We had our first Master the Art of Presenting 2016 -webinar today with event keynote speaker and brain researcher Mona Moisala and Paulus Perkkiö from Seidat Intelligent Presentation System.
Mona Moisala is PhD student and specialised cognitive neuroscience. Her expertise is what happens in the brain when people are processing information. In the webinar we discussed about brain-friendly presentations and what you should consider when delivering a presentation. These were the topics discussed with Mona Moisala:
- Who is Mona Moisala and what does she do for her day-to-day work?
- Why did she choose to study the brain and attention?
- Does she need to give a lot of presentations in your work and what is that like?
- What is an optimal length for a presentation from the brain-friendliness viewpoint?
- How much information is too much for one presentation?
- What makes a powerful presentation graphic?
- What is Mona’s favorite speech or presentation that the audience should watch?
(Jeremy Narby: Intelligence in nature) - Give us a sneak preview what you will speak about at Master the Art of Presenting 2016?
After Mona, Paulus Perkkiö gave an introduction to their brain-friendly presentation system Seidat.
Below you can watch the recording of the presentation and collect the good tips that Mona and Paulus shared.
Watch the Seidat presentation showed in the video here.
The main points in writing:
1. Refresh your audiences brains
People tend to become distracted around 15 to 20 minutes and this is definitely something you should take into consideration when giving a presentation.
If your presentation is more that 20 minutes, you should have a brake, discussion or exercises. Something that refreshes your audiences brains.
2. How much information is too much information in a presentation?
Usually the biggest problem with presentations is that they are too packed up with information. Brain studies tells that people are able to absorb around 2 or 3 main points from a presentation.
This works with memory too, people are able to remember only few main points from your presentation.
When giving a presentation, best practice is to focus on your main points and narrow down anything that’s not so relevant or important.
3. People can stay focused longer times if they are motivated enough
People can stay focused for hours if they are emerged enough, for example when watching a movie or coding. This stage of mind is usually called flow. Since the task is so motivated you are able to stay focused, but this is not very common situation when you are listening a presentation.
Since people are able to focus longer times if they are super interested and motivated, you should aim to that when giving a presentation.
4. What makes an effective presentation graphic?
If we think about graphics that contain some kind of graph or other information, it’s important to remember to leave out everything unimportant. People are focusing only a small bits of the graphs so you should highlight and direct their focus on what is really important in the graph.
Emotional images or images where are other people are also good for your presentation. These kind of images are great because when people watches an emotional picture it activates different parts of her brain and this helps her learn and remember better. If we are in a emotional stage we tend to remember better, so you should use that in advantage in your presentation.
You can use emotions to help people remember your key points better, but it is still important to have only few main points in your presentation. Use emotion to help people remember those few points better, don’t try to get them remember more.
5. Inspiring with confidence
We don’t always feel very confident when we are performing and for the majority of people the greatest cause of anxiety is the idea of public speaking.
There are a lot of techniques you can use to ease that anxiety and boost your confidence. In Master the Art of Presenting 2016 -event Mona spoke about those techiques and gave tips on how you can present in a confident and natural manner.