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Welcome to episode 38 of the Language Neuroscience Podcast. I'm Stephen Wilson, a neuroscientist

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at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. My guest today is from a different

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field, so he might not be familiar to most of our listeners, but we have a lot to learn

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from him. I'm here with Professor Michael Alley, Engineering Communications Teaching Professor

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in the Penn State College of Engineering. Michael is the author of one of my absolute favorite

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practice of science books, ‘The Craft of Scientific Presentations’, first published in 2002

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and revised in 2013. I read this book maybe 15 years ago and it totally changed the way

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I give presentations, at least how I give my best presentations, because it does take

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more time to prepare a good presentation than a bad one, and I'm not going to claim that

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I always follow Professor Alley's best practices every single time I get in front of the audience.

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But most of the time, and especially when I really care, this is my Bible for scientific

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communication. So, Michael, how are you doing? Thanks for joining me today.

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Thank you so much, Stephen. I'm doing great. Excellent. And where are you joining us from today?

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Actually, I'm joining you from my parents' home in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Oh, okay.

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So, you're at a different time zone than we had originally planned, but you've calculated

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it correctly, and here we are. Here we are. And I am overlooking the Rio Grande River. Beautiful.

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Yeah, so I spent six years living in Arizona, so I know that part of the country well, and

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I really love it down there. Okay. Well, I had the idea of inviting you onto the podcast

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when I attended a conference recently. I'm not going to say which one, only that it wasn't

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SNL, the conference that many of our listeners attend routinely. And I sat through days

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and days of talks, and honestly, they were all completely awful. This was a neuroscience

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conference. I have a PhD in neuroscience in 20 years of experience. I was thoroughly familiar

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with all the methods and concepts, and yet I still couldn't understand any of the talks.

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Because I'm a fairly self-confident individual, I thought this was not a ‘me’ problem, this was

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a ‘them’ problem. Now, I do think that I'll feel the neurobiology of language is a little bit

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better, maybe because we're interested in language, and we think more about communication,

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but still, there's plenty of room for growth. So, I want to invite you to talk about your book,

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which basically teaches us how to be better presenters, including some really counter-intuitive

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ideas that have been quite transformative for me. So, let's start with the really most

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transformative part, which is your views on visual aids. Slides. You use the phrase in your

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book, "Death by PowerPoint." I like that a lot. Can you tell us what do you mean by "Death

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by PowerPoint?" So, Stephen, is interesting, I'm old enough to remember what things were

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like before PowerPoint. And so, PowerPoint came about in 1987 when an entrepreneur by

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the name of Robert Gaskins teamed with a computer scientist by the name of Dennis Austin to

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put together this program that originally was going to be able to scale the size of letters

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so that you were able to create slides that had type large enough for the audience to

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read. And at that time, 1987, that was great. That was a step up the mountain for us. Unfortunately,

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the defaults that were chosen for that program spread like a virus around the world and those defaults

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that essentially call for a large headline at the top, so large that most people choose a phrase.

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And then that headline is supported by a bulleted list. It's really interesting how that program came

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about because Gaskins, when he just tried to sell the program, he didn't actually in his presentation

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use bullets. He was much more inclined to give a claim or assertion and then support that with

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evidence, much of it, visual evidence. However, in this program, because of the computer architecture,

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of that day, they were limited in being able to incorporate visuals into the body. And so, he had seen

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a presentation where they were using these dots or bullets. And so, he just thought, well, just to

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give it something, he chose a bullet. But he had problems selling the program. And so, he decided that he

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needed more heft in the design, not just his phrase headline and did a single bullet beneath it.

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But he came up with this idea of these nested bullets. Which by the way, he never used in any of his

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presentations, but they caught on. And so, the style of presentations, and again, it was like the

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coronavirus in terms of its spread. From 1987 through 1999, the world just was taken by these bullets.

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And nested bullets. And so, presentations became this march of speakers talking through

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these bullets, which are essentially their notes to the audience.

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Yeah. Okay. So, the PowerPoint defaults were very influential on this and change the way people

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gave talks around the world. Large headlines where you just put in a phrase, like for instance,

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methods, then you've got this bullet box where you put things like 12 participants, you know,

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3 Tesla functional MRI (3T fMRI), four conditions varying pseudowords in their blah blah blah.

