Perhaps you have had the chance to attend one of the great medical conferences that have been popping up all over the country in the past few months. Apart from the obvious networking opportunities, it’s of course not uncommon to come away with some pointers that you can take into clinical practice, or some inspiration for a talk of your own. But are you confident in how engaging your presentation should be, and how tightly you will hold your audience’s attention?
There is, in fact, research out there on the experience of attending a boring lecture or talk. A study from 2022, published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, looked at why so many university students seem so bored during lectures. Granted, some lectures may not be focused on the most stimulating of subjects, and some lecturers may not be highly engaging, but this research found that the students themselves are partly to blame.
Simply put, if students walk into a lecture expecting to be bored, they probably will be. There is plenty of other previous research on self-fulfilling prophecies – for example, people who go to see a movie and expect it to be funny will generally find the movie more funny than those who go in with low expectations.
In this case, the students were surveyed five minutes before they went into a lecture. As you might expect, those who expected to be bored were more bored than their counterparts. But the authors noted another confounding factor: Perhaps the students were “making accurate predictions about how boring they were going to find the lecture”. In other words, they knew the subject matter, they knew the lecturer, and they knew the event was going to be boring, and they were right.
An older study from 2005 titled ‘Nodding and napping in medical lectures: An instructive systematic review’, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, looked at the issue from a postgraduate perspective. Their review, said the authors, “allows us to say with confidence that soporific lectures at medical and scientific congresses are an annoying and persistent problem throughout the Western world.”
Their systematic international review “suggests that soporific lectures at medical meetings are common, annoying, and persistent. Low lights and boring material are prominent risk factors for nodding off during presentations. Extreme remedial measures are warranted.” Of note, the team suggests that younger researchers include an admission of weakness in their research report, but it’s important to present these weaknesses with a positive spin.
They also note how physician time is taken for granted in these circumstances: “From an economic point of view, even a meeting at which 100 physicians who bill at a rate of $200 per hour nod off during a boring one-hour presentation carries a $20,000 cost. Given that between grand rounds, CME lectures, pharmaceutical consultancies, journal clubs, annual meetings, regional programmes, and city-wide supper clubs masquerading as information exchanges, about 100 such meetings must be occurring daily in Canada, the annual cost is about $75 million, roughly the purchase price of the naming rights for 1.5 faculties of medicine every two years,” they wrote.
Of course, PowerPoint has its uses as a tool, but research warns against leaning too heavily on the slides, and simply reading what’s on the slide is a no-no. The Centre for Teaching and Learning in the University of Vermont also advises to keep the slides light on text and to get to know your lecture so well that you don’t even need them. It’s also advised to black-out the screen when it’s not relevant, and if you do use slides, try not to overload them with text.
If you can do all that, plus be prepared for the Q&A, plus get the technology right, and do it all in 20 minutes, it’ll be a piece of cake.
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