The Unfinished Work Week

86%  of a person remembers is seen as opposed to 9% being heard.   We should therefore focus more on visual communication.   This is seen in the fact that most people process only 7 verbal bits (or 4 if you take into account modern distractions) of information in 30 seconds but can process 15 bits of visual communication in the same time.

The author suggests that the visual learning is much greater than verbal learning.   We should therefore use more visual learning to communicate than we do.

The average person reads 250 words a minute but they can not comprehend this level of information.   Therefore we tend to scan or miss things.  The average email has 100 words and so is read in 25 seconds.  But it likley that you can only comprehend only 45 words in these 25 seconds.

There are three types of attention.

  1. Controlled Attention – actively decide to concentrate on some thing.
  2. Stimuli Attention – an involentary response to simuli such as a phone ringing or an email arrving.  You must contiously re-establish controlled attention to get the most from your memory process.
  3. Arousal attention – the loss of attention when a topic becomes monotonous and boring.