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And then people kind of look back at their slides and they read it off the slide. And that's I think

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what you call ‘death by PowerPoint’. And so why does this not work? Like, can we not read and listen

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to speech at the same time? So, we can. But then there are a number of problems. One problem is that

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people put too much text on the slides for the audience to read and still listen to the presenter.

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So, it was a little bit after PowerPoint came out that a Canadian psychology 

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researcher by name of Alan Paivio realized through his experiments that people process

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words spoken and written in the same part of the brain. You and your audience are neuroscientists.

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So, you probably have a better sense of this issue than I do. But an Australian

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psychology researcher by the name of John Sweller posed a really interesting question.

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And it is if people are processing written words and spoken words in the same part of the brain,

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could that part of the brain become overloaded much as a central processing unit

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of a computer can become overloaded if it does too many tasks? And so, he did these experiments

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and in these experiments, he had a room where people had no slides but had a speaker. 

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And then another room where people had slides, but no speaker. And then a room where people, I mean the audience

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had both. And the room that had both slides that supported what was said and then the speaker

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did the best as far as comprehension until the number of words per minute reached this point,

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which Sweller termed ‘cognitive overload’. In which case that room that was doing first went to worst.

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And Sweller goes on to say that most people who follow PowerPoint's defaults cross that threshold.

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And so, if you have a slide that's just words and you cross that threshold of too many words,

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you get to this cognitive overload. My colleague from Belgium, Jean-luc Dumont

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says that in that case no slides just a black screen is more effective than the actual slide that show.

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And I think that's interesting. Oh, it's very interesting. And I love it that you're bringing evidence in.

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And you know like you said, I mean our field, we are very familiar with these kinds of concepts.

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And in my own work we've shown that essentially the auditory language input and the visual

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language input they're initially processed in the superior temporal lobe and

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Occipital, ventral occipital temporal pathway respectively. But then they converge in the left

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posterior temporal sulcus that's where it all comes together. We have got this paper Wilson et al., 2018.

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But you know this is not supposed to be a science episode but anyway. So, it's you know, we're

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very familiar with this and I don't want to claim that we're the first or only ones to show that.

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But certainly, that's well established. Now yeah and it's interesting that you know, you bring up

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actual evidence about the claims that you're making about how we should be presenting. And you

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do your own research, right? I mean you've also got original research in this domain.

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Yes, so and let me say that the person who's done the most research in this domain in terms of

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how much people comprehend when they are listening to words, reading words and then as you said

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looking at visuals, is Richard Mayer from I think, UC Santa Barbara and Mayer has done

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lots of experiments. But my team at Penn State we did do some specific experiments. I had Joanna Garner

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who is an educational psychology researcher from Old Dominion University (ODU), was on, was on my team. And so, my team,

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we did a test in which an audience is viewing a presentation of something that they can understand

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but is unfamiliar to them. And, and part of the audience saw the presentation in a room that had

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traditional slides that follow PowerPoints default's and another audience was in a room where they saw

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this ‘assertion evidence approach’ which we'll talk about a little bit later. And what we found is

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that the level of understanding of the, of the audience that looked at the assertion-evidence

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slides were statistically significantly much higher than the other room. It was it was at a statistical

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significance of less than 0.01 and for the really technical parts it was less than 0.001. And one

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other thing I'll say is that the number of misconceptions that audiences in the room would have, the

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room that was looking at the PowerPoint default slides with the bullets were 10 times higher in terms

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of misconceptions that they walked away with than the room with the assertion-evidence, 

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and so, Dr. Garner, what she thinks is, is that, that audience they were looking at the wrong

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bullet when the person is speaking and that was where the source of the misconception arose.

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Yeah, okay so assertion-evidence, you've sort of teased it with the results that it's

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going to lead to talks that are more comprehensible and I would also say much more engaging.

