“Stop the presses!”
Des Moines Register redesigns front page six times in just five hours on Iowa Caucus night.
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TV commercials are annoying. TV commercials for insurance companies are annoying squared. TV commercials for Progressive Insurance featuring the ever-perky Flo character are annoying cubed.
So I totally surprised myself by laughing out loud when I looked up at the TV and caught part of this commercial. Even with the sound off the gag still worked. I was still laughing when I typed a search into YouTube to locate the commercial. Yes, I went looking to watch a commercial purely for its entertainment value, even though the commercial franchise is one that makes my hair stand on end. In this case, that was part of the gag.
Producers know a large number of TV viewers turn the sound off for commercials, and work hard to make the video communicate the message even without an audio track. Since TV commercials are usually created by a storyboard, it is often the case that the commercial IS the visuals, and that the audio is secondary. This is the case with most Flo commercials, since the audio consists mostly of banal chit-chat between Flo and her customers (or so I’ve been told). With the exception of commercials based on jingles — which saw their heydey 50 years ago and are used today almost exclusively when a radio buy is also part of the advertising campaign — few commercials today rely on audio to carry the message. TV is a visual medium (gee … ya think?), but even more importantly, we live in a visual world where advertising competes for space in our kaleidoscopic visual field across broadcast TV, cable, print and outdoor advertising, Internet, and increasingly on mobile devices.
I’m sure advertisers think in terms of devices, demographics, markets, and all the rest, but one of the reasons visual advertising is so seductive is because of how our brains work. The visual cortex is the largest system in the human brain, and it is not just a mental home theater system. It is deeply connected with systems throughout the brain involved in cognition, emotion, and motor activity. The visual system is a highly complex and adaptive system, not designed simply to accurately reconstruct the visual characteristics of the external world (strictly speaking, everything the eye sees is “external,” even when it is part of our own bodies). If that is all the visual system was required to do, it would not require nearly as much horsepower as it does. Instead, the visual system actively constructs the world it sees from immediate sensory input combined with prior experience in an elaborately choreographed dance with other brain systems to create a meaningful interpretation of what is seen. If you have ever struggled to make sense of an optical illusion, you have experienced the power of the visual system to perform its ultimate task of interpretation. Seeing is the easy part. Understanding is hard.
So how did I get sucked in to Flo’s gag? It’s because this commercial is scripted differently from most Flo commercials. Instead of featuring Flo immediately to establish a connection with all prior Flo commercials, the only visual hint in the first 15 seconds of the spot that this is another episode with Flo is the bright white lighting and the studio set with shelves of familiar blue “packages” of insurance, but this time shown at a hazy distance.
Instead the camera observes a scene familiar to anyone who has ever been on a group motorcycle ride: bikes and riders of various descriptions rolling into frame and stopping side by side, as kickstands touch the ground marking the end of a long ride. As helmets are doffed one by one, men and women expose the rider’s badge of honor: wildly unruly helmet hair.
Flo is not seen at all until 0:16 of the 0:30 spot, and even then it is not until 0:18 that the familiar red lips and dark hair clearly establish her character’s identity. Even as she removes her helmet to reveal her perfect makeup and makes a quick glance in the mirror to fluff her perfect hair, her spiky-haired male and female comrades look on with envy. “Perfect hair … every time,” one male sportbike rider — with short but nonetheless disheveled hair — utters with amazement, while a female rider with shoots Flo a “how did she do that?” look from under her own tousled mane.
So I get sucked into the gag because I ride motorcycles, I like looking at motorcycles, and I make an immediate emotional connection as the riders in the commercial enact a scene that’s part of everyday experience for the target audience of this motorcycle insurance commercial. While my emotional system is activated by the connections my mind makes to memories of my own similar experiences, the sight of the lighting and the set begin to recall associations with the series of commercials. My mind unconsciously connects the familiar feeling of satisfaction at the end of a ride with the familiar context of the advertiser and its product.
