Brain Rules contrastingly pointed out that subjects remember 10% of material presented orally. Though no study was cited, in general verbal memory is tested by asking a subject to repeat back what they've heard. Several days after verbal input, participants usually forget a lot, unless something in the content particularly sparked their interest. Note, however, this is very different than the visual study, where participants only needed to recognize they had, in fact, seen the picture before. A more comparable study would be to play snippets of recordings for the verbal studies and test whether participants can recognize they have, in fact, heard the snippets previously. Google, however, did not help find any such study.
Why did Brain Rules assert pictures were still better than text, therefore (both processed visually)? They suggested that the brain processes each individual letter as a unique picture. That is true in early readers (and possibly individuals with dyslexia), but research has clearly shown that in average readers, the brain forms a unique neural pathway for every single word a person reads (the neural pathway for “cat” is as dissimilar to the neural pathway for “bat” as to “God”). In short, the brain actually processes each whole word as a unique picture, no longer taking in the individual letters (quite opposite to Brain Rules' assertions). That's why, when there is no problem or disorder, we are able to read so quickly.