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So, let's talk about it.  What is assertion-evidence, and this is by the way the most important

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part of the book for me. The book is actually full of gems about presenting, but this is the thing

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that really changed my, changed my life. Well, you know thank you Stephen. I, I think it has

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probably changed my career as well and this assertion-evidence approach, I mean I would love to say

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that I invented it. But, but I didn't. I would say that maybe, what I did is, I resurrected it. But it's

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roots go back to Hughes aircraft corporation. That's one root. Another root is in the films of 

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Alfred Hitchcock and so I kind of like the Hitchcock one. But Hitchcock, when he had, when he had a script and

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then he was envisioning the film, he would create these little panels, okay?  And these panels were

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this claim, this assertion, this, the essence of what the scene is and did a sketch of something in

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that scene.  And so, let's say from the film, The Birds, crow's land in school yard and then that's, that's, the

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claim and then you've got this school yard where you've got all these crows that are sitting there.

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But, but, but Hitchcock essentially would plan out his whole film by, with those, with those little, 

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you know those little slides you might say and, and so people have, a few people have kind of carried

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that on and brought that into presentations. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), was very strong

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in the 1970s and 1980s, but then once PowerPoints defaults came out again, they just, they just took over

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From, from, from what happened. But, but that's, that's, kind of where it started and so I was

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privy to that because I was across the, working across the street from Lawrence Livermore Lab

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and I saw that style. I didn't think a lot about it until PowerPoints default started taking over

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and I realized just as you began this, this podcast with, I realized how bad presentations were

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becoming and so that's when I started saying hey there is a different way for us in science and

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engineering to present and I coined this phrase with my colleague from University of Virginia,

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Kate Neeley, we coined this phrase assertion-evidence. Okay yeah, so, tell us what that entails exactly. 

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What's the assertion?  What's the evidence? How do you, how does your slide look when you are

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giving an assertion-evidence style to talk? All right and so it's, it's very close to what, what Hitchcock

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had in that we would think about your talk, you can think about it as this story in research I mean

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the story maybe begins with, or you know, early on you found out that there's this question. 

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This research question you're trying to answer. Then, how are you going to answer that question?  What are

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the results of that test that you're doing? And what do those results mean? I mean that's in a

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a sense, the arc of your story.  But you can, you can think about, then, that story in terms of

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scenes and for each scene what is the main takeaway and that main takeaway?  That's what we're calling

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the assertion. It is a step up the mountain for the audience. It is something that, that they did not

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know before the talk and then you as a presenter are defending that particular step. I mean a real easy

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place to see it is when you have accrued all this data, you put it into a graph and then you state

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what is the takeaway of this graph as temperature increases, pressure increases, something along those lines.

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But that is the claim and then you support that not with your speaking notes, which what a bullet list

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essentially is, you support that visually. So, you support that with the graph and so that would be an example. 

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Okay, so we get rid of the sort of title of the slide which might say something like methods

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and we instead put a descriptive phrase or sentence rather that describes what the point is that

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we're trying to make on that slide and then we don't put any text on the slide usually, we put

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visual evidence to support the assertion. So, I want to just kind of like tie it to our audience and

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give you guys an example from a talk that I put some time into which is my C-STAR talk from I think 2022,

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Center for the Study of Aphasia Recovery, I think it's on YouTube, so for instance in the introduction

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I have a slide that says, at the top in the title, it says language regions are localized to the left

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Hemisphere. So, it's a sentence. And then it doesn't have any other words on the slide. It has some pictures

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of the evidence that supports that.  Which is a photo of the brain that was studied by Paul Broca.

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and a little picture of Paul Broca. It has a picture of the, the language areas where stimulation

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leads to speech arrest and a little picture of the neurosurgeon, Penfield who discovered that. 

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So, it's all visual evidence and I talk over it, and I say why we, how we know that language regions localized

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to the left hemisphere. There’re no other words on the slide apart from that claim and then the next

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slide says different regions have different functions, in principle plasticity is possible.

