasons.
- It’s often badly used; and
- It’s designed in a way to make it too easy to use it badly.
I know I’m not alone in this, and recently another voice has joined in - namely Prof John Sweller, from Australia. You can see a report of his thoughts here: basically he points out that because of the way our brains are hardwired it’s easy to overload them with too much information. This is particularly a problem if we’re receiving lots of the same kind of information. A PowerPoint slide containing words runs a serious risk of doing just that.
A Powerpoint slide with a diagramme has a much better chance of getting through to your audience……
The key concept is that our brains work with a two-tier memory system - short and long term. We absorb them in the former but to remember things we need to transfer them to the latter. Generally our short-term memory can handle no more than seven things at a time. If we’re spending too much time/energy trying to keep tabs on what we’re hearing and seeing we’ve got no energy left to pass things back to our long-term memory. If that doesn’t happen there’s not much point in us having got the info in the first place as we won’t remember it past the end of the presentation…….
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