Horror on the Brain

The Neuroscience Behind Science Fiction

In this fascinating exploration of fear and madness, neuroscientist Dr. Austin Lim recounts psychology’s most bizarre and haunting real-life cases alongside famous speculative fiction that stretched that science to the edge.

Curiosity drives humanity to wade through the unknown, often leading to unforeseeable consequences. Scientists throughout centuries have mined these depths looking for – and finding – answers to life’s most mysterious questions, but perhaps the most memorable accounts of hidden dimensions have been left to us by science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin. When science discovers, science fiction writers ask “what’s next?” Horror on the Brain reveals the real science and psychology behind science fiction’s most iconic characters, from Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein to the doctors of H.P. Lovecraft and even today’s horror blockbusters like Stranger Things and The Last of Us.

In this fascinating exploration of fear and madness, neuroscientist Dr. Austin Lim recounts psychology’s most bizarre and haunting real-life cases alongside famous speculative fiction that stretched that science to the edge. In 1924, Hans Berger invented the EEG, a commonly used brain imaging device, as a means to telepathically communicate with his sister, eerily similar to the protagonist in H.P. Lovecraft’s Beyond the Wall of Sleep, while Nobel Prize-winning research on marine animals in the 1960s reflects the concepts of his At the Mountains of Madness. Phineas Gage, the 19th century man who experienced a dramatic personality shift following a traumatic brain injury, liked his experience to that of Gregor Samsa from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Investigate the neurological causes of schizophrenia and how characters in Sheridan Le Fanu’s story In a Glass Darkly manifest the diagnosis.

Neurological conditions from sleepwalking to the Cotard delusion – which leads patients to believe they are dead, even going to such extremes as burying themselves alive – have provided the basis for horror stories since their discovery, and, likewise, the wildly imaginative minds of writers have even prompted scientific research. Horror on the Brain uses illuminating analogies to connect science fact and science fiction, showing how spooky stories contain insights into the dark corners of the human mind and why we can’t stop looking into the abyss.

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