ATTENTION: do I have your attention?

Have you seen those heavy eyelids and expressionless faces? Have you despaired on those occasions when someone shuts their eyes and apparently goes to sleep, rather than listen to what you're saying? What would it take to win back people's attention at times like this? The answer is probably: quite  a lot! It's gone a bit too far when you see these signs. So let's not get there in the first place shall we?

What do you think is the average attention span of someone listening to a presentation? The answer probably varies considerably. Here we're really talking generalisations. It depends on a lot of things.

In his book "Flow", Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  states from the latest neuroscience at the time (1992)  that we can manage at most 7 bits of information, such as different sounds, visual stimuli or recognisable emotions, and the quickest we can discriminate between one bit of information and the next is about 0,05 of a second. So it should be possible to process about 126 bits of information, as defined above, per second. To understand what a person is saying requires understanding about 40 bits of information per second, he writes.

If you're interested in more information, check out TED.com using key words around neuroscience and communication. Check out some of the books I recommend here. Google on "attention span" and you'll find all sorts of stuff, and probably be none the wiser! There are bits and pieces of interesting information everywhere.

So just imagine that you are standing holding a presentation in front of a slide packed with words and figures and maybe pictures too. Not a nice image, eh? Most people, in fact, overload the audience most of the time. Just because it's familiar to you doesn't mean you can race through everything approximately as fast as you can say it all. You leave the audience behind really quickly.

Another way to understand the phenomenon is to think about how long you yourself can hold your focus in different situations. For the purposes of presentations I've heard several times that 2-3 minutes is about the best you can hope for. However you look at it, you have to work at keeping people's attention. The key word is VARIATION.

Vary everything. Go from pictures to text, vary the tone (and all other aspects) of your voice and how you stand, as well as where you stand. For each new section or slide move to a new position to clearly mark the shift. Put in exercises, ask questions, do live demos etc etc. Your imagination is all that's stopping you.