they can. No one says regretfully on his deathbed, “If only
I’d gone to more lectures!” We know that the best way to learn something
is by doing it, and in a lecture, you never do much of anything except sit
and stare (two things few of us need to practice). So, if we must go, we
sit in the back, bringing fully charged electronic escapes, and we select
the lecture with the greatest chance of being interesting or entertaining.
Consider how minimally lectures have changed in the last 200 years
compared to the exponential growth of everything else. If you used a
time-travel machine to bring the crowd at Gettysburg into the seats at
your next annual corporate meeting, the only question they’d have is why
so few people wear hats.
The science of attention—a topic popularized by books like Malcolm
Gladwell’s
Blink
(Back Bay Books)—can also be
thought of as the science of boredom, which is a surprisingly useful way
to think about how a speaker tries to keep people interested. If you can
stop boredom from happening, and stop doing things that bore people,
you’re well on your way to having an attentive crowd. Professor Donald A.
Bligh, while doing research for his book
What’s the Use of
Lectures?
(Jossey-Bass), strapped up his students to heart
rate monitors during various lectures and measured what happened over
time. It’s no surprise that their heart rates declined. They peak at the
magic moment of attention right at the start, and, on average, decline
steadily (see Figure 6-1 ). With this
depressing fact, it’s easy to understand why most lectures are slow
one-way trips into sedation. Our bodies, sitting around doing little, go
into rest mode—and where our bodies go, our minds will follow.
Figure 6-1. What your body does when sitting at a lecture. Adapted from
Donald A. Bligh’s
What’s the Use of Lectures?
(Jossey-Bass).
John Medina, molecular biologist and director of the Brain Center at
Seattle Pacific University, believes 10 minutes is the maximum amount of
time most people can pay attention to most things. In his bestselling book
Brain Rules
(Pear Press), Medina spends an entire
chapter applying this theory to the challenges of teaching—the 10-minute
rule is at the core of how he plans his lectures. He never spends more
than 10 minutes on a single point, and he makes sure to structure the
entire lecture around a sequence of points he knows the audience is
interested in hearing. With enough study about the audience’s interests,
and a 10-minute time limit, boredom can be kept at bay for an
hour.
Ten is not a magic number, however. Lectures that are 8, 12, or even
45 minutes long can be captivating, provided the speaker knows what he’s
doing and understands how to keep people interested. But most don’t. There
is a good reason the most well-respected conference in modern times, theTED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, uses a
mixture of 8- and 20-minute long talks at its events. At this ridiculously
popular and supremely expensive lecture-centric event (tickets are $4,000
or more), famous minds like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Bono, and hundreds of
other CEOs, political leaders, and geniuses in various fields, fly from
all over the world to speak—but for a maximum of 20 minutes. They spend
more time eating lunch than they do giving their presentations. This
forces speakers to distill their message down to its most concise,
passionate, potent form, so even if they fail to keep people’s attention,
they won’t be on stage long enough to bore anyone to death. [ 32 ] Television sitcoms—a format that has been studied for
decades to perfect its attention-capturing qualities—are also in the same
time range: 30 minutes long, divided into thirds, and with generous
helpings of 30-second commercials.
Most lectures are an hour long for no good reason other than we like
that neat increment of time. If you have to hire a babysitter, drive
I’d gone to more lectures!” We know that the best way to learn something
is by doing it, and in a lecture, you never do much of anything except sit
and stare (two things few of us need to practice). So, if we must go, we
sit in the back, bringing fully charged electronic escapes, and we select
the lecture with the greatest chance of being interesting or entertaining.
Consider how minimally lectures have changed in the last 200 years
compared to the exponential growth of everything else. If you used a
time-travel machine to bring the crowd at Gettysburg into the seats at
your next annual corporate meeting, the only question they’d have is why
so few people wear hats.
The science of attention—a topic popularized by books like Malcolm
Gladwell’s
Blink
(Back Bay Books)—can also be
thought of as the science of boredom, which is a surprisingly useful way
to think about how a speaker tries to keep people interested. If you can
stop boredom from happening, and stop doing things that bore people,
you’re well on your way to having an attentive crowd. Professor Donald A.
Bligh, while doing research for his book
What’s the Use of
Lectures?
(Jossey-Bass), strapped up his students to heart
rate monitors during various lectures and measured what happened over
time. It’s no surprise that their heart rates declined. They peak at the
magic moment of attention right at the start, and, on average, decline
steadily (see Figure 6-1 ). With this
depressing fact, it’s easy to understand why most lectures are slow
one-way trips into sedation. Our bodies, sitting around doing little, go
into rest mode—and where our bodies go, our minds will follow.
Figure 6-1. What your body does when sitting at a lecture. Adapted from
Donald A. Bligh’s
What’s the Use of Lectures?
(Jossey-Bass).
John Medina, molecular biologist and director of the Brain Center at
Seattle Pacific University, believes 10 minutes is the maximum amount of
time most people can pay attention to most things. In his bestselling book
Brain Rules
(Pear Press), Medina spends an entire
chapter applying this theory to the challenges of teaching—the 10-minute
rule is at the core of how he plans his lectures. He never spends more
than 10 minutes on a single point, and he makes sure to structure the
entire lecture around a sequence of points he knows the audience is
interested in hearing. With enough study about the audience’s interests,
and a 10-minute time limit, boredom can be kept at bay for an
hour.
Ten is not a magic number, however. Lectures that are 8, 12, or even
45 minutes long can be captivating, provided the speaker knows what he’s
doing and understands how to keep people interested. But most don’t. There
is a good reason the most well-respected conference in modern times, theTED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, uses a
mixture of 8- and 20-minute long talks at its events. At this ridiculously
popular and supremely expensive lecture-centric event (tickets are $4,000
or more), famous minds like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Bono, and hundreds of
other CEOs, political leaders, and geniuses in various fields, fly from
all over the world to speak—but for a maximum of 20 minutes. They spend
more time eating lunch than they do giving their presentations. This
forces speakers to distill their message down to its most concise,
passionate, potent form, so even if they fail to keep people’s attention,
they won’t be on stage long enough to bore anyone to death. [ 32 ] Television sitcoms—a format that has been studied for
decades to perfect its attention-capturing qualities—are also in the same
time range: 30 minutes long, divided into thirds, and with generous
helpings of 30-second commercials.
Most lectures are an hour long for no good reason other than we like
that neat increment of time. If you have to hire a babysitter, drive
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