As human beings vision trumps all of our other senses. Man is incredibly adapted to remembering images. If you read or hear something, studies show that in the span of about three days you will only remember about 10% of the message. However, if you add a picture or an image, then you are likely to remember about 65% of the message.
Unfortunately, most of us rely on text to obtain most of our information. Whether reading a report for work, the newspaper, or surfing the Internet, most of our information comes to us in the form of text. Reading text is a very inefficient process because our brain sees words as just lots and lots of tiny pictures. Each letter and symbol has to be identified and sequenced to create a word, and words have to be recognized and sequenced to get to their meaning. All this takes valuable time and energy for the brain to process, and is not how our brains were evolved to work. In prehistoric times vision was used to find food sources, locate a mate, and identify threats.
Our visual acuity has evolved over millions of years. Written language is something relatively new in the context of human evolution, and as such is not very highly developed. Yet text in today’s world is our primary form of capturing and distributing information. Images are far more effective in tapping into the systems for which our brains were adapted. Next time you do a presentation, forget the text and give them an image to remember.
How can you use more images to get your message out?