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It's, it's sort of two sentences but you could put a semicolon in there if you wanted to be pedantic

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and then again it has pictures of complicated models of the language network from people like

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Hickok and Poeppel, Cathy Price, that’s to show that different regions have different functions and

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again, I'll talk through it. I'm not going to say, there's no other words on the slide and I have a

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picture of from, Elissa Newport’s group of language regions in a child with a left hemisphere

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perinatal stroke where language areas have real nice to the right hemisphere so you can see that

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visual evidence that in principle plasticity is possible and so when it goes on like that and that's

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an assertion and I want to admit right now that the entire talk is not assertion-evidence there's

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like parts which were rushed and where it's not fully like done as well as it could have been

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but I just wanted to kind of tie it to concrete examples from our field. And you know what, I would say

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Stephen, I love that. I love what you've, what you've just shown because, as you were explaining it

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I saw the assertion at the top, I mean I captured that, because it wasn't that long and then as you

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described the visual evidence I imagine that visual evidence in in my mind but what I really like

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is how focused that sentence at the top made you as a presenter. Because you didn't have a lot of the,

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you know, it's just as you talk about you write methods up at the top there's so many things that

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you could bring in and, and the audience doesn't know what's important what's not important. 

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It becomes just often, it becomes a tsunami of details and the audience is just overwhelmed not

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Sure, what to hold on to what to let go. But you have streamlined it to the essence of what you're

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doing and then I'd say another thing that's cool, is, you are such a, you are a much more important

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player as a presenter in this presentation than someone who's got the bullet list, who just keeps

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turning and reading or paraphrasing. Because the audience often ignores the speaker and then tries

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to do that same thing themselves. But you're here explaining the visual evidence, much like somebody who's

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leading you through a museum, is explaining the artifacts of the museum. So, you're kind of

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hitting on some really key things, right?  Which is, that the assertion-evidence style doesn't just

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make better slides, it makes better talks by forcing the presenter to think about the structure of the talk,

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in terms of like what's the sequence of information chunks that I want to communicate to my audience,

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not then distracting them with irrelevant detail. Because, once you've, once you've structured your

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talk as a series of assertions you think only exactly what, what is the minimal amount of visual

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information that I need to show them to kind of make my point here and it lets them then communicate

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sort of much more naturally because instead of just reading off the slide you can make eye contact

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with your audience, speaking in a natural way and you've got that assertion on the screen so

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when people kind of space out and they forget what you're talking about for a few seconds and they

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want to like, reconnect, they've, they can, they've got that kind of anchor point up there on the on the screen, yeah?

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Exactly. Exactly.  So, let's talk about like what, what kind of things can the visual evidence

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consist of? Like what, what should the rest of the slide have on it?  

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And to me this is like one of the most wonderful parts of this whole thing, is that you have this, I mean this canvas, that you

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can bring in all sorts of visual evidence. First, if you're talking about tasks 

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with regard to time, a timeline is something that you could use. Which is so much more. 

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Communicates so much more than a bulletin list of dates and, and, and whatnot. Because here you can not only show the

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relative differences in time, you know, between when, when things happen, but you can also

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I mean creatively, incorporate images of those tasks that the audience can process

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rather quickly particularly when you're, you're, you are there kind of explaining

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that this was the construction phase and so here we're doing this and, and, and I'd say also just the

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modulation for you as a presenter, you can change things on the fly, that you realize: ‘oh, I'm

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presenting at this audience.’  You get a sense of this audience is maybe interested in that particular

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phase as opposed to another. So, you can just spend more time talking about that particular

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Image. And it's, and that I'd say, is more natural than when you've got four or five bullets you feel as

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if you have to, you have to cover each of those. Yeah. You have to cover every, you have to cover the

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image but you just have, you just have more play in, in the sequence of how you talk about things.

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Particularly if you've got, let's say a photograph as, as opposed to again, a bulletin list.

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Yeah, your book is full of these really funny anecdotes about like terrible presentations that

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you've seen where people like laboriously felt the need to go through every single bullet point

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and they ended up going like 30 minutes over time and cutting into the next session or whatever.

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It's, it's very entertaining. So, you also, you know, you kind of have this concept of simplicity where, like

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you get rid of extraneous things, right? So the slide only has the assertion and the evidence.

