Improving Conversations with Exciting Questions

What do you do? Where are you from? Live around here?

Well, I'm gonna go get some more wine. It's great talking to you.

Those conversations happened over and over again.

It was almost as if they were socially scripted.

My brain was on autopilot. What we found was is the worst ranked

conversation starters, the ones that got the lowest ratings, the ones

that produced

the lowest volume, the ones that got the most leans away,

worst head nods, and

worst microexpressions, those were the ones that we use the most.

What do you do?

How are you? Where are you from? From a physiological perspective, have no

effect, no pleasure. So what we tried was to find conversation

starters that could spark or create some kind of excitement.

Can you verbally trigger dopamine? We found that the brain

is really interesting.

If you ask the brain a question, it tends to look for hits and not misses.

What I mean by this is if you ask someone, "Been busy lately?" their brain

immediately looks for all the hits of been busy.

They think about all the negative things that have happened, the stress, the

busyness, all the bad things in their life.

Whereas if you ask someone, "Working on anything exciting recently?"

their brain

immediately begins to look for all the hits of excitement.

They start thinking of all the good, all the happy things, all the excitement

that's going on in their own life, and that does two things.

One, it creates pleasure for them.

You're literally asking them to borrow excitement from other places in their life

and bring it to the situation that you're in.

And the other thing that it does is it makes you more memorable. Dr.

John Medina found dopamine, when it's triggered in verbal

conversation, makes a

mental Post-It note. In other words, when you ask someone else to think of

what's exciting in their life, the happy side effect is

that you become more

memorable.