A Trainer Says Unfinished Stories Hold You Because Waiting Releases Dopamine

David JP Phillips, a trainer who teaches presentation skills, begins with a meeting that is going badly.

He has been invited to Stockholm to pitch training to a large training firm in Scandinavia. A woman named Liana meets him at the door and warns him that the pitch is not to her but to three men in the next room. They are all majority owners of the company, they all previously served in the armed forces, and none thought they needed what he was selling. As he walks toward the room, sweat on his palms and his heart racing, Liana calls out behind him, “David!” He turns, expecting a tip that might save him.

Then Phillips stops telling the story.

He asks the audience if withholding the ending is annoying. The laughter says yes, and that is exactly his point. That itch for resolution, Phillips says, is what a surge of dopamine, a brain chemical that helps carry signals between nerve cells, feels like.

Phillips calls dopamine part of an “angels’ cocktail” that also includes vasopressin, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. When dopamine rises in the blood, he says, people become more focused, more motivated, and better able to remember. He told the audience that their focus as they pictured the office and guessed what Liana would say was the chemical at work.

To create that effect, Phillips tells people to build suspense and launch a cliffhanger by delaying the payoff. His larger claim is that all storytelling works this way by definition, because a story is always about waiting and expecting what comes next.

The takeaway is Phillips’s practical advice. If you want someone to pay attention and remember, do not give away the ending right away. Hold back Liana’s tip for a while.