Engage People by Keeping It Surprising

The surest way to get people engaged when you write or speak is to hook them neurologically—get the dopamine flowing. My last post, excerpted from my new book Writing for Impact: 8 Secrets from Science That Will Fire Up Your Readers’ Brains, highlighted the second of eight strategies to fire up people’s motivation engines: Keep it specific. This post highlights the third: Keep it surprising.

When an acquaintance kisses you on the cheek unexpectedly, what do you feel? Surprise? Perhaps a pleasurable surprise? Science shows that at the top of what gives you a stroke of mental pleasure is unexpectedness. It can deliver joy not just when you’re reading but when you’re doing just about anything, so long as the surprise is beneficial.

Brain imaging shows as much, and evolution explains why: Your mind guesses what’s ahead. It’s a prediction engine.[i] After seeing what happens, it rates each stimulus for its unexpectedness. If it confirms the prediction, that’s fine—but often boring. “Violation” of the prediction, on the other hand, holds promise because it alerts you to a chance to learn.

Carol Burnett by Elmer Holloway

Source: NBC/Public Domain

That’s how people have made themselves better since the beginning of history—better able to survive and thrive. They paid attention to surprises as a way to find opportunities to learn to improve themselves. And that’s why writing with a keep-it-surprising strategy is another secret to engaging readers. People are thirsty to evaluate surprises of every possible kind for value.

Professional writers and speakers know from experience they can communicate with impact this way. As a start, they show it by writing with surprising observations. John McPhee said: “A sign—‘Slow, Children at Play’—has been bent backward by an automobile.”[ii]

Or they show it with an analogy. Science writer Ed Yong observed: “Each of our body parts has its own microbial fauna, just as the various Galapagos islands have their own special tortoises and finches.”[iii]

Or with metaphor. Author Joan Didion wrote: “Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.”[iv]

Or word combination: Curators at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument write that soldiers in the 1870s referred to their plight as “glittering misery.”^[v]

In experiment after experiment, scientists have shown that your brain predicts nonstop.[vi] When as a writer or speaker you upset readers’ predictions with something of greater value, you crank their reward circuits more than readers expected.[vii] Driven by a primal impulse to heed and value the novel and surprising, readers then become increasingly engaged by your meaning.[viii]

Every time your brain encounters a surprise, an odor, a picture, a word, or anything else, it pings the reward-circuit neurons to, in essence, ask: Is this worth heeding? Do I want this? Will I like this? Will I learn something from it? If your reward circuit says yes, you get a surge of motivation to attend to the surprise, sometimes as earnestly as if your well-being depended on it.

The orbitofrontal cortex decides if the novelty is worthy. If so, dopamine continues its work to focus your attention and enhance perception. Some scientists call this the “exploration bonus.” It’s a potent bonus, too, underlining how much evolution favored reinforcing people’s inclination to explore. The effect of dopamine can last up to 10 minutes, keeping your motivation, reward processing, and learning rolling for an extended period.[ix]

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Surprise Bias

People are reflexively drawn to what’s surprising. This fact aligns with other research, which shows that most of us devote one-third of our language time each day to unexpected events. We start doing so in early childhood.[x] That hard wiring is some of the most basic in the mind.

Just how far will people go to pursue surprise? As you might assume, scientists have found that people won’t get jazzed for just anything new. Our brains filter surprises. The mind does this filtering both consciously and unconsciously. It first wants to know: What’s worthy? What’s worth wanting, liking, and learning from?

Neurotransmitters in the brain, without your even knowing it, don’t just promote the good stuff. They suppress the noise and minutiae. They make sure you ignore meaningless surprises and favor stimuli that fit your goals—good or bad, fun or chilling. Only if the reward circuit says “go” on a surprising stimulus’s value in meeting your goals does the dopamine do its motivational work.[xi]

When it comes to the effect of surprise from language, some scientists theorize that in ancient times humans learned a Goldilocks rule—to prefer “just the right amount” of unexpectedness.[xii] Too much was numbing; too little boring. As with simplicity and specifics, a balance paid off best.

Surprise Gains

What’s especially surprising about prediction with words is that it doesn’t affect just language processing and reward regions. It goes as far as engaging the sensory and motor circuits. Remarkably, you get so far ahead of yourself that you not only predict words about to appear. You get other parts of your brain to simulate their meaning. Your simulating mind works ahead of your eyes.

Luigi Grisoni and a team at the Freie Universität Berlin asked people to listen to 138 simple action sentences—such as, “I take the broom, and I . . . sweep.” They repeatedly found that the motor circuits for people’s hands ramped up two- to three-tenths of a second before the word “sweep” appeared. The same thing happened with the motor circuits for facial muscles when people read sentences such as, “I take some grapes, and I . . . eat.”

Even when Grisoni and his team tricked people—giving them the word “smoke” to end the first sentence instead of “sweep,” giving them the word “write” instead of “eat” to end the second—people’s motor circuits fired for the predicted (not actual) word.[xiii] As readers, we simulate preemptively.

If you’re going to use the keep-it-surprising strategy, what measurable benefit will it have? One piece of evidence comes from Ahmed Al-Rawi at Concordia University. He looked at 17 elements of “most retweeted” stories in four newspapers (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post): The element that most commonly drove virality of stories in 195,000 tweets? “Unexpectedness/odd/surprising” content. That was the top-ranked item 15.3 percent of the time. (“Social significance” was second, “awe” third.)[xiv]

Surprise can, and should, serve as an always-on strategy when you communicate. It amps up other writing strategies to engage readers doubly.[xv] You can surprise with simplicity. Surprise with specificity. Sweetened by surprise, every writing strategy becomes a magic feather to tickle your readers’ brains. Here are three top tactics for harnessing it to engage people.

1. Make the familiar fresh. When you say something common, be inventive in how you say it. As a warning, though, you can’t make the familiar fresh with common idioms. Say you’re tempted to write, “Congress is grasping at straws in the crisis.” We know from Rutvik Desai and colleagues that this doesn’t get mental traction. The Rutvik team asked people to read that sentence (among others). They wanted to see how much a verb (“grasp”) embedded in a familiar idiom excites motor neurons. Does it spur simulation? Do the circuits for hand motion fire? The answer was . . . hardly at all.[xvi]

“Clichés,” as a friend of mine says, “are metaphors with rigor mortis.”[xvii]

2. Kindle new reactions. By combining words in unorthodox ways, you can release new energy. Say you’re making the case that historians too easily ignore the history of failures. You could say, as Carl Zimmer did, “It’s easier . . . to ignore . . . the fame that curdled.”[xviii]

Or say you’re profiling a company’s working conditions. You could write, “The boss is charismatic but makes you feel subservient.” Or, as James Baldwin wrote, his father had “ . . . a crushing charm.”[xix]

3. Upend the ordinary. Turn the customary into the creative. For example, can you take a tired expression—“The chickens came home to roost”—and reconfigure it to serve another point, “The chickens roosted to come home”?

We learn as kids to delight in such twists. Here’s one that many people count as a favorite. Dorothy says to the Tinman in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: “I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.”[xx]

A rule to end by: If the first sentence that comes to mind won’t surprise readers or listeners, think up another one. People are wired to hunger for and devour surprises. They yearn to feel the clicking heels of the unexpected. As they say in New York publishing, the first thing editors want is novelty. No surprise, no clicking, no readers.