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Episode #52: Carmen Simon
164 Plays8 years ago
Welcome back to the show! As you may know, I’m a big fan of data and research that shows how we do or don’t acquire information. But so much of that research–or purported research, I should say–sits on dubious methods...
The post Episode #52: Carmen Simon appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to MICA's Program
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by the Maryland Institute College of Art. MICA's professional graduate program in information visualization trains designers and analysts to translate data into compelling visual narratives, benefit from the resources of a premier College of Art and Design while learning online.
00:00:20
Speaker
Earn your information visualization degree in just 15 months. Expert faculty includes Andy Kirk, John Schwabisch, Marissa Peacock, and Rob Rolleston. Learn more at mica.edu slash MPSInvis.
Meet Carmen Simon
00:00:46
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy This podcast. I'm your host, John Chwalbech. On this week's show, I'm very excited to have with me Carmen Simon, who is a cognitive scientist, coach extraordinaire, and an author of the most recent book, Impossible to Ignore, Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions. Carmen, welcome to the show.
What Inspired the Book?
00:01:06
Speaker
Thank you so much for inviting me. Oh, thanks for coming on. I'm really excited. I've just finished your book. I've got tons of tags and marks and pens all over the place. I'm excited to talk about the content, talk about memory. But before we start, maybe you could introduce yourself for the audience. And then let's just get right into why you wrote this book about memory.
00:01:24
Speaker
Well, welcome, everyone. I am Carmen Simon. I'm a cognitive scientist. And what that means is that I research mental functions, such as attention, memory, decision making. And I specialize in neuroscience, which means that's the field that has to do with the structure and function of the brain. So now with improved technologies such as MRI and EEG, we have learned a lot more about the brain and what does what.
00:01:52
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We don't have to wait for people to die or have accidents to realize what does what in there. And do we know everything about the brain? Definitely not. We are decades away from fully decoding it. But we know a lot more. We used to know only 30 regions. Now we know about 300. So when you merge cognitive science with neuroscience, now we know a lot more how attention is taking place in the brain, how memories are formed, and most often not, how decisions are made and most often
Memory Recall Study
00:02:22
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not.
00:02:22
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And the inspiration like you asked for the book came from a study that I completed a few years back. And that study started with a simple question. I wanted to know if I gave an audience 20 slides with one message per slide, how many of those slides would they still remember two days later?
00:02:39
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And I was humbled by the findings. The findings showed me that on average, people remembered four slides after 48 hours. But that wasn't really what I found surprising. What I found surprising was the fact that out of 1,500 people who participated in the study, 500
00:02:57
Speaker
remembered zero slides. And these were mentally healthy people, these were successful professionals. I didn't submit the PowerPoint deck to people who are struggling with some mental functions. And in fact, quite a few emailed back and said, I should have my head examined. I just can't believe that. I can't even remember.
Understanding Memory Types
00:03:17
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This was only two days ago.
00:03:19
Speaker
I mean, it's really interesting when you put up all that information, how people fail to remember what you're showing them. Can you talk a little bit about how our brains process memory? You talk a lot about in the book about the difference between verbatim memory and gist memory. That's just one aspect of how memory works. So you can talk a little bit about how we process memory and how we hold on to things.
00:03:38
Speaker
Yes. So when it comes to memories, we can approach them from various angles. You can approach them from how long they last. So for example, our sensory memory, which is how our memories are born to begin with, we take in the world with our senses, it only lasts for a few fractions of a second. So as you enter a room and you're surrounded by all sorts of sights and sounds and smells,
00:04:02
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you're taking in the world but only in a fraction of it. And this is why people have exercises in the military, for instance. They want to know that soldiers or potential soldiers as they enter a room, they're immediately aware of their surroundings. So you'll be asked questions like, how many windows are here without even looking? Do you know that answer? And that's pertinent to all of us because quite often we forget because we don't pay attention to begin with.
00:04:28
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So that sensory memory lasts for a few fractions of a second. If we're lucky enough, a few pieces of information will make their way through our short-term memory storage. And that too has capacity limitations and time limitations.
00:04:42
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after about 40 seconds, a minute for smart people like you, maybe up to two minutes at the most, things will stay in there. And unless we rehearse them, like for instance, when somebody tells you a phone number and you don't have something to write it down with, you have to kind of repeat it to yourself until either you dial it or you write it down. And unless you keep on rehearsing it, it will be gone and that short-term memory will be replaced with the new pieces of information that you're faced with.
