Top Highlights

• Let me say that again: it is impossible to understand something you are reading while simultaneously trying to understand a voice you are listening to.
• Similarly, in the staff meeting, as the presenter speaks in front of a text-heavy PowerPoint slide, your auditory cortex is madly processing both the sound of the speaker’s voice and the sound of your own silent reading voice. The issue arises at the bottleneck: at this point, you must decide which stream of information you are going to let pass th...
• In fact, a number of studies have demonstrated that individuals who receive information in a single manner (oral or text) consistently comprehend and remember more than individuals who receive the same information simultaneously in both manners (oral and text).
• Interestingly, the need to internally translate visual text into auditory speech only occurs when many words are being read in succession, as in the case of a complete sentence, paragraph or slide of text. When we read a small number of highly familiar words, then we can bypass vocalization and, instead, directly access their meaning.
• For this reason, including a very small number of keywords on each slide (generally, less than seven) might not interfere with anyone’s ability to listen to your speech.