Helmets come off while one bike in the scene slowly rolls to a stop — notably a bike painted in the sponsor’s signature color blue. I start picking up the set-up and my mind starts to imagine (or more accurately, construct) the possibilities of where this is heading. It is precisely at this point that even though I know I find Flo absolutely irritating, there’s a payoff coming that I know I don’t want to miss. The least satisfying outcome would be to have Flo step up from behind the shelves and engage in chit-chat with her bike-straddling clientele about the virtues of affordable insurance coverage. Better, I might get to see Flo appear from under a helmet as disheveled as her companions, which would certainly be a kick. But before I can even articulate those possibilities, I realize I’m already anticipating exactly what makes this gag so funny. Flo arrives on her own beautiful bike with nary a hair out of place, which is as funny as it is improbable. The reaction shots of the other bikers with their hair standing on end turns my giggle into a belly laugh.
So you got me, Progressive, but I enjoyed it, and got a chance to think a little bit about how hard the mind works make sense of the continuous stream of data that arrive at our sensory doors. If our visual system were just for seeing, there would have been no reason to laugh. Laughter is a uniquely human trait, and humor exists only because the human mind is capable of doing more than just seeing — it is capable of understanding.
Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
Source: thelearningbrain
What’s wrong with this picture?
(Source: rizkyselma, via world-shaker)
However neat and tidy this image may be, we really need to put this sorry old chestnut to rest, and remind ourselves of the dangers inherent in citing secondary sources.
Will Thalheimer (2006) published a rather detailed and well-cited debunking of this oft-repeated learning myth. Thalheimer traced the concept to Dale’s Cone of Experience (1946), pointing out that Dale’s image contained no percentages. The percentages came from D.G. Treichler (1967), an oil company employee writing in a magazine about audio-visual communications, but without citing any research as a basis for the percentages. An organization called NTL Institute claims to have developed the Learning Pyramid in the early 1960s. Thalheimer presents one graph that includes a citation, but the cited article contains no such graph or percentages (meaning the citation was in error, or fraudulent). Thalheimer confirmed this with the author of the article the graph cited.
A report commissioned by Cisco from the Metiri Group (2008) goes into further detail. The report provides evidence of how this myth has been widely perpetuated — and manipulated — in the fields of education and training for several decades, despite the complete absence of empirical evidence supporting it. The report then goes on to summarize genuine research into multimodal learning, deriving information from fourteen published scholarly articles (based on twenty-three studies and meta-studies that together surveyed almost 6,000 students) to determine the best practices for multimodal teaching, whether or not it includes technology.
If you need any further evidence, try a Google image search for “Dale’s Cone of Experience” to see how these images endlessly ricochet around the web when a “reblog” is just a click away. If we see it repeated often enough, from otherwise reputable web sites for educators, why shouldn’t we take it as gospel? Limit your search to college and university web site (add “site:edu” to your search), and you may see that the echo is as loud in education as elsewhere.
One of the reasons this information has been endlessly repeated is that it “feels right.” It seems to fit rather intuitively with our perceived experiences, and meshes nicely with the preference many of us have (myself included) regarding active and experiential learning through multiple modalities. Somewhere along the way someone slapped some numbers on it, and suddenly it became credible, citable science. I can only wonder how many theses, dissertations, and peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals include this bogus information among their references, dutifully quoting a secondary source without ever checking the facts.
Ironically, this myth-busting does more than refute an old canard. It actually illuminates a very real research-based finding about learning: it is very much harder tounlearn something than to learn it correctly in the first place. Our brains, once “wired” into a familiar pattern, find it much easier to recognize and repeat the same pattern, and find it much harder to “rewire” to change the original pattern. Automaticity in learning has enormous benefits that allow the non-conscious aspects of our minds to repeat familiar patterns without taxing the precious resource of conscious thought. Yet that same automaticity can mask our perceptions and prevent us from even recognizing that the pattern we are repeating has little basis in reality.
Perhaps the bottom level of the Learning Cone should say, “People remember 100% of ideas that go unquestioned.”
Metiri Group, (2008). Multimodal learning through media: What the research says. http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/education/Multimodal-Learning-Through-Media.pdf
Thalheimer, W. (2006). People remember 10%, 20% … oh, really? Will at Work Learning. http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/05/people_remember.html
Source: rizkyselma