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You argue against logos, lines, background like you know, university templates, like you want to

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keep it totally clean, right? Absolutely. I mean for us, and for you in neuroscience, for all of us in

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science and engineering, it's the content that matters. You certainly want to give credit to your

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Institution, but hey, if, if your logo's on the first slide and it's on the last slide, good bet is

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all that time in between you're still at that same institution and you don't want, you don't want

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some logo compromising your graph or just taking away from, from things. So, I'd say the content is

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king in our presentations and, and sadly a lot of templates that companies and universities are just

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created to look nice but, and so you've got all this artwork, but that artwork distracts from our work

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and our work is what people came to the conference to hear and to see. Yeah. That, that kind of connects with

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this quote from your book which I want to read out which you write: ‘Interestingly in engineering and

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science there exists a deep-seated distrust of a noticeable style what, many refer to as glitz.’

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So, that's this idea that oh why should we care about how we present, like you know, we are scientists,

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it's all about the content. But your point is, yeah, actually, it is all about the content and we need

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to like, do better on our presentations to let the content shine. It's not contradictory, yeah? 

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Not contradictory. I've not talked it at all about being sloppy. I mean these are your graphs are really

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important to you, you put a lot of thought into what's your y-axis, what's your x-axis, if you're going

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to have a z-axis. You know, what you would have there. I mean, you put a lot of thought into how you

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present the data. I mean you want it to be clean you want the audience to see that data as you saw it.

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And an important thing to realize is, I mean graphs are places where you really want to slow down as a

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Presenter, because you've seen that graph. I mean for hours, maybe you've, you've, you've  looked at

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that graph. But the audience gets a minute maybe a minute and a half. You know, one TED talk I would

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recommend that people watch, is the TED talk by Cheryl Hayashi (The magnificence of spider silk). 

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And all you have to do is, is type in to your browser TED for TED talk, and spiders and then her talk will come out. 

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Watch this talk between, I mean, I, I love the whole talk. But watch, she uses assertion- evidence by the way, but watch this

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talk between the seven-minute mark and the twelve-minute mark. She presents two graphs and it's a

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tour de force on how she does it. Each of those graphs she tells us a story. Think about what she says,

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think about what she doesn't say in, in that particular one. Hayashi, Ted, spiders. Okay, I will link it in

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the podcast show notes, so people can easily find that and yeah, I'm glad you talked about that example

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of like, you know, often you know, graphs and figures are so central to our work, right? 

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We often tell the story of our paper through the, through the figures and, and you know, you have to sometimes edit

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them a bit for your presentation. Like, you can't just put up the entire six by six panel of subplots.

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Like, you need the actual axes to be visible, like, you need the numbers to be visible. Like, if I'm really

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taking my time, I'll, I'll often re-do my axis numbering for my presentation, where I make it much bigger.

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And then, when I talk about the graph I say, hey, here's the, on the x-axis we have time on the y-axis we

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have aphasia severity, as indexed by the, you know Quick Aphasia Battery (QAB) overall score.
	
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And as you can see these individuals are recovering over time initially quicker earlier and then

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slow, and then decelerating over time. Something like that, where you really have to talk through each element

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of the graph and most people don't do that. Like you said, they just stick their graph up there. 

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They've seen it a million times. They know what it shows. Their audience does not and then very quickly you are,

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your audience is lost. So, you published this book in 2002 and I think it's been extremely influential

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on a subset of scientists and engineers but still as I said in my opening many most presentations

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continue to be awful. Why are people sticking with this ineffective style that they are using and not

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kind of like moving to these more effective ways of presenting? 

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Yeah. Now you ask a really tough question and, and, and there I'd say there are a number of reasons. One reason as you, as you mentioned

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early on is, making a good presentation takes time. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner said that,

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said that, most scientists, particularly young scientists, do not appreciate how much time it takes

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to make a good presentation. So, it takes, it takes more time, than to do you, know to follow PowerPoint

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defaults. PowerPoints defaults are easy on the presenter hard on the listener.