00:05:07
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And if you're repeating things long enough and often enough, then they have the luxury of long-term memory storage.
Emotions in Memory and Storytelling
00:05:15
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So you can study memory that way, or you can study it based on the phases that happen. So for example, at first we encode information, so that's phase number one, and then we store information and we consolidate it.
00:05:30
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sleep quite often helps with that consolidation phase. The final phase is the retrieval. You hope that after you have said something to someone or you share the PowerPoint deck with them after two days, something still stays on their minds. Or you can approach memory from exactly what you said, a trace versus a verbatim memory angle. What do we mean by this? This will be enlightening to everybody. I'm very excited about this categorization.
00:05:58
Speaker
Whenever you say something to someone, that piece of information has the potential to be encoded twice. It can be encoded as a verbatim trace. So, for instance, if I gave you a list of all the capitals of all the countries in the world and I expected you to remember exactly what they're called, that would be an example of a verbatim memory.
00:06:21
Speaker
and contrast that with just memory where you may not necessarily remember all of the exact names but you just may remember that you were exposed to a lot of information and you found it pleasant or maybe you found it confusing. So there's a familiarity with the notion that you're exposed to and
00:06:39
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That familiarity can work in our advantage or disadvantage. Many students, for instance, fail their exams because they believe they know things verbatim as they're looking at information, but when faced with a test, all they can remember is the gist of things and that may not necessarily translate into a good grade.
00:06:58
Speaker
Right. In the book, you talk a lot about presenting information verbally. You've mentioned PowerPoint a couple of times. And you talk a lot about emotions and memory, how using emotions can capture our attention and sort of sink it into our brains. And it seems that people can use stories and imagery during a presentation to tap into their audience's emotions. But how does that work in the written world? So how does that work when we're presenting data, when we're infographics or data visualization?
00:07:25
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Is it the same mental process that we're using when we're reading something in a book or online versus listening to someone speak and showing us slides?
00:07:34
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Yeah, so it all depends on the strength of the chemical signal that you ignite in the brain, regardless of the form of the communication that you're creating. And when you're analyzing your own communication, let's just say that you have a lot of data and charts and graphs. Think about this. Emotion indeed has a big impact on memory. No one ever questions that. In fact, after repetition, emotion is by far the mostly talked about variable.
00:08:04
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But what we have to be aware of is at the time that we communicate, there are two emotions that take place. One is the emotional state of the person receiving your information and the other is the emotional nature of the content that you share. I'm mentioning this because let's just say that you have some brilliant graphs and you spent months gathering some data that you're now ready to share with an audience.
00:08:27
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And you've done a really good job compiling all of this analysis. And your audience, maybe it's two people, maybe it's 50, are in a fairly poor emotional state. Maybe there were some layoffs at your company or something else happened on another project that they're impacted. So be very cautious of the time at which you choose to share your most brilliant information, because their emotional state is going to interfere with the memories that they form. So that's one aspect.
00:08:55
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The other is, let's just say that your audience is in a perfect emotional state, one that's conducive to you sharing what you worked on. Then you can reflect on the emotional
Complexity vs. Simplicity in Presentations
00:09:05
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nature that you can include in your own content. There can be a lot of emotion that is associated with numbers because numbers speak and when they do, they speak the language of business and everyone wants to be viable in business. So you can step back.
00:09:21
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from your numbers and ask, what is the story behind these? How did I even come up with these? What is the impact on human lives when I was looking at this data? How does this affect us today, tomorrow? So if you link this to a human component, any charter that you have, to how it impacts humanity in general, and it can be at a small scale or a grand scale, then you inherently have some emotion that you can add to numbers.
00:09:47
Speaker
You work a lot with clients in the business field and CEOs and business technology. So how do you convince content creators, speakers, and writers to use emotions and to use creativity and to use stories? I think a lot of people in those sectors are probably used to showing tables of data and graphs and sort of making it a little more sterile.
00:10:08
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But we know now that emotions matter. So how do you work with people to convince them that emotions are really important, stories are really important, you should be delivering that, you should be wrapping the content within these broader themes.
00:10:18
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I really like the word that you used, wrapping, because all you're doing after you've created your hard research and all of your data and the charts, then it becomes a matter of packaging that information in a way that's more palatable. And these days, just like you're explaining, emotions and storytelling are good ways to package your data in a way that stays on people's memory long term.
