By Chandler A. Calderon / UChicago Magazine
The unknown is at the heart of both scientific curiosity and horror, Austin Lim, CON PhD’14, observes in the introduction to his new book. It’s what drove Luigi Galvani to undertake his experiments on the electric stimulation of dead tissue—the experiments that in turn inspired Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein. And it’s why things we can’t explain make us afraid, like the empty hallways and disorienting layout of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Horror on the Brain: The Neuroscience Behind Science Fiction (Prometheus Books, 2025) is an exploration of the theory and history of neuroscience through works of horror and science fiction.
Lim delves into the real science that inspired these works, and along the way finds that the books and films themselves offer insights into the complex workings of our brains. For Lim, the science itself may be even scarier than the fiction. There’s a “haunting realization at the end of neuroscience,” he writes, “that we are not even in control over our own bodies and that our fears, desires, emotions, consciousness, and everything else in the multifaceted human experience are guided by clumps of cells.”
Wend your way through three of the science-and-fiction connections Lim explores in Horror on the Brain.
Fear factors
When the governess sees her predecessor’s ghost in the schoolroom in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, she first shrieks but then reasons with herself, deciding to she needs to stay and protect the children in her charge. This encounter encapsulates a fear response formally theorized in the 1990s, writes Lim. In this framework, fear operates “at two levels, the physiological and the cognitive,” called the “low road” and the “high road,” respectively.
The low road involves involuntary physiological changes that occur when the sympathetic nervous system, cued by the hypothalamus, increases the concentration of the hormone norepinephrine in our bloodstream to prepare us for action. Our heart rate and breathing quicken, digestive processes slow, pupils dilate, and we may get goosebumps. Like James’s governess, we might even scream. (The hypothalamus also controls hunger and sex drive. “As the joke goes,” Lim writes, “there are four Fs of the hypothalamus: fight, flight, feed, and reproduction.”)
Then a more rational reaction kicks in. This part of the fear response is theorized to originate in the prefrontal cortex, “the fanciest part of our brain,” used in planning and choice: “Circuits here help us inhibit our base animal impulses,” writes Lim. “Thinking that dead people don’t materialize out of thin air or that it is now your duty to protect the innocent children placed at your charge: high road.”
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