Information isn’t what we’re told. It is what we understand.
Audio is uniquely good at getting info to our brains.
Marshall McLuhan coined the term the "medium is the message” in 1964. McLuhan’s insight was that different forms of media create different kinds of spaces & stages for information & understanding. The result is a spectrum from high-resolution to low-resolution or Hot to Cold.
The main two variables to think about Hot & Cold are engagement & participation. When we process incoming info, our brain doesn’t grab and decode everything. Sometimes we process the whole blast in high-resolution. Other times we scan & fill in gaps with our own context.
Cool media is low in engagement and high in participation. Often multi-sensory. We take in low-resolution information and have to actively complete the picture. Twitter/texting are cold. The character limited format means most of what’s being communicated is actually context.
Hot media is high in engagement and low in participation. There is little ambiguity to the message and not much effort is required to fill in info. Often saturating one sense. Movies are hot. They saturate our vision and we don’t exert much effort filling in the details.
Audio is the hottest format of all. Human speech burns with information. It resolves uncertainty and communicates meaning more than any other format. Audio is how you communicate what you really mean. Intonation, emphasis, innuendo and all.
Intuitively we know this. Texting a friend or your boss has ambiguety in it. You can text a word and mean 100 different things. It is flat and fuzzy. When you really have something important to discuss, you hop on the phone. Speaking removes the ambiguety and missing info.
This is what makes audio such a powerful learning format. Multi-sensory media gets scanned at a low-resolution and our brains fill in the gaps. The single-sense saturation of human speech sends high-resolution info directly to our brains.
It is the ultimate learning format.