"A strong link between attention and learning has been shown in classroom research both a hundred years ago and as recently as last week. The story is consistent: Whether you are an eager preschooler or a bored-out-of-your-mind undergrad, better attention always equals better learning. It improves the retention of reading material, accuracy, and clarity in writing, math, science -- every academic category that has ever been tested."

Did you hear that? "better attention always equals better learning." These word from John Medina in his 2008 book, Brain Rules, give us a ladder to stand on to get our heads above the fog of ongoing debate over the value of things like games and virtual environments for enhancing learning. IF games and virtual environments can be used to enhance attention, better learning will result. Thanks John!

So for those of us involved in those areas, the question of the day is all about "attention". What is attention, and how the heck do we grab it? We'll dig into that in other places on this website, but as we do that, we might keep one eye on our friends in the marketing world...the "experts" at drawing people's attention to things they would normally NEVER pay attention too.

Pictures Before Text

Some of the things we do know about attention are that the visual approach wins over the 'text' approach every time. Pictures before words! If you are still a PowerPoint user...delete every word you can and replace it with images that get the point across. No, really.

Be Different

Along this line, we also know that if you want to gain attention, do something that is a bit different from everything else that is going on. Stand out a bit. It's not enough to keep a learner's focus, but at least they will glance in your direction and give you the chance to hook them further.

Quick Meaning

We know that you have just a couple of minutes to first grab someone's attention before their brain will wander on looking for other, more interesting stimuli. In those first minutes you need to communicate the "meaning" of what is coming...not go into a lot of details...but provide enough of the meaning so the learner decides "this is worth paying attention too...for a moment."

The 10 Minute Rule

Use 10 minute chunks...actually 9 minutes chunks. There is something about the human brain that causes it to begin to refocus every 10 minutes. So after doing your best for 9 minutes, spend the next 60 seconds doing something to re-capture the brain's attention, to 'hook' it into sticking around for the next 10 minutes. If you lecture for 60 minutes...or create online courses...chunk them into 10 minute 'modules' divided by a 60 second "hook"...something that will cause the learners' brains to say, "Say what?" This buys you another 10 minutes.

Emotion

The human brain has a soft spot for emotion. We all have those experiences from MANY years ago that we can still recall second-by-second because of the intense emotional reaction we had then. An experience that can connect to our emotions creates an intense chemical link in the brain, and significantly increases retention and recall. This does not mean you constantly have to make learners cry, or always keep them laughing, but it does mean we ought to think about how the content being learned somehow relates to our human lives on that visceral level, and how we can make that felt in a meaningful way.

TranceFormational Learning

TranceFormational Learning provides a framework for developing learning activities that increase attention, that are highly visual, provide clear meaning and are 'chunked' into steps that build upon each other to hold attention and pull learners and trainees through the learning. And a key focus of TranceFormational Learning is to design experiences that create that visceral, emotional connection with the learning. The result, enhanced learning.

Watch for our new webinars coming in August! If you have questions about TranceFormational Learning, or would like to talk with us about how we can help you take your learning and training to new levels, please let us know.

john@imagilearning.com