13 Scientific Reasons Explaining Why You Crave Infographics

Ever wonder why your brain craves visually stimulating content?

It’s not by random chance.

In fact, there’s overwhelming scientific evidence that explains why people are attracted to visuals such as infographics, data visualizations, and charts. In essence? The majority of people are visual learners, and carefully thought-out and well-researched visuals can explain something more effectively than text ever could.

It’s why we, at Visual Capitalist, aim to continue providing insights on business and investing by creating and curating the best data-driven visual media on the web.

13 Scientific Reasons On Why You Crave Infographics

Without further ado, the 13 data-driven reasons behind the power of infographics and visual content.

The above infographic comes to us from NeoMam Studios and it takes a data-driven approach to explaining why people constantly crave infographics.

Here’s a summary of the 13 reasons:

Human beings are visually wired:

1. Almost 50% of your brain is involved in visual processing.
2. 70% of all your sensory receptors are in your eyes.
3. 1/10 of a second is all it takes you to understand a visual scene.
4. It takes us only 150 milliseconds to process a symbol, and 100 milliseconds to attach a meaning to it.

We need to understand things faster because we suffer from information overload:

5. We receive 5x as much information in 2014 as in 1986.
6. We consume 34 gigabytes of information on an average day, just outside of work.
7. Only 28% of words on a web page are actually read on an average visit.

Infographics help us get information more quickly because:

8. Researchers have found that color visuals increase willingness to read by 80%.
9. For medicine labels, a study found that 70% understand the labels with text only, while 95% understand with text and pictures.
10. People do 323% better following directions with text and illustrations in comparison to just text.

Infographics are more persuasive:

11. A study conducted at the Wharton School of Business found that 50% of the audience was persuaded by purely verbal presentation, while 67% were persuaded by a verbal presentation accompanied by visuals.
12. Adding pictures of brain scans and mentioning cognitive neuroscience make people more inclined to believe what they are reading.
13. People remember 80% of what they see and do, in comparison to 10% of what they hear, or 20% of what they read.