Dream on*

The first time I went to Japan on business a local colleague warned me not to get distracted by people in the audience falling asleep. That is a common occurrence in Japan given how hard many employees work. But as a presenter, seeing people in your audience fall asleep is kind of a capital punishment. Nothing could be worse. So, we all try to make our presentations more interesting. But does it work?

In 1981 Melvin B Schullinger noted something that he described like this:

“As part of a continuing investigation into communicators' attitudes to teaching audit, one of us (MBS) has been exploring the mechanisms of retention of verbally transmitted material in a conventional stylised lecture setting. Preliminary studies suggested that little or none of the content of the lectures on a course given by one of us (MBS) was actually retained for more than 0-3 kiloseconds, and that recall was inversely proportional to the prevalence of sleep or dreaming among the audience, or both.”

Translation: No matter what I did, people couldn’t remember what I said and don’t get me started about the ones who fell asleep.

Always the scientist, Melvin recruited three more academics and started a randomised controlled trial. The four gave 15-minute presentations at different medical conferences in 1981 and 1982. The core slides in each presentation were the same, but the presentations were extended by three additional slides that ranged from very boring to very interesting (read the paper to see what these slides looked like).

Because these were medical conferences, they had no problems asking the audience if they wanted to participate in tests that included wearing an EEG cap during the presentation and answering a questionnaire afterwards. The EEG cap could identify if a member of the audience was drifting away (daydreaming) or even falling asleep and whether they were entering the REM phase during which we dream. Based on the results of the EEG, the scientists could then ask the audience members who fell asleep what they were dreaming about.

Thanks to this invaluable research we know that Senior lecturers and NHS Consultants predominantly dreamt of medical politics or money, while younger participants mostly dreamt about food and drink. Professors, meanwhile, dreamt about drinks and travel while emeritus professors mostly had dreams that involved their bladder function…

But what was really interesting, and I guess rather sobering to all of us who give presentations was that no matter what the presenters did, the recall of the content did not change. Presentations that contained more interesting slides were rated as more enjoyable, but the audience did not remember the content any better.

And when it comes to putting your audience to sleep, at least more interesting slides keep the audience awake. However, they don’t keep them from daydreaming. In fact, adding very boring slides or adding very interesting slides had the same effect on the audience: they were more likely to drift off into daydreams.

In the end, what we learn from this is that if you want people to remember what you said, you have to pack it into very bitesize and easy-to-digest content, like these missives. Too much content or content that isn’t easy to grasp simply is harder to remember. And no matter how interesting your slides are, people will not remember that content.

Influence of more boring slides (A) or more interesting slides (D) on presentation audience

Source: Harvey et al. (1983)

*And just so you will hum this song for the rest of the day in your head as I did, here is the video: