Color Mixing Warm colors elicit alertness; cooler colors support creativity.
Human Learning & Retention 100 83 67 50 33 17
overload or with an environment that is really not conducive to people feeling good. They are looking to create something wonderful, only they do not follow any principles. They go by feel and intuition, but they just don’t have enough infor- mation yet.” To help fill that gap, Sullivan and PSAV co-
produced a white paper called “Audiovisual Tech- nologies and Adult Learning in Meetings,” which doesn’t just offer AV strategies that capitalize on how attendees’ brains work, but also explains the science behind them. While meeting planners don’t necessarily need to be steeped in neurosci- ence, it’s helpful for them to know the principles and applications — if only to understand the odds against any single bit of sensory information lodging in an attendee’s brain. “We are taking in about 1 million bits of infor-
mation every second, but we can be conscious of only 16 to 40 bits,” Sullivan told a packed audience at Convening Leaders 2013 this past January, where, along with Van Dyke and Kati Quigley, CMP, senior director for worldwide partner community events at Microsoft, she presented the session “Using AV to Enhance Learning, Memory, and the Meeting Experience.” (The information for this story comes from the presentation, the white paper, and an interview with Sullivan.) “We are taking in all this information through
our senses, but sensory memory is really short — we’re talking fractions of a section,” Sullivan said.
“We miss most of what happens. We have to get out of thinking that people learn and remember just because we tell them something.” When sensory information is noticed, it goes
Retention & Visual Imagery 100 83 67 50 33 17
Speaker and visual imagery
Learning & AV Input 100 83 67 50 33 17
Hearing + graphics
67+ 10 83114+2+1
Sight
Sight is by far the most dominant human sense; 83 percent of learning occurs visually.