Traditional Learning is Dead. Long Live Brain-Friendly Learning!

The idea for this post came to me after a recent discussion with a group of participants in one of my workshops. It all happened last week, when I facilitated a "Communication Skills" workshop for a group of professionals in the financial field. The course was a mixture of behavioral science, sales techniques and presentation skills, aimed at giving attendants the tools and techniques to successfully sell their ideas to a group of clients.

I quickly found that my participants were particularly concerned with the "presentation skills" part of the seminar, because speaking in public and getting their message across to a group of potentially reluctant customers was a major source of worry for them. They all had sat through too many mind-numbing presentations in their lifetime, and the last thing they wanted was to take the place of those nightmarish presenters that had wasted countless precious hours of their time and whose ideas they had forgotten 5 minutes after the presentation finished.

Together, we tried to answer a few thorny questions: How do you get people's attention? Even more importantly, how do you keep that attention? And, to top it off, how do you get them to remember your message and differentiate yourself from a host of other presenters whose messages compete with yours to get a prime spot in your clients' memories?

These questions led us to a very interesting discussion about how our brains process information and how far most presenters, public speakers and teachers are from delivering brain-friendly presentations that we may enjoy, remember and act on afterward.

The principles by which our brain processes information are wonderfully synthesized by John Medina in his book, "Brain Rules", where he talks about discoveries that have started to revolutionize the way we teach or present our ideas to others. To mention just a few:

The brain likes to learn through stories and metaphors rather than abstract concepts

Our brains like stories more than anything. It's not by chance that, as children, we learn through stories. But then, we go to school and the "anti-brain" learning begins. We're bombarded with abstract information and asked to painfully memorize tomes of useless information for the sake of some meaningless grade.

Later on, this curse of boredom and meaninglessness seems to follow us in our professional lives. How many hours have we all spent listening to long, rambling, wooden-language presentations, where just the act of staying awake took up all of our energy?

Our brain likes to learn through pictures rather than words

"A picture is worth 1000 words" is not just a lovely metaphor. It's hard science. Our brains process written language as if it were a long sequence of pictures - each letter a picture. Just think of how many pictures there are on 10 bullet point PowerPoint slide! 200? 400? Maybe more? Our brains must really work hard to read all of that information, comprehend it and it's next to impossible for them to pay attention, whilst doing this, to the presenter who is talking about the information on that slide. Torture! Pure torture!

So what's the solution? Reduce the number of pictures the brain has to work with! How? By replacing words with actual pictures. Like in this example:

You don't really need more words to explain what the message here is, do you?

We have a 10 minute attention span

As children, when were you most alert during school hours? You'll probably say that you were most energetic during the brakes, when you would run and play with your friends, in the first minutes of a class and probably also when the bell rang, announcing another brake. Of course, that might have been the rule for regular classes, where teachers used the classical lecture/reproduce method. Hopefully some of us are lucky enough to remember at least one teacher that managed to keep our attention all throughout their class. And if you had such a teacher, can you remember what they did to keep you awake and alert for 50 minutes?

I remember one such teacher. He taught English, and loved to involve us in the discussion - something that other teachers seldom did (except for when they asked us to answer a question to check if we had done our homework or understood the key points in the lesson). But this one teacher told us stories to illustrate the origin of a word, invented word puzzles and made us work in teams to solve them and told us funny facts about the lives of famous British writers whose novels we read and commented on. I never got bored in his class, because there was no monotony. He always changed the rhythm and never let more than 10 minutes pass on a single activity. We simply didn't have time to get bored.

John Medina explains the success this teacher had by proposing the "10 minute rule" every presenter, lecturer or teacher should be aware of. And this rule states that humans have a difficult time maintaining attention if nothing interesting happens for longer than 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes our thoughts tend to drift away, unless something interesting happens to capture our attention - the presenter engages us in dialogue, plays a movie, tells a joke, or otherwise breaks the rhythm.

Even a presentation around a very technical topic can benefit from using these principles. There will always be some interesting image that you might use instead of those boring, endless phrases that too often monopolize every PowerPoint slide. I'm sure your audience would appreciate if you stopped torturing them by reading what's written on the slide, and instead used that valuable time to engage them in meaningful discussions.

Just the same, I'm sure students everywhere would be forever grateful if their teachers stopped treating them as if they were some kind of tape recorder that's only supposed to take in information and reproduce it just as it was first played.

What if presenters took the extra effort to build a story around their presentation, to give us life examples of those very concepts they are trying to get across? What if teachers remembered the 10 minute rule and used their creativity to build more interaction into teaching?

Should any of you doubt this is possible, I invite you to check out one of the most popular courses in Harvard's history, "Justice", taught by Michael Sandel (it's available online, for free and it's an eye opener to what an outstanding lecture truly looks like). This Professor turned political philosophy into a thriller-like experience. He managed, amazingly as it may seem, to engage some 900 students in meaningful debates around the most controversial subjects of political philosophy. The man builds a conversation with his 900 students!!! And there is not 1 minute of his one hour lectures that can be deemed boring by anyone's standards.

If Michael Sandel was able to make students fall in love with political philosophy, why shouldn't you (be you teacher, trainer, occasional presenter or public speaker) be able to build a meaningful relationship with your audience?

I'll end my plea for brain-centered learning, speaking and presenting by offering you an example of how someone can present information involving 200 years of history and 200 different countries, in 4 minutes, in a clear, compelling, visual, engaging, fascinating way. Here it is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo&feature=player_embedded]

What are your thoughts? What other ideas would you add to the "brain friendly" learning paradigm?