00:10:45
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One trend that I'm noticing and I'm finding it a lot easier when it comes to CEOs or executives explaining data with their employees is the strength towards stories that are from different fields compared to their own. For example, I was just working with a CEO who is very prominent in this area of predictive analytics.
00:11:06
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So data at its best. And the story that he was sharing in this particular example was related to a mountaineer. His name is Reinhold Messner. Many of our listeners might be familiar with him. He was the first to climb Mount Everest without oxygen.
00:11:23
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without an oxygen help, without those tanks that most people need. And the story was well told, we visualized it well. So the emotional nature of the content can also come from the visuals that you choose to use. So we were talking about Mount Everest a bit earlier on a different show.
00:11:46
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And people are asking, are pictures or words more memorable? And the intuitive answer might be that pictures are always more memorable. And that's not always the case. Your words can be just as memorable if you enable them to build mental pictures. So for instance, if I told you that
00:12:04
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Climbing Mount Everest was like running on a treadmill, breathing through a straw, which is probably what Reinhold Messner felt like when he was climbing without those additional oxygen tanks. But see how those words build mental pictures in your audience's minds. So when you don't have the luxury of slides or access to a talented graphic artist, you can still have powerful stories as long as you choose words that create mental imagery.
00:12:32
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And in the cases where you do have images, you do have slides, does that redundancy help? Let's take the Everest example. If I showed a picture on the screen of Everest and then use that same way to talk about it, the same imagery through the words, does the redundancy of the two, does that help or does that hurt our efforts to get our audience to remember that statement?
00:12:55
Speaker
Yeah, I would go beyond the redundancy and focus more on the combination between what shows behind you and the words that you choose. So, for instance, in the specific example, the presenter had a slide that displayed the base camps that you have to go through in order to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
00:13:15
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and that established a visual context. In fact, it eliminated some redundancy because if the context is visual and is behind you, now the words that you're displaying and you're sharing with an audience are placed in something that is physical and visual and you don't have to describe all of the bases and all the altitudes and how you have to go from one to another because that is so explicit. So that reaches a good economy of words because now you can focus on the point of the story which is
00:13:43
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this man's journey of accomplishing something that hadn't been done before.
Dispelling Memory Retention Myths
00:13:48
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The next time that you watch the news, observe how well they combine the images that show and the words that you hear. And typically they work in combination. If you were to remove one or the other, something would be lost.
00:14:00
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but when you put them together that's where you have a complete package so for example they don't just say in this rich district of these multi-million dollar houses this crime took place they'll just say the play the crime took place here and you can see what here is because of all the lush and the beautiful houses that appear in the background.
00:14:21
Speaker
It's interesting the way you talk about the way of setting the stage with words and setting with visuals. And I'm still curious how, when you're working with people, how you get them who are, you know, they're CEOs and maybe more used to thinking in detailed numbers and details and says, how you get them to think in a sort of different way. There's this great part of the book where you talk about working with some executives and you write in the book that one of the members of the, of the workshop said, if I didn't include all of the details in my presentation, my boss would think I'm lazy.
00:14:50
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And I run into this all the time. It's such a great comment. So I'm curious how do you work with people to say, look, you don't need to show all the details. You don't need to show all this all the time and to back out a little bit and to get maybe the higher level points or more visual or different imagery. One of the questions that I ask that hits right in the gut is to say, do you like to be forgettable?
00:15:16
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And hardly ever do we like to be forgettable. Usually, after expanding a lot of effort on something, we would like to stay on people's minds intuitively. Rationally speaking, the reason why we want to stay on people's minds is because those people will make decisions in our favor because people decide based on what they remember, not on what they forget.
00:15:35
Speaker
So starting with that question is always a good point, but you can only start with that question if you have a really good relationship with somebody, otherwise you can't provoke that way initially. Another entry point into being succinct and making sure that you can engage in some content sacrifice is to proclaim this. I'm not asking somebody to sacrifice all of their complexity. People get on the defense when you ask them to do that.
00:16:00
Speaker
And simplifying complexity is a myth. It's where memory is concerned. It's a myth because if you show the brain something that is too simple, you're not giving it enough to build memory traces that are necessary for memory retrieval later on. Remember how we were saying earlier that memory works in terms of encoding information, you store, consolidate, retrieve later on.
00:16:21
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If you don't encode it that much, that means you can't retrieve that much days later. So elaboration and complexity help us build more memory traces. And unfortunately, people abuse it too much. But if you tell people, look, you can keep some complex components as long as we can balance them with some simple components. It's this rhythm that not only helps us build memory traces, but also keeps the brain's attention for a prolonged period of time.
