Friday night is curry night and last Friday night was no different. I was also delighted to see that the glorious BBC has bought one of my favourite “waiting for the curry delivery” programmes back to it’s proper time slot.
A Question of Sport has been running for years but they keep moving it in the schedules. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s a quiz where 2 teams of three sports personalities answer questions about sport. Good title eh.
What interested me last night though was the introduction of a new round.
In it the team captains were each shown a sequence of 5 pictures of different sports stars with the name of another sports star written underneath.
The captains were then asked questions about the sports stars whose names were written and had to remember which sports star’s picture they were shown with.
What surprised me was how many they got right.
Having been asked a question, the captain had to work out the answer knowing that it was one of five names written underneath the photos. The questions were cryptic, not about the captains own sport and not at all easy; so even without the additional challenge to come, they were a real test of the captain’s sports knowledge. To then be able to recall which picture the name was shown with was impressive. To be able to do all that 5 times and get almost all of them right was very thought provoking.
How were they able to do it at all?
Our understanding of memory and recall indicates that short term memory is very fragile and leaks away quickly unless it is embedded with something else. AND we also know a little about the brain’s preference for images.
This quiz had very cleverly linked long term memory (the captain’s deep seated sports knowledge) with the power of the brain’s ability to remember images.
What an awesome thing the human brain is. If the quiz had stuck to text only:
- it would have been a boring programme to watch
- I doubt that the captains would have had the success they did.
By using pictures linked to text the producers had created a recall rate in excess of 80%.
Not bad!
(And even my wife and I scored over 70% once the captains had done the first part of answering the question)
This led me to think about how we use images to embed learning. I concluded that I probably don’t do it enough.
I have written before about visual workplaces and the brain’s preference for images (see As Debbie Harry would say “Picture This”) but I still don’t use them enough.
So my new years resolution is this: I will double the amount of imagery I use in my sessions.
I don’t yet know how I will do this but I will do it and I will tell you what the results were. (And if you are on any of my sessions come and tell me what you thought.)
curry image by wickenden
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