Technical clue provided by Perl Training Australia
by Paul Fenwick
While there are many excellent books, websites, and resources on effective conference presentation, these often focus upon imparting knowledge to the audience. However, a successful conference presentation is not only informative, but also entertaining. These are the presentations that are remembered the most.
In this paper, we're going to investigate how people think, and more importantly, how they can become distracted or lose concentration. By examining brain function and behaviour we can formulate ways in which we can give presentations that are both engaging and stimulating.
While this paper is entitled presentation mind control, there's no real mind control happening. All we'll be doing is using a good understanding of mental mechanics to improve our presentation technique. In order to learn how, we need to investigate how the various parts of one's brain actually works.
The Corpus Callosum connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The Corpus Callosum represents the largest of all inter-hemisphere connections, and is the primary conduit for information transfer between the hemispheres.
Most of our knowledge of the Corpus Callosum comes from studies of people and animals where the Corpus Callosum has been severed, which used to be a treatment for severe epilepsy. There is a lot of evidence from these studies that the left and right hemispheres can function independently. A remarkable example of which was performed with split-brain cats.
In split-brain cats, each half of the brain receives input from only one eye. By placing an eye-patch on the cat, visual information can be selectively supplied to a particular hemisphere.
These cats were presented with a puzzle in which they had to select between two differently marked doors, one of which would result in a reward of food. The cats would rapidly learn the ``correct'' door, but when the eye-patch was moved to the other eye, the cat would be unable to solve the puzzle and would pick a door at random. In fact, it was possible to teach different solutions to different hemispheres; the cat picking a door depending upon which hemisphere was active at the time.
Similar experiences have been observed in humans. Some split-brain individuals have been observed to be unable to name an object placed in their left hand, but can name it immediately when transferred to their right hand. One of the most striking conditions associated with a severed Corpus Callosum is alien hand syndrome, where a person's non-dominant hand appears to act purposefully without their consent.
It's been postulated that the actions of an ``alien hand'' are due to the controlling hemisphere acting without information sharing with its twin. In one study an alien hand routinely closed books that its owner was reading. It is thought that the non-dominant hemisphere was simply bored, and closed the book in preparation or encouragement of more interesting activities.
When the Corpus Callosum is intact, it not only carries information, but it also performs a very surprising role; that of suppressing brain activity. A good example of this can be seen when we watch a bad science movie, such as The Core or The Day After Tomorrow. Our logical and reasoning hemisphere will be horrified by the science presented, but the other hemisphere attempts to suppress it in order to enjoy the movie as a whole.
The lesson for presenters is a simple one: make sure that your presentation entertains both brain hemispheres. We've all been to presentations that have been technically interesting, but we've had difficulty paying attention, or even staying awake. Half our brain is bored, and suppressing it is hard work. Similar reasoning can be used to explain why many technical professionals are more effective if they listen to music while they work: the non-technical hemisphere remains happy, rather than providing a distraction.
Luckily, there is a simple way to provide non-technical information, and that's through the use of pictures. Pictures provide non-verbal information; at the very least they can be used as a form of brain-candy, but ideally pictures should be used to convey concepts and ideas as well.
One basic rule when using images is to ensure they draw attention towards your text. If you have a picture of a person looking interested, make sure they are looking interested in your text. The same applies to animals, and even inanimate objects like flowers and desk lamps. Anything that could be considered facing a direction should face towards your text, drawing your audience's attention towards it as well.
The best pictures are clear, colourful, and interesting. Any pictures that require ``explaining'' are likely to miss the mark. However, we can use our knowledge of human mental processes to use pictures as a much more powerful tool, providing a level of emotional control over our audience.
Humans are hard-wired to recognise faces and emotions, and most importantly to empathise with others. In the absence of other factors, humans will reflect emotions by default. The best way to get someone to smile is to smile at them. The best way to make someone angry is to be angry at them.
Displaying pictures of people expressing strong emotions can produce similar low-level responses. If you're telling a story where you discovered your backups were corrupt, then show an image of someone crying. If you're displaying a slide about how your new project solves problems, then show an image of happy and contented people. If you're talking about how something was hard work, show an image of a person performing hard labour. These emotional cues will nudge your audience towards the correct responses to your slides.
The hippocampus, or more correctly the two hippocampi, are brain structures that have been implicated in the consolidation of long-term memory. Much of our information about the hippocampus comes from a patient known as ``H.M.'', who in 1953 had both hippocampi surgically removed as a treatment for epilepsy. It was discovered that H.M retained many of his previous memories, but was unable to form new memories. Doctors have to re-introduce themselves every time they meet, he is surprised by his age whenever he looks into the mirror, and relives the grief over the death of his mother whenever he hears about it. Despite this, H.M. retained an above-average IQ, and also the ability to learn new procedural or ``muscle memory'' tasks, although he cannot remember learning them.
We want any presentation we give to be memorable, and the hippocampus is regarded as being responsible for 'encoding' memories. At a very simplistic level it takes two important inputs, the memory to be stored, and the perceived importance of this information. Luckily, we have a good understanding of what our hippocampus considers ``important''.
