Present Beyond Measure

12Sharpen Their Vision with Preattentive Attributes

“You can't see the picture when you're in the frame.”

—Les Brown

One of the most fascinating—and frustrating—aspects of presenting information is that there is so much unconscious mental processing going on behind the scenes of the audience's brain. Remember that by “unconscious,” I mean not aware of. And that lack of awareness is something most presenters are unaware of, which is an unfortunate irony.

How Memory Works

Our brains send information through a series of memory stages to keep what we need or discard what we don't, mainly for survival purposes. We have three stages of memory that enable us to visually intake, process, and store information. The three stages are as follows (see Figure 12.1):

1. Iconic memory
2. Working memory
3. Long-term memory

FIGURE 12.1 The three stages of human memory

Iconic memory refers to the short-term visual memories we store when seeing something very briefly, like pictures in the mind.¹ Unlike long-term memories, which can be stored for a lifetime, these iconic mental images last only milliseconds and then quickly fade.

Working memory is where the information that the iconic memory passes in is actively evaluated for either long-term storage or the mental trash bin.² This stage is temporary and has a limited capacity for storage, which will become important in Chapter 13.

Long-term ...