Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds

by Carmine Gallo

In Mayer’s experiments, students who were exposed to multisensory environments—text, pictures, animation, and video—always, not sometimes, always had much more accurate recall of the information than those students who only heard or read the information. Mayer said the principle should not be surprising. When the brain is allowed to build two mental representations of an explanation—a verbal model and a visual model—the mental connections are not just a little stronger. They are much, much stronger. Add touch and you’ve got a winner! The differences between two types of learning (auditory and visual) were even more striking when the “audience,” the people learning the information, lacked prior knowledge of the material. Students with high prior knowledge of the content can generate their own mental images while simply listening or reading.