There is a moment in performance that I live for, and it took me a long time to understand why it works as well as it does.
I have just told the audience that before the show began, I sealed a prediction inside an envelope. The envelope has been sitting on the table the entire time — in full view, untouched, unmoved. The spectator has made a series of choices. Free choices. Choices I could not have anticipated. And now I ask the spectator to open the envelope.
The room goes quiet. Every person in the audience is staring at the envelope. Not because I told them to look at it. Not because I am looking at it. Not because I pointed at it or gestured toward it or used any deliberate attention technique. They are staring at it because they want to know what is inside.
That is inherent interest. And it is the most powerful attention tool that exists.
The Eighth Tool
Darwin Ortiz lists eight tools of attention control in Strong Magic. I have written about several of them already — eye contact, body language, sound, contrast, newness. Each of these is effective. Each exploits a different mechanism of human perception or social behavior. But Ortiz distinguishes the eighth tool, inherent interest, from all the others. It is different in kind, not just in degree.
Here is why. Every other attention tool requires the performer to actively direct the audience’s attention. You look at something and they follow your gaze. You create a sound and they orient toward it. You introduce a new object and their change-detection system locks on. In each case, you are doing something to capture attention. You are the active agent.
Inherent interest flips this. With inherent interest, the audience directs their own attention. You do not need to guide them. You do not need to employ a technique. They look at the thing because they already care about it. Their own curiosity, their own emotional investment, their own need to know the outcome drives their attention to exactly where you want it.
It is the one attention tool where you can do nothing and the audience still looks in the right place.
How Inherent Interest Gets Built
Inherent interest does not appear out of nowhere. It is constructed through the earlier parts of the performance. It is the product of everything you have done to make the audience care about a particular outcome.
Think about what happens in a mentalism routine. You tell the audience that you made a prediction before the show. You describe the envelope. You describe what is inside — or rather, you describe that you are not going to reveal what is inside, not yet. You ask a spectator to make a choice, and you emphasize that the choice is free, that you could not have known in advance what they would choose. You build toward the moment of comparison.
By the time you reach the reveal, you have done something remarkable: you have loaded the envelope with psychological weight. It is no longer just an envelope. It is a container of potential impossibility. It holds the answer to a question the entire room is now asking: did he know? Could he really have predicted this?
That question is the source of inherent interest. The audience is not looking at the envelope because of any attention technique. They are looking at it because they desperately want to know the answer.
This is what Ortiz means when he says that inherent interest is the tool where the center of interest and the source of information automatically coincide. The envelope is both the thing the audience cares about most and the thing that will resolve the question they are asking. These two roles are fused. And because they are fused, no further attention direction is needed.
The Suspense Formula
The construction of inherent interest is closely related to what Ortiz calls the suspense formula: make them care, then make them wait.
This two-step process is the engine of dramatic tension. First, you establish emotional stakes — you give the audience a reason to care about what happens next. Then, you delay the resolution — you make them wait for the answer.
If you skip the first step, the waiting produces boredom. If someone asks “Would you like to know what’s in this envelope?” before you have any reason to care what is in the envelope, you shrug. There are no stakes. The question is empty. The envelope is just an envelope.
But if you build the stakes first — if you construct a scenario where the contents of the envelope represent something meaningful, something that will confirm or deny an extraordinary claim — then the waiting becomes tension. The audience is suspended between wanting to know and not yet knowing. That suspension is suspense. And while they are in that state, their attention is locked on the source of resolution.
I did not understand this distinction early on. I would rush through the setup of a routine to get to the climax, thinking that the climax was where the magic happened. It is, in terms of the effect. But in terms of attention, the magic of inherent interest happens during the setup. The setup is where you build the care. The climax is where you cash it in.
Now I spend significantly more time on the setup. Not in a way that drags — that would be the second mistake, making them wait without first making them care. But in a way that invests each moment with meaning. I explain what is at stake. I make clear what will happen if the prediction matches. I let the audience feel the weight of the question before I offer the answer.
Why Inherent Interest Is the Strongest Tool
Consider the hierarchy of attention tools.
Eye contact works because we are social creatures who follow the gaze of others. But it fails if the spectator is not looking at you. Body language works because we read physical orientation as a signal of importance. But it fails if the spectator is distracted. Sound works because the orienting response is involuntary. But the effect is brief — a snap or a tap captures attention for a moment, not for minutes. Contrast and newness work because our visual system is wired to detect anomalies. But they are one-time bursts that decay through habituation.
