Boring is bad. Marketers have known this for years. If it wasn’t, then every TV commercial would just be a picture of a product with someone telling you about the product in the background. Unfortunately that is what most PowerPoint presentations do in the classroom.
Soaring mountains, white water rafting, fast cars and the ever present sultry female, inspire some type of emotion that we can link to a product. They get us excited in some way. I can’t, easily, justify placing a bikini model in my PowerPoint for my classes to stimulate emotion, but I can use other things. Delta waves are large and slow brainwaves. In my PowerPoint, before I mentioned them I showed a picture of a Delta luggage terminal, Delta Burke and an actual geographical delta. All of which are large and slow (apologies to Mrs.Burke and Delta airlines but the purpose of emotion and laughter was achieved). Compare that to the plain description and a picture of a brain wave. This is much more exciting and apt to be remembered.
Brian Steinberg wrote an article for the Boston Globe concerning the new research of body reactions in tandem with advertising:
“Advertisers really want to see you sweat. Or smile. Or bat an eyelash. Or anything, it seems, that might demonstrate a new commercial or program has enough of an effect on you to prompt a physical reaction”
If you smile at the presentation of a product, you might want to buy it. If you smile at the presentation of a fact or concept, you should be more able to remember it. Do you remember the day, date or place you first learned of the Civil War? Do remember the day your whole class laughed at something. We remember the exciting and not the mundane. Work is currently underway to measure emotions and physical reactions during commercials. If we can take that same research and “borrow” it for education, we might get some interesting results.
