42. Vision Trumps All the Senses

Half of the brain’s resources are dedicated to seeing and to interpreting what we see. Maybe this is why presenters spend so much time and energy working on their PowerPoint slides, often at the expense of honing the message or practicing their talk. Just because vision is so important doesn’t mean that it should be the main channel for your message. And it certainly doesn’t mean that your PowerPoint slides should take all your thought, time, and energy. In fact, people will be paying much more attention to you, the room, and the other people in the room. Visuals can enhance what you say—maybe—but they aren’t all that there is.

Because vision is so important, you actually need to minimize what you show, since it will interfere with other channels, such as the auditory. In order for what you are saying to be heard and listened to over what is going on visually, you actually need to minimize visual distraction. In order to make sure that people are paying attention to what you are saying, you should have LESS visual stimuli.

Make Sure Images Fit the Message

If you use a picture or photo as a visual on your PowerPoint slide, make sure that the visual matches the message. Sometimes presenters go overboard in the other direction: They get the message that they shouldn’t use too much text, so they have dozens of slides with pictures and photos. Don’t use too many pictures and don’t use pictures that don’t match what you are trying to communicate.

If you have slides where things fly around or move a lot, it will be visually distracting and people won’t be listening to you and your message. Presenters like to use the feature whereby material doesn’t appear on the slide when the slide first displays; the material is displayed when the presenter clicks a button or key. This approach is okay, because it prevents your audience from reading the entire screen before you’ve had an opportunity to discuss a particular item on the screen. However, this technique shouldn’t be all that necessary, because you shouldn’t have so much text on your slide that you have to figure out the best way to show it all!

Other visual distractions could include people coming and going in the room or the fact that you are wearing very bright colors or doing something repetitive (such as nervously pacing back and forth).