Authors: Yathish Kumar S
Abstract: This paper proposes a theoretical synthesis between the predictive processing framework in computational neuroscience — most rigorously formalized as Karl Friston's free energy principle — and the literary phenomenon of narrative suspense. We argue that suspense is not merely a felt quality of certain texts but a measurable consequence of how narrative structures modulate prediction error across a reader's generative model of unfolding events. Drawing on empirical work in neuroaesthetics, psycholinguistics, and narratology, we develop a model in which classical plot devices — foreshadowing, withheld information, dramatic irony, the ticking clock, and the twist — function as deliberate engineering of precision-weighted prediction error. We review existing fMRI and behavioral evidence on narrative transportation and the Default Mode Network, and we present, as a Stage 1 Registered Report, a fully specified 2×2 within-subjects experimental design with power analysis, a pre-registered statistical analysis plan using linear mixed-effects modeling, and directional hypotheses derived independently from competing theoretical accounts. We close by addressing the principal objection to this research program — that formalizing suspense in information-theoretic terms risks reducing literary value to a computable quantity — and argue that this concern rests on a confusion between mechanism and meaning.
