We Hear with Our Eyes

Our Physics teacher was more of an older friend for us than a teacher. He took all the boredom away from an arduous science subject by making it incredibly appealing to our curious minds.

He knew extremely well how to communicate complex scientific concepts to us through riveting demonstrations and fascinating experiments (that didn't always work, mind you). The classroom was our playground when it was time to 'study' Physics. The captivating visual appeal of what I was told was Physics, worked wonders to teach me seemingly intricate ideas about the macrocosm and microcosm that have stuck with me to this day. And this is how I learned that light travels faster than sound. Why I still ended up becoming a banker and not a physicist, is a story for some other time.

School Physics taught me in more ways than one, that light travels faster than sound.

Light is human beings' beloved child while sound is the unruly step-child that our brains love to hate. Compared to words (written or spoken), not only do pictures get registered in our minds quicker and stay cached in our memories for longer, we have an inherent positive bias for pictures; we tend to ignore words if they conflict with what we see.

The McGurk Effect

The McGurk Effect demonstrates beyond doubt the perceptive dominance of the visual input for the human brain over the auditory input. If a sound is paired with the visual component unrelated to that sound, we hear the sound related to the visual component rather than the original sound. The following video clip explains how the McGurk Effect works.

Now you see? This is why communication experts and advertising consultants the world over advise advertisers to minimize the wordiness of their advertising copy and use visuals to tell strong stories. In fact this was the understanding that gave rise to info-graphics and PowerPoint decades ago. What we use PowerPoint now for, is to describe a curved line with every point equal distance from the centre. So let's admit; it's a pity how we all abused PowerPoint to regurgitate words rather than communicate real meanings through visuals. That would be a circle by the way, and sure enough; it looks like this.

The Picture Superiority Effect

The picture superiority effect resulted from experiments demonstrating that for recalling information from human memory, pictures do dramatically better than text. When information is presented verbally, after three days, people will only remember 10% of it. If the same information is presented visually, the human brain will recall 65% of it three days later. 

This also has a broad philosophical meaning for our lives. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his work “Letters and Social Aims,” published in 1875:

Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, “I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it."

Painting Mental Pictures of Objects and Event

The picture superiority effect does not suggest that you carry a pen and paper or your multimedia gizmos everywhere you go so that you could communicate with the human race, or you should forever hold your peace.

Painting mental pictures through story-telling substitutes visual communication in situations where you do not have the luxury of using illustrations or pictorial representation of your verbal message. Examples, metaphors and anecdotes serve to paint a mental picture to complement the verbal  content of your message. 

Proposed by Allan Paivio in 1971, the Dual-coding Theory hypothesized the idea that verbal and visual representations of objects or events are coded differently by the human mind but are available alternatively to recall the object or event. Having both verbal and visual representation of the object or event in the mind complements a person's understanding of the core message and reinforces the ability of a person to recall it. When a picture and a word can do the same job that a thousand and one words would, why bother the voice cords. 

The Business Loss of Excessive Reliance on Verbal Communication

Knowing what we know about the tendency of the human brain to be more respectful of the visual content vis-à-vis verbal, lets examine the top three downsides of excessive reliance on verbal communication:

1. Same words, different meanings - Depending on the social, cultural and educational background of the audience, you run the risk of communicating something contrary to what you intended to say.

2. The more the words, the lesser the ROI - Whether it is your day-to-day business communication, a board presentation or an ad campaign, excessive use of verbal communication means slower ingestion of the message into audience's memory and more time required to recall it. This means slower and less predictable call to action. Since business communication - especially advertising - is all about influencing human behaviour, use of words in place of visuals means you would end up investing more marketing dollars to influence your clients' buying behaviour. This is not because ad space for words is more expensive than for pictures, but simply because you need to spend more to put the same message across, and that translates into poor ROI. The same goes for all other forms of business communication.

3. Professional relationships go downhill at the speed of light - The tricky thing about words is, we think we are communicating what we are saying; and that's not always true. Also, since the knowledge we intend to impart through verbal communication is native to our memory, we tend to get blind-sighted by our prejudice of owning the whole information. We assume that the listener already knows the preamble and we only need to tell him or her the part that is important to effect an action. What it results in is, a misinterpretation of why you intended to influence the listener's actions in the first place, and hence a distrust in the nobility of your intentions. All too often, I see otherwise congenial relationships at work turning into bitterness in a matter of minutes.

Neglecting the effectiveness of complementing verbal communication with visual representation results in direct loss of business and reputation. This is simply not the kind of risk that has a proportionate return associated with it. 

Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs instead of  alphabetical symbols to communicate ideas - oftentimes complex ideas. Could it be that they knew of the picture superiority effect long before we did? Regardless of what they knew or not, with all the modern scientific evidence to suggest that we are in fact hardwired to hear with our eyes, we better start paying more attention to the incredible power of the visual.

© Majid Kazmi 2015

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