What do religion, television shows, and sporting events all have in common? They are all very interesting to people. Why do we find them so? You'd think that such a variety of phenomena would require a wide variety of explanations--but it turns out that the things people find compelling play on the same few psychological foundations in all of us. In this talk, Dr. Jim Davies, Associate Professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University, will describe Compellingness Foundations Theory, a unified theory of why we find things interesting.