4 Scientific Rules for Improving Your PowerPoint

Are your PowerPoint presentations putting everyone to sleep? Is your business culture so steeped in slide decks that your audience immediately zones out when the lights go down? If so, you need to do something to spice up your slides and get people to pay attention.

Cognitive science to the rescue! Last year, Harvard scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn spoke in a symposium about the visualization of data and how people can best present information in a PowerPoint format. Writer Annalee Newitz summarized Kosslyn's four rules of PowerPoint.

1. The Goldilocks Rule: Present a "just right" amount of data. Too much is overwhelming; too little won't get your point across.
2. The Rudolph Rule: Guide your audience to important details, just as Rudolph's red nose guided Santa. If you present a piece of key data in a list, make it a different color or size, point an arrow to it, highlight it, or circle it in red. In a pie chart, pull out the important sector. Our brains are wired to immediately notice what's different, and this helps your audience distinguish what's important from what's background information.
3. The Rule of Four: Never offer more than four pieces of information at once. Why? The brain can generally only hold four pieces of visual data simultaneously -- so when we take in the visual information on a slide, more than four items starts to overwhelm us.
4. The Birds of a Feather Rule: If you want to indicate to your audience that several items belong in a group, make them similar by giving them the same color or shape. Or group them very close together.