Working Memory and Surprise

LeDoux Synaptic Self (p194)

"...prefrontal regions receive converging inputs from sensory, memory, emotional, and motivational circuits..."

So all of these can be used to set up a surprise. Clear working memory of the clues people need to see what's coming by all these means:

Sensory

Memory

Emotional

Motivational

Contextual conditioning - where something happens may be as significant to you as who or what did it to you... so locations, people, objects and events can all be given powerful emotional content early in the work of art, and be invoked to direct attention in the wrong place later, when something entirely new is underway, and one wants to maximise the surprise.

Create another conflict to distract from  the real one

p222: memories are more easily retrieved when the current mood matches that of the time of the memory's creation. So to stop a memory being sparked, best to create an utterly different mood.

expectation could also be looking in the wrong sensory realm - listening for something when the surprise is visual. Have the thalamus streaming entirely different sorts of sense data.

Two types of surprise - McCrone p259 p251 - reinforcing existing streams if things seem to be going right - so reinforce false senses of security.

Backward masking - McCrone p130

Phi effect McCrone p 122

Complication and interruption as diversions - McCrone p256

Barthes block - let the viewers see the evidence destroyed, so the culprit cannot be identified. How else? track it in different art forms.

Multiplication effect: in Agatha Christie where every character has a motive, and there are so many suspects it's hard to see the real one - too many clues. Or in the film about an art theft where the suspect is being watched, and it wearing a very distinctive bowler, and suit, and carrying an umbrella and briefcase... then when you are sure he'll be caught twenty other clones appear and they don't know who to follow.