fMRI Study of Inconceivable Cosmic Horror

ABSTRACT: Popular author Howard Phillips Lovecraft speculated in the early 20 c. that certain experiences gave rise to inconceivable cosmic horror, as if something were fundamentally, hideously wrong with the very nature of reality, a grotesque feeling, hovering at the borders of thought and beyond, as of nails on a chalkboard, but worse, inconceivably worse, as if for one moment the veils that allow us to live our lives without going mad were lifted and we heard the loathsome opera of trillions of gibbering malefic voices laughing insanely at the futility of human hopes for respite from the mocking ghoul smile of the abyss. To test this we ran a functional MRI (fMRI) of 50 sophomores while they were exposed to either a neutral stimulus, a positive stimulus (a ten dollar i-tunes gift card) or a symbol of subtle and awful wrongness that was obtained from a certain obscure group of Portugese sailors whose ceremonies are so hideous that this research team feels we will go MAD if we think about them and what we learned in those filthy cabanas reeking of garlic and body odor and shaking to the rhythms of their awful voodoo-inspired REGGAE MUSIC. We found that when exposed to the symbol of obscure cosmic horror certain regions in L4, L9 and the anterior cingulate nucleus experienced higher activation as compared to control and hypothesize that this is a cosmic horror detection module. Our research is being published in the Journal of Brain Imaging studies, although a further hypothesis that this module was IMPLANTED IN OUR BRAINS by certain — I hesitate to call them ENTITIES! for that seems to bely their fundamental strangeness or EVEN INTELLIGENCES — for that ignores that if anything they are a prototype of INSANITY — for the purpose of tormenting the poor human race — AGHH! AGGHH! THE DOOR! THE DOOR IT’S OPENING. NO! NO! NO! AND THE HANDLE — THE THING TURNING IT — GOD HELP ME! IT IS NOT A HAND!!!!!!!!

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