16 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING Visuals are processed 60,000 times specific moods, things that are almost impossible to con- faster than text by the human vey using words. Do you think that if 100 people heard brain and 90% of information the word “girl,” they would all think of the same thing, 17 transmitted to the brain is visual. exactly? Would they all feel the same thing? But looking at Humans evolved over millennia to a picture like the one on the previous page, the majority of respond to visual information long people will think and feel something very similar. before they developed the ability to Images act like shortcuts to the brain: we are visual read text. creatures, and we are programmed to react to visuals more than to words. In the 1960s, Professor Albert Mehrabian 18 showed that 93% of communication is in fact nonverbal. By this he meant that most of the feelings and attitudes of a message come from the facial expressions and the way the words are said, and the rest, only 7%, derives from the actual words being spoken. It isn’t even just the meanings of a message that are conveyed more precisely by visual infor- mation. Even issues of trust and credibility are carried by images far more so than text. Dan Roam, an expert on visual storytelling and an author of the inter- national bestseller The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, says: We live in a world that is very noisy. There are a lot of conver- sations and buzzwords around us. The number one way out of this noise is just to become visual. To show things with pictures. For thousands of years people have been drawing. If you think about the history of communication from then till now, it goes through all the different periods of time where people are try- ing to find ways to share information with each other. For the longest time, it was through telling stories around the campfire, reciting poems, and singing songs. That was the technology that was available. All along, all we wanted to do was share pictures with each other. Painting was the only way to convey a message visually. Then came writing and the printing press. Now let’s