Brain Rule #10 – Vision trumps all other senses. – John Medina, Brain Rules, 2008 

While smell evokes powerful memories . . . often without conscious thought . . . vision takes up half of the brain’s resources. We learn best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.

Here is the amazing part – we only see what our brain tells us to see. How our brain decodes the signals from the retina through to cortex and finally back to what we think we see is complex. There are times that two people – watching the same event – will have different recollections of the event based on their personal perspective.

It is important for us to make sure we provide clear, repeated visual experiences over time. When we see an instant replay on television of a sporting event, that second viewing changes our perspective – it encodes the same visual in a slightly different way. When we see that replay in super-slow-motion it again encodes the signals to the brain in a different way.  

When you are looking at a piece of art or climb to the top of a mountain to catch a breathtaking view – you naturally change your perspective. Each different view, each time we change the visual we encode that specific visual into our memory.

When you want a group – when you want yourself – to remember something it is best to provide the visual stimuli in different ways and from different lenses. Change your perspective – or – change the perspective of your audience. Say it – show it – and show it again from a different perspective.