It's well known that emotion is a strong key to long-term memory. Births, deaths, marriages and injuries are naturally stored as lasting memories. The uneventful train trip last Wednesday is rarely stored for longer than a few hours. In order for our talk to be memorable, we want our audience to become emotional, and we want our topic to sound interesting and important.
Knowing that people have a natural tendency to reflect emotions, we can improve the delivery of our presentation simply by showing emotion ourselves. Being passionate about your material is an excellent start, if you seem really excited and interested, it's natural that others will become interested as well. This brings us to the most important of all presentation emotions: curiosity.
Curiosity is simply the desire to learn, and being able to invoke curiosity is one of the hallmarks of a good talk. The art of invoking curiosity is an ancient one, and is most commonly seen in story-telling, a theme which is central to much modern and historical forms of entertainment.
A good story means a curious audience. We don't want to leave part-way through a movie, or even put down a good book, because we want to know what happens next. A good talk will be the same: your audience will remain seated because they want to hear your conclusions, not because it's polite.
It shouldn't be surprising that the rules for good story-telling also apply to presentations. Don't give all your facts and conclusions up-front, instead present puzzles to your audience, explore false leads, give hints and clues, and end with a twist if you can.
Almost all modern presentations are done using a data-projector attached to a computer. Anything that can be displayed on the monitor can be displayed to the audience, giving the presenter an amazing range of possibilities. Unfortunately, many presenters continue to give presentations that don't take advantage of their media.
The goal of the presentation media is to help the audience both absorb knowledge, and to provide them with a focus of attention. The worse the presentation media, the better a presenter's verbal skills need to be. Conversely, the good use of media can make-up for lacking verbal skills, or make a good presentation even better.
Regardless of the content of the slides used, an excellent rule is to never allow a presentation to stall. Spending a long time on a slide gives the audience a chance to get distracted, check their e-mail, or otherwise stop paying attention. It's important to always keep the presentation media relevant.
A common theme of technical presentations is the live demonstration, and are one of the things that can make or break a presentation. Presenting in front of an audience can be a stressful experience, and it's easy to make mistakes when giving a demonstration. Nobody wants to see the presenter fumbling with their editor because they've accidently pressed caps-lock, or try to find a syntax error in code. Nonetheless, a live demonstration can be an impressive display and reinforcement of concepts.
Rather than giving a real live demonstration, you should instead
consider automating it. Perl programmers will find that the IO::Prompt
module can provide the look-and-feel of a terminal-based environment,
but with completely scripted interactions. The Win32::GuiTest
can be used under Windows to automate demonstrations involving graphical
interfaces. Automatic demonstrations do away with much of the
chance of possibilities of human error, and can allow the demonstration
to focus on the technology being presented.
Even though we have examined a number of ways to improve our presentation, it's still going to be poorly received unless the presenter has good delivery. All presentations are improved by careful planning, testing, and revision. Giving the first run of a presentation at a conference means that your large audience will spot all the flaws you could have fixed in a trial run.
Some guides recommend giving the first trial presentation to pets, but I've found this to be a poor choice. Pets rarely have a good attention span, and are more interested in going for a walk, or sleeping on the couch. I feel that first presentations should be given to inanimate objects, such as furniture, which have excellent attention spans. The simple act of giving the presentation is sure to allow you to find improvements and corrections that can be made.
Once you've done a few trial runs, it's time to start presenting to good friends. It helps if your friends can be considered part of your target audience, and are willing to give you critical feedback. Friends who are regular presenters are best of all, as they'll be more aware of good and bad presentation styles.
After presenting to friends, the next step up is presentations to user groups. Local user groups are almost always in need of more talks, and usually represent an excellent sample of your target audience. Many user-group members are more than happy to give you feedback on your talk, usually without prompting or solicitation.
One important thing to remember is to time your presentation. Conferences usually require talks that fit into a certain time-slot, and by timing your talk beforehand you'll know if your talk is too long, or too short. It's best to have a little time left over for questions, and to cover any unforeseen delays in presenting.
Even if no question time has been allocated for your presentation, you should still anticipate questions from your audience. It's recommended that you prepare for these in advance, by taking a critical view of your presentation and considering what questions may be posed by it.
There will be circumstances when you are confronted with questions to which you don't know the answer. A useful trick in this situation is to ask the question back to the audience in general. This usually results in a comprehensive answer from an educated audience member. In the rare circumstances that nobody knows the answer, you can feel quite justified in admitting ignorance yourself; after all, nobody else knew the answer either.
Effective presentation techniques are best discovered through experience: each presenter will have different techniques that work best for them. This paper does not aim to provide guidelines for basic presenting, but instead investigated a number of neurological effects and how they can be used to improve any presentation.
By understanding how our audience thinks, we can best tailor our presentation to be informative, entertaining, and memorable. This provides a better experience for both presenter and conference attendees.
Copyright 2000-2008 Paul Fenwick. Copyright information