Cue Vip Sitaraman. The founder of PubDraw, an open access, graphical science publishing platform, breaks down for us why infographics are the future of funding:

There's  overwhelming evidence that infographics are extremely effective at catching people's attention, and that sticking ability isn't going away. In fact, 3M conducted a study that found visuals are processed in the brain over 60,000 times faster than text.

The brain craves infographics because we suffer from information overload: the average attention span has dropped to 8 seconds since 1980 and people only read 28% of what they see.  Our eyes are neurally networked to take in a visual scene in under 1 second while it takes 250 seconds to recognize, then assign meaning to symbols (think of each word in a sentence as a symbol). This explains why 80% of people are more willing to read an infographic--and they learn and retain information 32% better as a result too.