College Education

In case you haven’t been following this blog, this series of postings looks at John Medina’s book Brain Rules chapter by chapter, looking to see what the implications might be for workplace learning.

Rule 4: We don’t pay attention to boring things

In this chapter, John Medina makes a number of hugely important points. I hope he won’t mind if I provide you here with a liberal sprinkling of direct quotes which make these points more clearly than I could manage:

• "The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus the more elaborately the information will be encoded – and retained."
• "Before the first quarter of an hour is over in a typical presentation, people usually have checked out."
• "Emotionally arousing events tend to be better remembered than neutral events."
• "Emotional arousal focuses attention on the gist of an experience at the expense of peripheral details."
• "Our brains tend to be filled with generalised pictures of concepts or events, not with slowing fading minutiae."
• "Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions."
• "We can’t multitask. People who appear to be good at multitasking actually have good working memories, capable of paying attention to several inputs, one at a time."
• "Studies show a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to complete a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50% more errors."
• "The most common communication mistakes? Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots. Lots of force feeding, very little digestion."
• "It’s key that the instructor explains the lecture plan at the beginning of the class, with liberal explanations of ‘where we are’ sprinkled throughout the hour.
• "Each segment should cover a single core cpncept, always large, always general and always explainable in one minute."

There are major implications for anyone who makes presentations, runs classroom sessions or creates e-learning materials:

• You’ll achieve nothing if you haven’t captured the attention of your audience.
• The best way to capture attention is with an emotionally-arousing experience of some sort – perhaps an anecdote, a surprising fact, a scenario, an activity – that is relevant to the point you will be making.
• Even if you do manage to capture the audience’s attention, you’ll have lost it within 10 minutes if you don’t stimulate a fresh emotional arousal.
• Start with an overview and provide regular progress updates.
• In each 10 minute block, concentrate on a single, very general key point.
• Avoid interruptions.

I’m only part way through Medina’s collection of rules, but I can’t help thinking that this is the one that will have the most impact. I for one will be keeping these ideas to the forefront the next time I design an intervention.

My postings on Brain rules #1, Brain rules #2, Brain Rules #4

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

Source: Clive Shepherd