{"id":72,"date":"2007-05-03T08:50:28","date_gmt":"2007-05-03T07:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2007\/05\/03\/how-big-a-cognitive-loads-can-you-handle-eh\/"},"modified":"2007-05-03T08:50:28","modified_gmt":"2007-05-03T07:50:28","slug":"how-big-a-cognitive-loads-can-you-handle-eh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/how-big-a-cognitive-loads-can-you-handle-eh\/","title":{"rendered":"How big a Cognitive Loads can you handle, eh?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Regular readers will know I&#8217;m not a fan of PowerPoint for two reasons.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s often badly used; and<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s designed in a way to make it too easy to use it badly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I know I&#8217;m not alone in this, and recently another voice has joined in &#8211; namely Prof John Sweller, from Australia.  You can see a report of his thoughts <a title=\"cognitive load theory\" href=\"http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/news\/technology\/research-points-the-finger-at-powerpoint\/2007\/04\/03\/1175366240499.html\">here<\/a>: basically he points out that because of the way our brains are hardwired it&#8217;s easy to overload them with too much information.  This is particularly a problem if we&#8217;re receiving lots of the same kind of information.  A PowerPoint slide containing words runs a serious risk of doing just that.<\/p>\n<p>A Powerpoint slide with a diagramme has a much better chance of getting through to your audience&#8230;&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The key concept is that our brains work with a two-tier memory system &#8211; 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&#8217;re spending too much time\/energy trying to keep tabs on what we&#8217;re hearing and seeing we&#8217;ve got no energy left to pass things back to our long-term memory.  If that doesn&#8217;t happen there&#8217;s not much point in us having got the info in the first place as we won&#8217;t remember it past the end of the presentation&#8230;&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Regular readers will know I&#8217;m not a fan of PowerPoint for two reasons. It&#8217;s often badly used; and It&#8217;s designed in a way to make it too easy to use it badly. I know I&#8217;m [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}