Thanks to Gareth Kay at Brand New for calling out this interesting post on i09 about cognitive scientist Stephen M Kosselyn's recommendations about how PPT can be tailored to the way the human brain processes information.
According to Kosselyn (as quoted on io9) the four rules of PowerPoint are: The Goldilocks Rule, The Rudolph Rule, The Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule. Here's how they work:
The Goldilocks Rule refers to presenting the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image.
The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details -- the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers' and led them.
The Rule of Four is a simple but powerful tool that grows out of the fact that the brain can generally hold only four pieces of visual information simultaneously. So don't ever present your audience with more than four things at once. This is a really important piece of information for people who tend to pack their PowerPoint slides with dense reams of data. Never give more than four pieces of information at once. It's not that people can't think beyond four ideas -- it's that when we take in the visual information on a slide we start to get overwhelmed when we reach four items.
The Birds of a Feather Rule is another good rule for how to organize information when you want to show things in groups. "We think of things in groups when they look similar or in proximity to each other," Kosslyn pointed out. Translation into PowerPoint? If you want to indicate to your audience that five things belong in a group, make them similar by giving them the same color or shape. Or group them very close together. This sounds basic, but it often means taking your data apart and reorganizing it.
Even these goofy names for each rule of PowerPoint follow a principle from cognitive science: it's always easier to remember an unfamiliar idea if it's named after something familiar.
Part of me agrees with one of the commenters on io9: "yeah this Design 101 (hello, hierarchy of information!), tarted up in science drag." But helpful reminders just the same.
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