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.
