How do you change a conversation topics without any lapses?

Question

... but also without sounding too sudden or abrupt, like you are making a conscious effort to change the conversation topic. In other words, how would you describe the natural flow of conversations between two people (or two friends, for the most natural effect)

Answer 1

...Hey, you know, I met this guy and he had a really nice monkey and I ate it....

Yeah, something like that eh? What you need to do is elaborate on something really simple, even the weather, talk about clouds, wind, rain, rainforests, monkeys in rainforests, a guy you met in the rainforest that had a pet monkey...

Answer 2

by connecting the current topic to the one you want to change it to. For example, the conversation is about how everyone in the conversation looks when they are drunk, and you want to change the conversation to the gas mileage...

person 1: well i look crazy when im drunk and i do stupid things, how about you george?

george (you): oh well ive done many crazy things but the worst ive ever done was almost drive home drunk, but someone stopped me.. I cant imagine how I would drive drunk in the hummer! Speaking of the hummer, i got like 23 mpg in it the other day! thats unheard of!

from there you would direct the conversation deeper into gas mileage or gas prices... etc

this can be applied to most conversations....

sometimes if the change is a drastic one, you have to make two transitions... for example

from talking about s*x, to talking about your kids accomplishments

s*x> result of s*x> your kids accomplishements

Answer 3

Use transitions.

By this I mean, you are talking about A and want to talk about C.  So you inject B.  An example will make the clearer, but the formula (previous sentence) might be easier to remember:

"I was thinking about The Dark Knight movie last night (=A), and, Oh, speaking of movies (=B), "You've seen the first Batman movie (=C) right?"

That's a simple illustration.

A good B relates both the the A you are moving away from and the C you are moving to.

Or, "The English teacher (=A) I had last year wasn't one of my favorites.  I mean half the time I couldn't understand what he was getting at.  By the way, speaking of educational experiences (=B), are you going to science camp this

Summer (=C)?"