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Why is mystery so compelling? What draws us to the unknown? Jonah Lehrer sets out to answer these questions in a vividly entertaining and surprisingly profound journey through the science of suspense. He finds that nothing is proven to capture a person's attention as strongly as mystery, making mystery the key principle in how humans see and learn to understand the world. Whenever patterns are broken, we are hard-wired to find out why. Without our curiosity driving us to pursue new discoveries and persevere in solving stubborn problems, we would never have achieved the breakthroughs that have revolutionized human medicine, technology - and culture. From Shakespeare's plays to the earliest works of the detective genre, our entertainment and media have continually reinvented successful forms of mystery to hook audiences.