Surprise is the affective signature of a mismatch between what the brain predicted and what actually happened. The technique has one structure: establish (or rely on) an expectation, then break it, so your ongoing, semi-automatic processing is interrupted and attention is yanked back to the stimulus.
The jolt is brief and largely involuntary — a startle-adjacent orienting response — and it opens a short window in which the surprising item is more deeply encoded and the next message is more likely to be attended. The manipulation lies not in surprise itself (a neutral, useful signal) but in engineering a jolt whose emotional charge is then immediately spent on a request or claim before your evaluation catches up.
It differs from the Novelty Hook (T1.1), which asserts newness without breaking a pattern, and from Pattern Interruption (T1.4), which uses the same reset to derail an ongoing thought. The signature here is a manufactured jolt sitting immediately upstream of an ask.