Of everything I have read about performance — and I have read a lot, from academic papers on attention psychology to theatrical theory to magic-specific texts — one definition stands above the rest in its simplicity and usefulness. It comes from Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians, and it is this:
Interest is thought-provoked attention.
Six words. That is it. And those six words explain more about why audiences engage or disengage than entire textbooks on the subject.
Let me unpack it, because when I first read it, I almost scrolled past. It seemed too simple to be important. But the more I sat with it — and the more I applied it to my own performances and to every performance I watched afterward — the more I realized it was the master key.
The Two Kinds of Attention
Fitzkee distinguishes between two types of attention, and the distinction is critical.
Involuntary attention is what you give to a loud noise, a bright flash, a sudden movement. You cannot resist it. A door slams and your head turns. A light flickers and your eyes jump to it. This kind of attention is passive — it affects your sense organs, but it does not engage your mind.
Voluntary attention is different. It is active, given by choice. You decide to pay attention to something because it interests you. You lean forward. You focus. Your mind engages.
Here is Fitzkee’s critical insight: involuntary attention does not produce interest. You can grab someone’s attention with a loud noise, but you have not made them interested. You have only startled them. Interest requires thought. Interest requires the audience’s mind to be engaged, to be processing, to be wondering, anticipating, connecting, predicting.
Thought-provoked attention. Attention that is accompanied by active thinking. That is interest.
Why This Definition Matters
Most performers — and I include my earlier self in this — conflate attention with interest. They assume that if the audience is watching, the audience is engaged. This is wrong. An audience can watch you with polite attention while their minds are elsewhere. They are looking at you because social convention demands it, but they are thinking about dinner, or their phone, or the meeting they have tomorrow morning.
This is the zombie audience — physically present, eyes forward, mentally absent. Every performer has experienced them. And every performer who has experienced them knows the feeling: you are performing to a room full of people who are looking at you and could not care less.
Fitzkee’s definition explains why. You have their attention — perhaps through novelty, social obligation, or the fact that you are the only thing happening in the room. But you do not have their interest, because you have not provoked their thought.
The question is not “Are they watching?” The question is “Are they thinking?”
What Provokes Thought
This is where the definition becomes practically useful. If interest is thought-provoked attention, then the path to interest is clear: give the audience something to think about.
And here is the crucial qualifier: it must be within their common experience. Fitzkee is emphatic about this. To provoke thought, you must use situations, problems, language, and objects that the audience recognizes from their own lives. If the stimulus is outside their experience — if they do not recognize it, do not understand it, cannot connect it to anything they know — their mind will not engage.
This is why standard magic apparatus often fails to generate genuine interest. Red boxes with Chinese dragons. Crystal cabinets on ornate tables. Objects that exist only in the world of magic shows and have no connection to anyone’s real life. The audience sees them and thinks “magic prop.” Their mind classifies the object, files it under “weird thing a magician uses,” and disengages.
Compare this with a mentalism effect that uses a borrowed phone, or a card trick with an ordinary deck, or a prediction written on a restaurant napkin. These are objects the audience knows intimately. They have expectations about how these objects behave. When those expectations are violated — when the phone displays information it should not have, when the card changes in their hand, when the napkin prediction matches their free choice — their mind is forced to engage. The thing they know is doing something they do not expect. That gap between expectation and reality is what provokes thought.
Applying the Equation to My Own Work
Once I internalized this definition, I started evaluating every moment of my performances through a single lens: is the audience thinking right now?
The results were humbling. I found entire stretches of my show where the answer was no. The audience was watching — I had their attention — but I had not given them anything to think about. They were passively observing competent performance without being mentally engaged.
The worst offenders were my transitions. Between effects, I had been filling time with generic patter — the kind of talk that communicates nothing and provokes nothing. “Now I’d like to show you something a little different.” This is not thought-provoking. This is noise. The audience hears it, processes it instantly (no thought required), and goes back to passive observation.
I replaced those transitions with questions, stories, and provocations. Instead of “Now I’d like to show you something a little different,” I might say “Here is what I find fascinating about how decisions work in your brain — you think you are choosing freely, but are you?” That sentence provokes thought. It touches the audience’s own experience (everyone makes decisions). It creates a question (am I choosing freely?). It sets up a gap between what they believe and what I am about to demonstrate.
The difference in audience engagement was immediate and obvious. People leaned forward. Eyes sharpened. Body language shifted from polite to active. Not because I had performed a trick — the trick had not started yet — but because I had given them something to think about.
