is the emotion that holds a reader, and it looks like it ought to be made of ordinary machinery: expectation, anticipation, prediction. Nobody had looked at the neural side of it. So participants read a suspenseful literary text in a scanner, broken into short passages, and rated how much suspense each passage produced. Then the ratings were set against the imaging. Which areas tracked the tension?
The suspense ratings tracked a social and predictive set of regions. Passages rated more suspenseful went with activation in the , in bilateral frontal regions along the inferior frontal sulcus, in lateral premotor cortex, and in posterior temporal and temporo-parietal areas. Those are the areas usually associated with and with , which puts suspense in the business of modeling people and guessing what happens next.
Stories produce real emotion, and suspense is the response that keeps a reader in the chair. On the face of it it should be made of unremarkable parts: expectation, anticipation and prediction, all of them processes a brain runs constantly. The neural side of the experience had not been investigated.
The design is pleasingly simple. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while participants read a suspenseful literary text, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, divided into short passages. After each passage the reader rated how much suspense they had felt, which gives a rating per passage per person to set against the imaging.
Higher suspense ratings went with activation in the medial frontal cortex, in bilateral frontal regions along the inferior frontal sulcus, in lateral premotor cortex, and in posterior temporal and temporo-parietal areas. Taken as a set, those are the regions the literature associates with social cognition and with predictive inference.
The reading the authors offer is that the emotional experience of suspense depends on exactly that machinery, which turns a gripping plot into a kind of parasite on ordinary cognition. Weigh the method as well, though. This is one text, the suspense is rated by the readers themselves, and arguing from an active region back to a mental function is the least reliable move in imaging.
wat. The passages readers found most gripping lit the circuits for working out people and predicting what comes next.
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It identifies suspense as something built rather than something undergone. If holding a reader relies on the machinery for guessing other people and guessing outcomes, then suspense is a side effect of what minds do anyway.
How do we know?
Lehne and colleagues collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data while participants read E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman in short passages, and related each passage’s suspense rating to the activation.
What is still unknown
One literary text, suspense rated by the readers themselves, and an inference running from brain area back to mental function, which is the weakest kind of argument imaging can make.
Learn something?
Where to next
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