Boring Presenations can be Productive?

August 6th, 2008

According to a NYTimes Article By BENEDICT CAREY, Published: August 5, 2008 “Boring” can be productive. I did not quite understand the concept, but I found the article very boring in the first place and hard to read to the end – the more interesting part for me.

According to the the author “Research suggests that boredom allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative”

If this is the case, maybe that next boring company meeting is not such a bad thing? Maybe that is why PPT presentations are so popular, because it is so easy to create a presentation that will bore your audience and maybe induce them into a few moments of productivity – rather than all that wasted “exciting” time they spend surfing the web on their computer in their office.

The part of the thankfully short article that I liked “The investigators analyzed the presentations themselves and found that a monotonous tone was most strongly associated with ‘nod-off episodes per lecture (NOELs),’ followed by the sight of a tweed jacket on the lecturer.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Rockwood, a professor of geriatric medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said when the material presented is familiar, as a lot of it was, then performance is everything. “Really, what it comes down to,” he said, “is that if you have some guy up there droning on, it drives people crazy.”

Dr. Rockwood and his co-authors have followed up with two more related reports and attribute the inspiration for the continuing project to Dr. Patterson.

Early on in one of those first dementia lectures, he went out cold.”

I hope I bored you with this post enough to do some productive thinking.

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