98 DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE
so you can never retrieve those slides again. The argument for
the visual representation of ideas is such a powerful concept that
psychologists have a term for it: the picture superiority effect
(PSE).^23 Researchers have discovered that visual and verbal infor-
mation are processed differently along multiple “channels” in
your brain. What this means for you and your next presentation
is simple: your ideas are much more likely to be remembered if
they are presented as pictures instead of words.
Scientists who have advanced the PSE theory believe it repre-
sents a powerful way of learning information. According to John
Medina, a molecular biologist at the University of Washington
School of Medicine, “Text and oral presentations are not just
less efficient than pictures for retaining certain types of infor-
mation; they are way less efficient. If information is presented
orally, people remember about 10 percent, tested seventy-two
hours after exposure. That figure goes up to 65 percent if you
add a picture.”^24
Pictures work better than text because the brain sees words
as several tiny pictures. According to Medina, “My text chokes
you, not because my text is not enough like pictures but because
my text is too much like pictures. To our cortex, unnervingly,
there is no such thing as words.”^25Steve’s Love of Photos
On June 9, 2008, Steve Jobs announced the introduction of
the iPhone 3G at the WWDC. He used eleven slides to do so,
employing the concept of PSE to its fullest. Only one slide con-
tained words (“iPhone 3G”). The others were all photographs.
Take a look at Table 8.4.^26
Given the same information, a mediocre presenter would
have crammed all of it onto one slide. It would have looked
something like the slide in Figure 8.2. Which do you find more
memorable: Jobs’s eleven slides or the one slide with a bulleted
list of features?
When Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air as “the world’s
thinnest notebook,” one slide showed a photograph of the new