Welcome to the final post in our series on memorability. In the last post, Jerry referenced the “Magic By The Numbers” survey, and in particular, the open-ended question that was used to explore what magical audiences expect to get from a live show. While the raw responses are not available, the summary does not mention any pattern of people seeking to “create memories” or similar. Assuming this is not just an oversight of the researchers, it is reasonable to conclude memorability is a misguided goal that magicians pursue for no good reason.

Or is it?

As magicians, we recognize that a really good performance will be remembered, and we want our own tricks to be among those performances that stick with someone. In my last post on the subject, I explored the sort of tactics a magician could take if they were entirely focused on optimizing the memorability metric. But as Jerry has so clearly elucidated, that is not a particularly useful approach. And yet, the fact remains, we still want our performances remembered!

I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t care about whether or not your performance is remembered. If you, your tricks, the world you wrought, or the story you told sticks with your audiences, that is undeniably a good thing. I’m only cautioning against going all-in on optimizing for memorability. In particular, it should not be allowed to stand in the way of sacrificing the number one most important thing: giving the audience what it wants.

Let’s look a bit closer at what the survey found when it set out to find exactly what it is audiences want. To quote:

Twenty-five percent of people, in their own words, like the element of surprise best. People of all backgrounds, genders, and ages valued surprise more than they valued being amazed.

Joshua Jay

Survey participants listed things like amazement, mystery, curiosity, showmanship, and skill, but a plurality of them wanted, along with or before any of that, to be surprised. So ought we give up focusing on doing memorable things and instead focus on doing surprising things?

Actually, we don’t need to give up anything. In fact, psychology research indicates surprising your audiences will, in itself, aid them in forming memories! In the last decade, several academic psychologists have been studying a cognitive effect called “retroactive enhancement,” wherein a moment of surprise and intense emotion cause the events that led to it to be recorded more indelibly in long term memory.

When you’re surprised by an unpredictable outcome, this activates the novelty-triggered neurons that respond to reward in the subcortical parts of the brain. The responses of those neurons then become transferred to higher cortical areas where they become stored more permanently.

“The Unexplored Emotion of Surprise” – Susan Krauss Whitbourne

For example, in one study, participants watched a short film which may or may not have included a surprising detail at the end, which, if included, may or may not have been relevant to the film’s plot. Participants who saw the version with the plot-relevant surprising detail tended to remember more details about the rest of the film. In another study, American participants were surveyed regarding their memories of the 2016 Presidential Election on the understanding that many people were surprised and emotionally affected by the result. Those who were shocked by the election results (in a positive or negative way) had much more vivid memories of the night than did politically inactive participants, including having a highly accurate recall of their local weather conditions some two years after the fact.

We found participants’ memory characteristics were strongly related to their level of tension and shock, irrespective of valence. […] The results revealed retroactive enhancement is dependent upon experiencing a surprising moment amidst a suspenseful event.

How suspense and surprise enhance subsequent memory: The case of the 2016 United States Presidential Election. - Congleton A.R. & Berntsen D.

Alright, then! There’s no downside, right? We scrap the memorability techniques I described in my previous post and go all in on surprise! It’s win-win!

No, no, no! Do you remember all those other things people mentioned in the survey? Surprise alone won’t satisfy everything they want. You cannot just pick one metric and optimize it. Even though good performances, as defined by the audience, contain surprises, the converse is not necessarily true. After all, a surprisingly bad performance could be just as memorable. Surprise, like memorability, is just one of so many proxy metrics for what audiences really want.

So, yes, always be looking to add surprise to your routines. And I stand by everything I said before about souvenirs and memorable performances too. Do all of it. But don’t get lost in doing this thing or that thing because you believe it will achieve your goal, or you may forget the goal itself. Always go back to the fundamental question: Am I giving the audience what it wants? Maybe a metaphor will help here:

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.

“The Book of Five Rings” – Miyamoto Musashi

Your audience wants to be cut and cut deep. A good surprise attack could leave a permanent scar, but focusing solely on the surprise attack you want to deliver or the scar you want to leave won’t help you actually cut them.