00:16:50
Speaker
Because if everything was complex the brain gives up too soon but if everything is too simple the brain will stay with you for a while because it enjoys not thinking. Simplicity doesn't require a lot of cognitive effort and we enjoy not thinking. We don't require a lot of energy so it feels good in the moment but later on we're missing the necessary
00:17:09
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necessary memory traces. So balancing simplicity and complexity helps us out and besides people would not even appreciate the brain would not appreciate simplicity unless it knows the complexity from which it has come.
00:17:24
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So indulging people's complexity helps them in some way. It doesn't put them on the defensive. So asking them to keep the complex pieces that they're really fond of and that they're very attached to. And then they're only giving up a small percentage in favor of some simplicity and summarizing what that complexity really means for an audience.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah. You made a comment earlier about some things that are not true with memory. And this is one of the other great parts of the book that I love. And of course, when we, when we first met last year at the presentation summit, it was one of the things that got me really excited because you had stood up there and sort of denounced some of these statements or statistics about memory that just turned out to be false and totally not found in any of the research. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about memory?
00:18:12
Speaker
Let's start with one of the biggest ones, which is that misnomer of people remember 10% of what they see, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see and hear, all the way up to about 90% of us remembering things we do. That's just so false. First of all, if I asked you what you did on Tuesday two weeks ago, you probably don't remember that much.
00:18:36
Speaker
So there is no statistical study out there that proves such conveniently increasing numbers and that is a red flag right there. There is something in the book that I mentioned in terms of percentages and that is something related to the forgetting curve.
00:18:53
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The forgetting curve is a theorem, a formula that has stood the test of time for more than eight decades now. And it reminds us of this. And all of our listeners are going to enjoy hearing this in a sense. It's a humbling statistic.
00:19:08
Speaker
When people come to our information, data, charts, presentations, whatever it is that you're creating, without the intent to remember, they will forget that information fast at first and slower later. This means that after two days, they will have forgotten about 90% of it. On average, we don't attach a specific statistic. In business, it's almost impossible to do so. But on average, we know that they forget the most amount in the first two days.
00:19:35
Speaker
And a small percentage, let's call it a metaphorical 10%, stays there over time. And the cautionary mark I have in the book is this. Are you in charge of that small, let's call it that metaphorical 10%, that people take away, or do you leave that to chance?
Conclusion: Creating Memorable Content
00:19:52
Speaker
Because otherwise, what can happen is people will tend to remember, for most part, something out of your communication, but you may not be in charge of it. They just may have established their own patterns or they may have taken away something that was completely irrelevant, maybe just one small side remark that you made and that would be a shame if you're not in charge of the small percentage that stays on people's minds. Yeah, absolutely.
00:20:18
Speaker
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's a great book, and I hope folks will read it. I think it really applies to lots of different fields when it comes to presenting, when it comes to creating graphs, when it comes to writing content. When you were going through the process of writing the book, were you thinking primarily about standing in front of an audience and presenting, or were you thinking sort of broadly about how just communication in general and how we deliver content across all these different platforms?
00:20:44
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Definitely across all different platforms, all communication styles, anybody who aspires at gaining a spot in someone's mind long term.
00:20:54
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and influencing decisions would benefit from the book. I'm excited about the things that you're writing about and things that you'll be publishing because I think that will bring some of these principles down to earth even more. So people who are focused more on data and visualizing that data will know how to do it well, but also how to do it in such a way that it impacts people's memories long-term.
00:21:21
Speaker
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, Carmen, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been fascinating. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone for listening. It's a luxury and a privilege these days to reside on people's minds. And I'm convinced that any of these principles are going to help you out.
00:21:36
Speaker
Great. And thanks so much, everyone. Be sure to check out Carmen's book, Impossible to Ignore Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions. And thanks so much for tuning into this week's show. If you have any comments or questions, please do let me know on Twitter or on the website. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:22:05
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by the Maryland Institute College of Art. MICA's professional graduate program in information visualization trains designers and analysts to translate data into compelling visual narratives, benefit from the resources of a premier College of Art and Design while learning online.
00:22:25
Speaker
Earn your information visualization degree in just 15 months. Expert faculty includes Andy Kirk, John Schwabisch, Marissa Peacock, and Rob Rolleston. Learn more at mica.edu slash MPSInvis.