210 The Neuroscience of Designing Memorable Content
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Tuesday, March 26
Instructional Design
Salon 11
People are constantly bombarded with requests for their attention, many of which unfortunately go ignored. It’s frustrating to consider that when you share educational content, most people will forget 90 percent of it after just two days. Why go through all the trouble of painstakingly developing content, if most of it won’t be retained for the long term? With the brain more likely to forget something than remember it, it’s critical to understand how the brain processes information and tends to remember it, and then to apply that knowledge when designing instructional content.
When you are creating eLearning content, you are in full control of what people are seeing on their path to memory. In this session, you will learn how to think about your content in terms of three elements: attention, memory, and decision. Drawing on insights from neuroscience, you’ll understand how audiences pay attention, remember content, and ultimately act on it. You’ll discover strategies for transforming the content you share into something worth noticing and remembering. You’ll address how memory is, among other things, a problem of discrimination, and outline strategies for drawing attention to the most important aspects of your content. You’ll also learn why employing repetition is often overlooked in eLearning, and how it’s essential for embedding memories.
In this session, you will learn:
- Which variables are completely in your control when you want to influence someone’s memory
- How you can insert stimuli into your content to attract and sustain audience attention
- About the visual elements that make content more memorable
- The difference between two types of memory—verbatim and gist
- Why your persuasive power is a function of what people remember, not what they forget
Audience:
Designers and managers
Carmen Simon
Cognitive Neuroscientist & Founder
Memzy a Corporate Visions Company
Carmen Simon is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and founder of Memzy, a company that uses brain science to help corporations create memorable messages. Her most recent book, Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions, has won the acclaim of Inc.com, Forbes, and Fast Company, and has been selected as one of the top international books on persuasion. Carmen holds doctorates in instructional technology and cognitive psychology, and she teaches at Stanford University. She speaks frequently on using brain science to craft communication that not only is memorable but also sparks action.