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Doing it another way, such as the assertion-evidence, that is going to be tougher, but I would argue

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and, and, and you, you've thought about it as well for your most important talks, that investment is

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worth it. I'd say another thing is, oh my gosh, we are overwhelmed by bad presentations and so in a

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Sense, I think about the youngest scientists coming up, this is what they see, they want to be part of

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the scientific community and so they gravitate toward what is most common. It takes courage

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to present in a way that is different, because you're going to stand out. I mean if you if you don't

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want to stand out, yeah. I mean just yeah, just all about one's defaults. And people won't say anything.

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They won't tell you it's a bad presentation. They just won't say anything at all, but it takes

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courage to present differently. Yeah. Courage and time and, and I think that's what's getting in the way, right?

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And, and you're right. People won't say anything, right?  This conference that I went to,

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people just clapped themselves on the back and said oh what a great conference this is. And I was like,

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no. Like, I don't understand anything that I'm hearing in any of these sessions. These talks are

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all gobbledygook and there's, and like I said, it's not me. Like I know that I've got the background

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to understand this stuff and if I'm not understanding it like you're not either. Like don't pretend

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that like, we're getting anything out of this. People will just quietly go about their day and focus

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on the end of day mixer and not on actually learning anything. Okay. So, we've talked about the slides

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that how, how transformative it can be to kind of reframe your talk into a series of assertions

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supported by visual evidence. Let's now talk a little bit about the content and organization

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of a talk and, and we'll focus on um, conference talks, because I think that's kind of the most sort of

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bread and butter talk for scientists. Can you talk about like you know, the conference talk what does

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the occasion demand? What is, what's the purpose of a talk there and what are people typically failed

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to understand about the appropriate level of detail and so on for a conference talk? Yeah, I

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think, I think, with a conference talk it's really important for you to get away from the computer

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to take a walk and really think about an audience watching your talk and think about it from their

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Perspective. So, you might be presenting on a second day, in the afternoon, third talk of a session

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and so, if you think about it, audience may have seen 10, maybe even 15, talks that day by the time

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they get to yours. So, the audiences is tired and the audience wants value. They want to, they want to

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learn something that they can take back to their institution and share. And I think if you just

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step back and think about it from that perspective instead of coming in and trying to impress them

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with how much you've done, you might say rather than speaking really fast and showing a lot of data,

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I'm going to try to tell one story, tell it really well and, and to me a really important thing is

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make it memorable. So much of the time, I just feel as if people are just trying to impress me

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with how much they've done, and I mean everybody's working hard. I'm not really impressed. I'm more

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impressed by the person who comes in, instead of sprinting from the start to the finish, just tells me

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a story of the research, not gonna be entire research, but a story that is important and that I can

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retell and so, think, just think a little bit about the audience who they are, what they know about your

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research, and why they are in the room. What is it about your research that really is going to

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interest them? Okay, great. So, you've got some quotes that I, I want to read another one of your

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quotes that I think connects with this. It's, you write, when you effectively present your work you

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did not present everything you know about your work. Rather, you select those details that allow

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the audience to understand the work and you leave out details that the audience does not desire or

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need. So, there's this editing that has to happen, that rarely does happen, um, and I think that it's kind

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of as on two dimensions, kind of the way you describe it in your book and um, resonated with me is that many

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talks they attempt to cover too much, so they, they try to shove too much into their time

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and they're too deep. So, they get into details that are unnecessarily, cannot possibly be grasped by the

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post lunch crowd in the 10-minute platform presentation. So, too much too deep. That those are the

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the enemies of a good talk. It needs to be simple. It needs to be focused on a single main point

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and it needs to have all of the unnecessary detail stripped away because if you want that detail

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you've got to go read the damn paper. Like, you're not going to get it, you know, on the Sunday afternoon

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talk session. Yeah? 
Amen. (Laughter)  
So, yeah um. So, then you talk about like how important the intro is, right?

