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REAL LIFE NEWS: POWERPOINT ROTS THE BRAIN

by Hazed

If you've ever had to sit through a Powerpoint presentation where the droning presenter showed you a lot of slides full of long, wordy paragraphs and then proceeded to read the slides to you word for word, you will know all about "death by Powerpoint" - that glazed and vacant feeling that overwhelms you as you struggle to stay awake in the face of such tedium.

You will be delighted to learn that some Australian researchers have just discovered that there is a biological reason for that feeling. It seems that the human brain is not geared up to absorb information verbally and visually at the same time - one or other is fine, but not both simultaneously.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia found the brain is limited in the amount of information it can absorb. Presenting the same information in visual and verbal form - like the deadly reading from a Powerpoint slide - overloads this part of memory and makes absorbing information more difficult.

Professor Sweller, one of the researchers, says, "It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

So if you're always falling asleep during slide presentations, it's not your fault. Now all we have to do is to convince all the people out there who misuse Powerpoint to change their ways.

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