This is Your Brain on Visualization

This is Your Brain on Visualization 1

What cut it 10 years ago in business just doesn’t cut it anymore, unless off course your customer is a goldfish.
Here are some sobering stats: The average attention span of a human is 8 seconds while the average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds.
That’s right. Who knew goldfish could concentrate better than humans? Our attention span has shortened as our world has become more complex, more demanding and the average person today is a multitasking media junkie. He is impatient, often juggling between tabs, and is keen on digestible chunks of information. So how are you supposed to stay connected to them if their attention span is so low but the amount of information available is five times more than what it was in 1986.
Make those eight seconds count by using data visualization.. i.e. representation of information in a pictorial or graphical format. Visualizations are the single easiest way for our brains to receive and interpret large amounts of information.
Research shows the use of visual info has increased 9900 percent in the last six years, which means that 50 percent of your brain is involved in visual processing. So if you want your business to succeed, start using infographics.
Why? A visual is worth 100 words. Replace text with visuals since 65 percent of the people are visual learners anyway. Information that is solely aural will be recalled only three days later, and that too just 10 percent. By adding a picture you can increase the retention rate to 65 percent!!
Need more proof? Research shows that 99 percent of all sensory data gets filtered out by the brain immediately and visual data is in the 1 percent that is left. No wonder people following instructions with a visual element perform 323 percent better without it.

Let’s throw in some more stats to understand the importance of infographics:
1.90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual while 40 percent of people respond better to visual information than text.
2. Publishers that use infographics grow in traffic an average of 12 percent more than those who don’t use it and is capable of driving 250 percent more website traffic than ordinary posts with pictures. Little wonder that websites like Techcrunch, Buzzfeed and Business Insider today are more popular than a Washington Post or NewYorker. Mashable for instance is three times more likely to get retweeted with an infographic as against an ordinary post.
3. With its appealing designs and charts, your attention will really be caught. Everything you would ask for is already in one image and don’t we all just love images?
There are approximately 172 million unique Facebook visitors daily. Just imagine, they could share thousand and millions of infographics. So go ahead create an infographic and draw a crowd. For if I am sure about anything, it is this: People love a little picture show, they’re always willing to devour it which is why you would rather be processing the infographic below than reading my post about how great it actually is.

This is Your Brain on Visualization
This is Your Brain on Visualization

Infographic source: quicksprout.com

1 Comment on "This is Your Brain on Visualization"

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *