“Did you know that we can process visuals 60,000 times faster than text?” -3M Visual Systems Division
This “statistic” is used all the time in promoting the value of data visualizations, marketing, and quality presentations. Hubspot has used it (multiple times) as have the folks at presentation design firm Ethos3. It shows up in blog posts and news articles and infographics. More recently, Visually used it. It’s a sexy number, right? We process visuals 60,000 times faster than text? That’s crazy! That’s great! Let’s make infographics and visualizations and graphs! Let’s get rid of text altogether because pictures are the only way to communicate!
The problem is that the number appears to be completely unfounded. Thus, I’m begging you, Internet, please stop using it. Please.
Let’s go to the original source, which appears to be a two-page report in 1997 from the 3M Corporation. Entitled, Polishing Your Presentation, the offending numbers shows up in the second sentence, prominently displayed.
In any good research paper, we find the references at the bottom, right? Not here though. Nothing. Along the side of page 2, we find a banner labeled “Related Reading.” It’s unclear whether these are citations for the various numbers used throughout the document or are provided as additional resources.
I haven’t been able to hunt down all of these citations, but a few things turned up.
- My guess is that the first on the list is also from 3M and makes no mention of the 60,000 number.
- “A Quiz for the First-Time Presenter” is a dead link and is no longer supported. It appears to be a simple quiz about giving good presentations and probably not about how our brains work.
- I believe the Kushner reference is a “Presentations for Dummies” book, since updated. I found no reference to the 60,000 number in there either.
- I haven’t been able to locate the Meilach article. I did, however, find the following (somewhat comical) citation to the article in a post about presentations on ULearnOffice.
If this was indeed stolen from an in-flight magazine, I’m not optimistic I’ll be able find it, and I certainly doubt it includes a serious study about how our brains interpret text and images.
All of my work here is probably unnecessary. Back in 2012, Alan Levine over at the cogdog blog did an exhaustive search for the original document, even offering a $60 reward for the original source! He explored all the usual suspects, scoured libraries, and even called 3M, all with no success. It is worth your time to read through his post. To date, the $60 remains unclaimed.
I don’t believe that we, as readers, need to factcheck every single statistic that’s published in every article that’s ever been written. That responsibility should be on writers, researchers, and publishers. But, when you see a number that just sounds so good, that looks so good, and especially when it perfectly suits your claim or argument–but is completely unreferenced in the source document–it is incumbent upon you to be skeptical! It is your responsibility to dig a little deeper and find where it comes from. And you should be critical when you do find the original source, because sometimes these numbers are based on faulty logic, data, or methodologies.
This 60,000 statistic and a few others (I’ll write about another interesting one found a few months ago if you’re interested; use the comment box below) repeatedly pop up and are used by people and firms that I usually follow and trust. But every time an author uses numbers like these, I pause when I read their work. As writers and bloggers, researchers, analysts, whatever, we must be more careful with the numbers we use and reuse because 82% of people make important decisions with those numbers 63% of the time. But don’t cite me on it.
hi john, yes, please write more articles about dubious statistics! …nigel
I believe most of the people who quotes the 60k number uses less than the proverbial 10% of their brain capacity.
Would you believe 15.4 times faster? Much less exciting than 60,000, but at least based on some research…
MIT neuroscientists say we can process an image in as little as 13 milliseconds (http://news.mit.edu/2014/in-the-blink-of-an-eye-0116).
And it looks like Cambridge neuroscientists say we can integrate the different processes that lead to word recognition in 200 milliseconds (If I’m understanding correctly – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16460964)
200 / 13 = 15.4
Probably need a study that compares visuals and text head-to-head to know for sure, but this seems like at least a start to understanding the true difference.
@Erik Yes, I remember this MIT paper; thanks for sharing. To be clear, I believe in the basic concept that we process information more quickly and perhaps easily when it’s presented visually–there’s lots of research on the Picture (Pictorial) Superiority Effect–but this 60,000x number is, well, you read the post.