The “Over Their Heads” Problem
Fitzkee addresses the common complaint among performers: “My material is over their heads.” His response is devastating: “That is not an indictment of the audience but of the entertainer.”
If the audience is not interested, it is not because they are insufficiently intelligent. It is because you have failed to connect your material to their experience. You have presented something that does not provoke their thought because they have no framework for thinking about it.
I see this in the magic world constantly. Performers who present effects with elaborate mythological backstories, or who frame tricks using concepts from magic theory, or who reference other magicians and performances the audience has never heard of. These framings may be interesting to other magicians. They are not interesting to a general audience because they are outside the audience’s experience. They provoke no thought because the audience has no thoughts to have about them.
The fix is always the same: translate the effect into the audience’s world. Find the connection between what you are doing and what they already know, care about, or have experienced. Make it about them, not about you.
In my keynote work, this translation happens naturally. The audience is composed of professionals in a specific industry. I know their world because I have worked in it for decades. When I frame a mentalism effect around the concept of confirmation bias in business decision-making, I am speaking their language. The effect is not about magic. It is about their daily reality. And because it touches their reality, it provokes their thought.
The Thought Hierarchy
Not all thought is equally engaging. I have come to think of audience thought as a hierarchy with four levels:
Recognition thought: “Oh, that is a deck of cards.” This is the lowest level. The audience identifies what they are seeing. It is thought, technically, but barely. It does not generate sustained interest.
Expectation thought: “I wonder what he is going to do with those cards.” Higher. The audience is projecting forward, anticipating. They are building a mental model of what might happen. This generates moderate interest.
Question thought: “How is that possible?” This is where genuine interest lives. The audience has encountered something that does not fit their model. They are actively trying to resolve a cognitive conflict. This generates strong engagement.
Personal connection thought: “That is exactly what happens to me when I try to make a decision.” The highest level. The audience has connected what they are experiencing to their own life. The performance has become personally relevant. This generates deep, lasting interest.
Every moment of a show can be evaluated against this hierarchy. Am I generating recognition thought (weak), expectation thought (moderate), question thought (strong), or personal connection thought (strongest)?
Most magic performances live at the expectation and question levels. “What will happen next?” and “How did that happen?” These are genuine interest. But the performances that truly transform audiences reach the personal connection level — the moment when the audience member stops thinking about the trick and starts thinking about themselves.
The Diagnostic Power
When a performance moment falls flat — when the audience disengages, when the energy drops, when the room goes dead — the thought-provoked attention equation gives you a diagnosis.
Check involuntary versus voluntary attention. Did you grab their attention with a visual flash but fail to engage their mind? That is attention without thought. It will evaporate.
Check common experience. Are you referencing something outside the audience’s world? Are you using language, objects, or concepts they cannot connect to their own lives? If so, their minds have nothing to engage with.
Check thought level. Are you generating recognition thought (too shallow) or question thought (engaging)? Are you ever reaching personal connection thought (transformative)?
Check pacing. Are you giving the audience time to think? Rushing through material without pauses means the audience never gets the chance to engage their minds. Thought requires time. If you do not provide the time, you prevent the thought, and without thought there is no interest.
The Connection to Everything Else
What I find remarkable about this equation is how it connects to every other principle of performance. Fitzkee’s emphasis on unity — a connecting thread binds the audience’s thinking across the entire show. His emphasis on economy — excess material dilutes thought by giving the audience too many things to process. His emphasis on common experience — props and situations from the audience’s world provoke thought; alien apparatus does not.
Even his argument that the performer should sell themselves, not their tricks, maps onto this equation. People are more interested in people than in anything else, Fitzkee writes. This is because people are within everyone’s common experience. We think about people constantly — their motivations, their reactions, their stories. A performer who sells their personality gives the audience the richest possible stimulus for thought.
What Changed for Me
The practical change was this: before every show, I now review my set with one question per moment. “What is the audience thinking at this point?” If I cannot identify a specific thought — a question, an expectation, a connection to their own experience — then that moment needs work.
This is particularly powerful for identifying weak spots. The moments where the audience drifts are almost always the moments where I have not given them anything to think about. The solution is never “be more exciting.” The solution is always “give them something to think about.”
A question. A provocation. A story that touches their experience. An object they recognize behaving in a way they do not expect. A statement that challenges an assumption they hold. Any of these will provoke thought, and thought-provoked attention is interest, and interest is the only thing that separates a good show from a forgettable one.
Six words from a book written in 1943. Interest is thought-provoked attention. The simplest diagnostic tool I own, and the one I use most often.
If they are thinking, they are interested. If they are not thinking, they are not. Everything else is decoration.