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Going to Extremes
The art of making extreme numbers meaningful
A key part of our job involves the presentation of data. But despite the fact that we are taught to deal with numbers from an early age, the human brain is still very poor at dealing with very large or very small numbers.
Essentially, this is because the brain prefers handling numbers that it can easily relate to tangible things. For instance, we can all understand what £10 looks like and what it can buy. We’re probably not bad with numbers in the thousands either, because we can relate that to how much we earn in a month or a year.
But when government debt hits £160 billion, the numbers begin to get a little meaningless. A debt of £1 million sounds big, but for many, a debt of £1 billion or £100 billion (although still sounding big) may not sound that much more. The same principle is true for very small numbers. If something is 1mm across we can understand it. But when people talk about nano-technology and items that are measured in nanometres, how many people can really grasp what that means?
Paint a picture…
Sometimes it is vital to present important messages that involve extreme numbers. But how do we do this? The answer is to somehow relate those numbers to something that we can visualise. There are several ways of doing this:
By division: Take the example of government debt of £160 billion. To make this more meaningful, it can be divided into an amount per household – i.e. under £3,000 per household. Suddenly we can grasp the enormity of it, because it means that effectively each of us will have to give the government £3,000 more in tax over the coming years to pay it off.
By comparison: Another approach is the ‘size of Wales’ measure. Trying to explain to people how much rainforest disappears each year is hard. A running joke now is the frequency with which people will use the example of: ‘An area three times the size of Wales’ as a method of helping others to understand the size of the area involved.
By visualisation: Charities know that we don’t understand big numbers – so statistics like ‘200,000 children a year die from diarrhoea’ don’t really strike home. So they will use a picture of an individual child and use a caption like: ‘A child like Sophie dies every three minutes’.
Now do you see?
But how do we deal with tiny numbers? For example, how do we understand just how little time human beings have been on this earth (about 200,000 years)? The earth has been here for six billion years. So one way scientists explain this is by saying that if the earth had been in existence for only one day, humans would appear at three seconds before midnight - and even the dinosaurs existed only as recently as 20 minutes to midnight.
Another example is a quote about the accuracy of the particle beam at CERN. To suggest that a beam has an accuracy of some tiny fraction of a degree doesn’t mean anything. But once they say that if it was fired from London to Bristol, it would hit a target smaller than a pea, it suddenly means something!
So, if you need to get extreme numbers across, why not try one of these techniques? The brain is a marvellous organ, but sometimes it just needs a little help…