I hadn’t seen the NIH paper, so thanks for sharing, though it’s hard to know whether the abstract is actually written in English. 😉
I’ll say more about these types of stats in another post soon.
Thanks again,
Jon
While you’re at it, could you help me figure out if it’s a 30,000 or 50,000 foot view? When we “step back” and take a “high-level” view, what altitude are we referring to?
– Confused in Cleveland
If you want to get a “bird’s eye view”, you might consider how high birds can fly, which maxes out at about 37,000 feet, in which case a 30,000 foot view is better. Of course, what can you really see from that height? I would just trust the bird to figure out the optimal height and refer to it as that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_by_flight_heights
BTW, thanks for the original post bringing to light the fallacy!
Attached image:
60000 thought science foundation article 2005 published by fred luskin
Hi Shailendra,
First, the 60,000 claim you cite is about number of thoughts per day, not speed of visual processing. Second, the origination of this citation appears to be this 2012 Forbes article (https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecomaford/2012/04/04/got-inner-peace-5-ways-to-get-it-now/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20research%20of,Wow.). But there is no Luskin paper that shows this at all.
So, this is just another fallacious number that should not be shared.
Jan. 11, 2017 – This just got Tweeted. Why does the infographic display 600,000X but the text references 60,000X?
Thank you for setting the record straight! Why have people forgotten that the written word is one of civilization’s foundation stones. Reading develops critical thinking. This endless fascination with visual nuggets and short, interactive drivel has eroded this skill set as evidenced by the proliferation of patently false factoids that few seem to question, let alone critically evaluate. When conveying meaning is at stake, expediency is a double-edged sword. Relying on imagery alone leaves viewers less capable of judging whether the information presented is true or false. Anybody who studied mass communications knows this. Beware of those who favor expediency over depth.
Here’s a paper from the University of Minnesota supporting the 60,000 finding:
http://misrc.umn.edu/workingpapers/fullpapers/1986/8611.pdf
Thanks for the link Mark, but sorry, that paper does not support the 60,000 finding. In fact, if you go over to the linked cogdog site, you’ll see that he emailed with the lead author (Doug Vogel) who wrote: “The research that I did as a PhD student at the U. of Minnesota was involved with persuasion and the working paper that you found is actually the most complete description of the work (even beyond that which was ultimatedly reported in my thesis). I have not seen the 2001 3M publication but my research had nothing to do with visual processing speed.”
Mark, There’s no mention of cognitive processing in this article, especially not to the extent of being 60,000 times faster than text. This is not even a cognitive study, but rather a study of behavior based on empirical evidence. It suggests visuals can make a presentation 43% more likely to get the participants to take action than without visuals. It’s definitely valuable information, just not 60,000x better.
hmmm
3M = Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company
University of Minnesota supporting 3M
No, coincidence there. Besides who ever heard of industry supporting or providing grant money to professors.
60,000 just doesn’t even sound right when you think about it. Thanks for posting this! Maybe they could have gotten away with 6 or 60.
And thanks for your article. I intend to use it in my classes on the dangers of falling for statistics just because they’re on the Internet and appear “scientific.”
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Great example on this is when kids love to read books with pictures than books with plane paragraphs.
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This is the right web site for everyone who wants to understand this topic. You understand a whole lot its almost tough to argue with you (not that I actually would want to…HaHa). You certainly put a new spin on a topic that’s been discussed for many years. Excellent stuff, just wonderful!
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Good job writing them in this blog article
Best regards,
Thomassen Cannon
Really… minds are wired visually thanks for sharing
Maybe this? http://web.archive.org/web/20001102203936/http://3m.com/meetingnetwork/files/meetingguide_pres.pdf
Hi Elizabeth – impressive to have found the 3M article! Unfortunately the whole point of the above post is that those very same statistics cited by 3M have no real scientific backing – at least not that any of us have been able to find in the 8 years since this subsequent article was published.