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The beginning of the talk, so important for capturing the audience's attention. Can you tell us what

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is the beginning need to accomplish and how long, should how long should it be like relative to

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the total talk length? Yeah, so, that's it. That's a really good point. So, we'll take your 10-minute talk

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for an example and, and one thing I want to preface is, that Einstein, who was probably one of our

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greatest presenters of the 20th century, at conferences spent more time on the introduction

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than most presenters did. But, for Einstein it was important that the audience understood not only

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what he was doing but why it had important or importance or in his case what, what made people curious

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about the, the research question. And then also what did the audience need to know to understand the

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talk, what background was important. And so, I would say that I would not hesitate to spend three minutes

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on an introduction to, to get those points across and, and you're probably not going to begin with

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the research question. You'll probably begin with motivation and then perhaps a little bit of

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the literature review as a bridge, then to show what the gap is, to then to then give the research,

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the research question. But when you give that research question or research hypothesis, the audience

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should be nodding their heads. They understand why you have, you have, you have pursued this particular

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question. Yeah, and papers should be structured much the same, right? 
That's the topic for a whole

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another day but I will mention you also have a look on writing papers which is also fantastic but

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topic for another day. So, yes um, extra time on the intro, like don't just rush into your stuff,

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don't even, yeah, don't even start with your research question first. Explain the knowledge gap

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that makes your question the right question and then you can bring the audience along for the ride.

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Again, using assertion-evidence slides throughout. I want to kind of briefly touch upon some of the

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other slide types that exist, right? So, it's not the entire talk would be assertion-evidence on a

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very single slide. Often, your talks kind of have a structure, where they might especially a longer

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talk, might have a couple of different topics that you're going to cover. How do you kind of do those

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transition slides, um, where you want to you know, kind of demarcate different parts of the talk and

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keep the listener situated within the whole structure of the talk? 
Yeah. So, so, sometimes you know

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we're not just presenting at a conference we are giving an invited lecture at another institution

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and so instead of speaking for 10 minutes we're speaking for 40 maybe even 45 minutes.

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And, and in that kind of talk, then you are, you've got multiple threads that you're going, you'll

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be telling two three maybe four stories in that in that kind of, kind of talking, and you need to

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you need to develop a, a pace and, and transitions between, between those stories, and so

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I think a real interesting approach, is the approach maybe of a TED talk.

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Perhaps having a scene that doesn't necessarily have an assertion because an assertion's not important

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you're not really taking a step up the mountain but rather it's more translational you're moving from

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this mountain to this other mountain and it might be a repetition of what I call the mapping slide

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of the talk where you've got the topics or, or maybe your names of your stories. But then I've got an

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image that kind of represents that story and so you've got, let's say you're doing four. So you've

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got four on there but that, that transition slide could have three of them kind of in black and white

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and in the one you're now going to cover in color. Or, or you could make that one bigger and the other

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one's just kind of small you know, in, in some such a way. I think that's where some nice creativity can

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come in but it's purposeful because it's, it's teaching the audience how to look at the talk. So, TED style

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So, when I watch a TED talk, a lot of times I'll, I'll gather some, some good ideas for things that I might

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use in my own talk and some of the people behind TED talks are, are thoughtful artists. You talked about

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Simplicity, Garr Reynolds, who thinks a lot about Japanese gardens when he thinks about designing a slide

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is, just, but in terms, you know having a really simple, but everything, everything that is shown

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matters. I, you know, I would take a look at Nancy Duarte also thinks a lot about different types

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of visual evidence to use. There's some good people who've, who've done some thinking there. All right.

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Yeah. I'll, I'll just share how I did it in this, in the talk that I mentioned from our field earlier.

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So, this talk is called the neural basis of recovery from aphasia after stroke. So, that's a big topic

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that's not an assertion and it kind of has three sections, three studies that it focuses on and what I

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do is, on the, on you know, on the first slide, basically at the start of the talk, I have a key figure

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from each of those three papers and I arrange them diagonally down the slide and this is by the way

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just ripped off of your book. So, thank you! (Laughter) 
And so, I've got those three key figures. It's like the, you

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Know, the best figure from each paper and I, and I dim out two of them, so I show all three and I

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said I'm going to talk about this, this and this. Then I dim out two of them, leaving the first one

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still bright and then I talk about that first paper. When I'm finished, I pull that, I bring that, I

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have that slide again, so and then you just see still bright, is the one that I've just been talking

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about and then I dim it, and I lighten up the next one and so you can kind of get that visual

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anchoring of where you are in the talk and you know oh okay, I'm on, now on the second of these three

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Things. I can, like I can kind of wrap up that first part in my mind and okay I've learned from that.

