The Best Conversation Starters | @TED Talks

What do you do? Where are you from? Live around here? Well, I'm going to 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. We found 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 used the most. What do you do? How are you? Where are you from? Those conversations, from a psychological 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? And we found that the brain is really interesting. 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? 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 Medita found that 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.