Super-Abstraction and Dual-Turn Narrative Architecture: Cognitive Rhythm, Attention Span, and Variable-Amplitude Turns

This work proposes a unified structural model for narrative design by abstracting story progression into a dual-turn architecture: two major turning operations that define the minimal functional skeleton of coherent narrative movement. While traditional frameworks such as Syd Field’s three-act structure and the Eastern Kiten–Shouten–Ketsu appear culturally distinct, both reduce to the same dual-turn configuration when decomposed into functional phases. The paper further integrates cognitive science, demonstrating that the widely observed practice of dividing feature-length films into approximately eight segments corresponds to human attentional rhythms. A fifteen‑minute cycle of rising and falling tension aligns with the natural limits of attention span, explaining why Eastern and Western traditions independently converge on similar mid‑level segmentation. These segments, however, do not prescribe fixed content; they function as reference values rather than rules, allowing creators to freely adjust the number, amplitude, and distribution of intermediate turns. To accommodate the diversity of modern storytelling—including ensemble narratives, serialized formats, and interactive media—the paper introduces variable‑amplitude turns, a probabilistic model of beats and local reversals. This approach reframes existing beat theories (e.g., Save the Cat, Hero’s Journey, 8‑sequence method) as special cases nested within the dual‑turn architecture rather than competing prescriptions. Drawing on Sunzi’s concept of formlessness, the model emphasizes structural adaptability: the dual‑turn skeleton provides coherence, while the internal dynamics remain fluid. The result is a cross‑cultural, medium‑agnostic, cognitively grounded framework capable of explaining both classical narrative forms and contemporary nonlinear or multi‑threaded works.