You've known it for a while. The tidy rows of bullet points feel like sort of a cop out. You tried using that fancy template from Corporate to add some interest. You even added some terrific images you found on one of those stock photo sites.

But your slide deck still seems so ... blah. And you suspect it's not pulling its weight in helping your audience to learn about your topic.

Well scientists and academics have been working on that very issue. And they have found some very useful things.

We'll focus on just one of them here: cognitive load.

The concept, developed by John Sweller, refers to the amount of work required to understand something. In a sense, it refers to a kind of "traffic jam" in your brain's processing of information.

If you can keep information "traffic" flowing smoothly with your slides, you are well on your way to becoming a PowerPoint superstar.

Lightening the Load

One of the simplest things you can do to reduce cognitive traffic jams for your audience is to simplify your slides. Yup. Just stripping away whatever is not absolutely essential helps reduce the number of distracting elements competing for attention.

As a rule there aren't any prizes for having the fewest slides. Can you spread your concept from one or two busy slides to several sparse ones?

Competing Pathways

If you have lots of words on your slide, and worse, if what you are saying follows those words really closely, your audience is already skimming ahead to the last few bullet points when you haven't even finished with the first one. The effect in your brain is a bit like a movie with the sound track slightly off. Their eyes and their ears are literally providing competing input about what should be a unified scene. Traffic jam.

You can show some mercy for your audience by slashing the number of words on any given slide. A few key words to help them remember your major concepts will go a long way.

Letters Are Pictures

But not the kind that get processed efficiently. The input from your eyes is broken down into dozens of different components -- diagonal lines, horizontal and vertical lines, curves, textures, colors, etc. Your visual cortex has highly specialized areas that process very specific features of what you see before all the components get reassembled and interpreted.

Granted, all this happens really, really fast. But it does take measurably longer for your brain to process a series of abstract little pictures, say, T-I-G-E-R, than it does for it to process an image of a certain striped feline.

Another Round of Processing

Letters are symbols, of course, representing aspects of language. So the symbols need another layer of specialized interpretation.

Your auditory cortex and the areas around it are the major players in processing language, both spoken and written. So during a bullet-point-heavy presentation, this area is already busy interpreting the spoken words being picked up by your ears.

Meanwhile, back at the visual cortex, there's no interesting new input to process, and that part of the brain starts getting a little bored.

What's a presenter to do? Pictures and other visuals are your friend. Whenever you can covey a concept visually -- with an image or a graph, etc. -- you'll help keep both the visual and auditory corteces happy, and you'll give your ideas extra sticking power.

Relieving Traffic Congestion

How you design your slides can make a big difference in whether your audience's cognitive "traffic" flows smoothly or gets snarled in congestion.

One of the easiest, most high-impact ways you can keep things moving is to simplify your PowerPoint slides. Limit the number of concepts on each slide, and strip away any elements that you can get by without.

Can you trim a few more words? And a few more? Can you convey at least part of the the idea visually instead?

Your audience will appreciate how much easier it is to absorb what they are trying to learn from you.