Inherent interest does not decay. Once the audience cares about an outcome, they continue caring until the outcome is resolved. Their attention does not drift. Their focus does not habituate. The question in their minds — what is in the envelope? will it match? — sustains attention continuously, without any further effort from the performer.
This is why well-structured mentalism routines create such extraordinary attention. The audience is not watching because the performer is doing something visually interesting. Often the performer is doing almost nothing — just talking, just standing there, just building the scenario. But the audience is riveted because they are invested in the outcome. Their own curiosity is doing the work.
And this brings up something Fitzkee wrote about in Showmanship for Magicians that resonates here. He distinguished between involuntary attention — which we cannot resist, like a sudden loud noise — and voluntary attention, which is given by choice and provokes thought. What he called “thought-provoked attention” is essentially interest. And interest, Fitzkee argued, comes from connecting to things within the common experience of your spectators. Situations they understand. Problems they recognize. Outcomes they care about. When you build inherent interest, you are not just employing an attention tool. You are engaging the audience’s active, voluntary, thought-driven attention — the kind that sustains itself because the audience wants to keep paying attention.
The Failure Mode
The failure mode of inherent interest is building it and then failing to deliver.
If you create suspense — if you make the audience care and then make them wait — and then the resolution is anticlimactic, you have committed the worst attention crime possible. You have betrayed the audience’s investment. They gave you their focused, self-directed attention, and you wasted it.
I experienced this early in my journey, and it stung. I had built what I thought was a strong setup for a prediction reveal. The audience was engaged. The room was quiet. The anticipation was palpable. And then the reveal was underwhelming. The prediction matched, but the way I revealed it was clumsy. I rushed. I did not give the moment space to land. The audience had built up enormous inherent interest, and I dissipated it in a hurried, poorly timed reveal.
The lesson was painful but clear: inherent interest creates an obligation. When you build curiosity, you are making a promise. The audience is investing attention because they trust that the payoff will be worth it. If you honor that trust, the reaction is enormous. If you betray it, the disappointment is proportional to the investment.
This has made me much more careful about the resolution phase of any routine that relies on inherent interest. The reveal needs to be as carefully constructed as the setup. It needs space. It needs timing. It needs to land with clarity and impact, because the audience has been waiting for this moment and they need it to deliver.
Building Inherent Interest in Non-Mentalism Contexts
Inherent interest is not limited to mentalism. It works in any context where you can make the audience care about an outcome.
In a card routine, you can build inherent interest by establishing a clear, compelling premise. “Your card has been lost in the deck. It could be anywhere. And I am going to find it without looking.” The audience now has a question: can he really do it? That question creates inherent interest, and as long as the question is unresolved, the audience’s attention is focused on the deck.
In a keynote speech, inherent interest works through narrative. You pose a question at the beginning — “What happened when I walked into that meeting with nothing but a deck of cards?” — and the audience’s desire to know the answer sustains their attention through the story. This is basic storytelling structure: create a question, delay the answer, resolve the question. The middle part, where the audience is waiting for the answer, is where inherent interest does its work.
In a stage performance, inherent interest can be built through physical staging. An object covered by a cloth. A box with a lock on it. A curtain hiding something behind it. Each of these creates a question in the audience’s mind — what is under there? — and that question generates inherent interest. The covered object does not need to be visually compelling. It does not need to contrast with its surroundings or be newly introduced. It just needs to represent an unanswered question.
The Effortless Tool
What makes inherent interest special is that once you have built it, it runs on its own. You do not have to maintain it. You do not have to reinforce it. You do not have to keep using techniques to keep the audience’s attention in the right place. Their own psychological investment keeps them focused.
This is enormously freeing. During the resolution phase of a routine with strong inherent interest, I can stop worrying about attention control. The audience is managing their own attention. They are looking at the right thing because they want to. My hands are free. My mind is free. I can focus entirely on the quality of the moment, the timing of the reveal, the emotional landing of the effect, because the attention work has already been done — not by me, but by the audience’s own curiosity.
Seven of the eight attention tools require active effort from the performer. The eighth requires effort only in the setup. Once the curiosity is built, once the question is planted, the audience does the rest.
Build the care first. Then make them wait. And when you are ready to deliver the answer, their attention will be exactly where you need it. Not because you directed it there, but because they could not bear to look anywhere else.