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Now I'm going to, now he's going to talk about this. So, it really works well and like I never knew how

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to do this until I read your book. Like I think you, I just have like you know, at the start of my talk

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I'd have like bullet points, these are the things I'm going to talk about and then you know you'd go

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into them and like the audience would completely forget where you were in the whole story and it

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would become very boring and I'm confusing. 
I think one thing I would just say, I think at the start like late 1990s early 2000s, I had

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these principles: build your talk on messages done on topics, support those messages with visual

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evidence, not bullet list, but then, but then things such as that you know, that angled

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set of images that was some student, who just thought well this is how I'm going to do it and

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and then I thought oh my gosh, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. I'm going to use that and, and so

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I still see people, reinvent this approach by coming up, is the creativity of coming up with

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different visual evidence combining types of things yeah in I mean having a graph but then maybe

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somehow incorporating an image, you know, to represent a curve in the graph. Yeah, yeah it's, it's

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that you give principles, but then there's like this room for creativity about how you implement them.

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Um, so, the last section of your book talks about some practical presentation related topics like your

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Voice, your movements, whether your hands and head and body, what to wear, eye contact, paying attention

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to the audience responding to AV mishaps, belligerent questions, um and so on. You have this particularly

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and so, I think readers, sorry listeners can go check out your book for all of those details, but you have

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this one particularly entertaining anecdote about your wife giving an address in front of 2,000

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people in Copenhagen. Do you remember that one and could you share it with our listeners? 

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So, this was a big presentation for my wife. It was not a long presentation but it was part of the

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opening ceremony of this conference on gas turbines and so it had people from Europe people from

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North America, South America, and people from Asia were there and this was her moment

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to be on the big stage and she prepared. She really worked hard on this short segment but during

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that segment just as she was speaking she was doing really well, boom, lights went off. Now, the sound

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system was still working and so she could hear that her voice was still being projected, and she kept going

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because she realized the audience didn't necessarily need to see anything on the screen

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she had prepared she didn't need to read anything she knew the direction that she was going

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and she just kept going and then the lights came back on and she didn't she didn't break stride she

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just kept and she finished but as she was finishing she had a part of her talk where she talked about

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the importance of engineers what it is they do, and she had an example certainly about gas turbines

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but then it was a natural thing she also said such as keeping the lights on and I mean the

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crowd just erupted but it was laughter, but it was it was so natural spontaneous, and it was natural

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as, as humans should be. Yeah, so you probably don't want to be writing jokes into your talk but if

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your talk is well prepared and you're comfortable and well prepared then when those humorous moments

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arise you're going to be positioned to take advantage of them and say something funny. Yes.

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Yeah. Okay, great so we've kind of talked through some of the, some of the highlights of your book

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we've really only scratched the surface. I want to kind of just encourage again our listeners to

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get this book buy it or check it out from your library and I've linked the book in the show notes

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so, you can find it easily it's just filled with you know, the obviously this, this

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Assertion-evidence concept is at the core of the book, but it's also filled with advice related

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content and structure details about your slides and your delivery and how to prepare and all kinds

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of stuff it's just very valuable. Like I said, this book was very influential on me as a scientist and

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and realizing that communicating our ideas and findings effectively is a very important part of the

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Job. So, this is not the end of this. I would encourage you all to go check out Michael's book

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and yeah, thank you very much Michael for joining me today and, and sharing it in your own words

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with our listeners.  Well, thank you Stephen. I appreciate the reflection of my book in what it is

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that you do. I mean that's why we do things. Why you do your podcast, to reach audiences and give

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them information that will help them, you know, aim higher, reach higher and that's why I write books

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to have scientists such as you, lift up their presentations. Thank you very much. 

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Oh, thank you. I really appreciate your time. Okay, well that's it for episode 38. Thank you Michael for coming

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on the show. Thank you all for listening. Thanks to Marcia Petyt for editing the transcript of this

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episode. I've linked everything that we discussed in the show notes to the podcast

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so, you can find the book and some other key links. Bye for now, see you next time.

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