From the course: Infographic Design Theory: How the Market and Science Impact Success

Why the brain loves infographics

From the course: Infographic Design Theory: How the Market and Science Impact Success

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Why the brain loves infographics

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- When you hear the word cat, what pops into your head? Maybe the image of your own cat appears if you have one. Maybe a herd of cats. Or you could be a dog person averse to seeing a cat while picturing man's best friend in your mind's eye. Regardless of the fur ball that you're picturing, the key is that you're picturing something. You aren't simply seeing the letters C-A-T because that's not how the human brain works. We don't think in text. We think visually. This is exactly why visual communication is so powerful. You see, the human brain is made up of thousands of neurons firing in symphony to make sense of the world around us, but it is the visual mind that dominates this process. In fact, a whopping 30% of the cerebral cortex is reserved for visual processing. Compare this to our other four senses, and you can quickly see that our sense of sight far overshadows the rest. This is why our brains take in visual information 60,000 times faster than any other form of content that exists. That's just one 10th of a second. To put that into perspective, our brains take anywhere from five to eight seconds to fully comprehend a single line of text. In a given hour, our brains have the power to take in roughly 36,000 visual messages when viewing static content. If you spent that same hour reading, however, the average adult would read about 15,000 words. Of course, those words must be strung together to create sentences, which must be combined further to communicate a message, reducing the output to only a couple hundred messages in that same hour. And if you put images into motion, our brains explode with understanding. Heck, just a single minute of video can communicate 1.8 million words worth of information to the average person. This is why infographics are so powerful. In this fast-paced world, where we are inundated with information, a world where multiple screens compete for our attention, our brains are overwhelmed with too much choice and too little time. As a result, our natural inclination towards visual communication has taken the reigns. In fact, to take in as much information as we can in our limited time, we now seek out visual content like never before. In other words, infographics let you speak visually in a world where thinking, and learning, and communicating visually is simply part of our intrinsic makeup.

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