Arcane books of forbidden lore, disturbing secrets in the family bloodline, and terrors so unspeakable the very thought of them might drive you mad.
By now, these have become standard elements in many modern horror stories.
But they were largely popularized by a single author– one whose name has become an adjective for the particular type of terror he inspired.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft grew up admiring the Gothic horror stories written by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Chambers.
But by the time he began writing in 1917, World War I had cast a long shadow over the arts.
People had seen real horrors, and were no longer frightened of fantastical folklore.
Lovecraft sought to invent a new kind of terror, one that responded to the rapid scientific progress of his era.
His stories often used scientific elements to lend eerie plausibility.
In "The Colour out of Space," a strange meteorite falls near a farmhouse, mutating the farm into a nightmarish hellscape.
Others incorporated scientific methodology into their form.
"At the Mountains of Madness" is written as a report of an Antarctic expedition that unearths things better left undiscovered.
In others, mathematics themselves become a source of horror, as impossible geometric configurations wreak havoc on the minds of any who behold them.
Like then-recent discoveries of subatomic particles or X-rays, the forces in Lovecraft’s fiction were powerful, yet often invisible and indescribable.
Rather than recognizable monsters, graphic violence, or startling shocks, the terror of “Lovecraftian” horror lies in what’s not directly portrayed– but left instead to the dark depths of our imagination.
Lovecraft’s dozens of short stories, novellas, and poems often take place in the same fictional continuity, with recurring characters, locations, and mythologies.
At first glance, they appear to be set within Lovecraft’s contemporary New England.
But beneath the surface of this seemingly similar reality lie dark masters, for whom Earth’s inhabitants are mere playthings.
More like primordial forces than mere deities, Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones lurk at the corners of our reality.
Beings such as Yog-Sothoth, “who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time.”
Or the blind, idiot god Azathoth, whose destructive impulses are stalled only by the “maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.”
These beings exist beyond our conceptions of reality, their true forms as inscrutable as their motives.
Lovecraft’s protagonists– often researchers, anthropologists, or antiquarians– stumble onto hints of their existence.
But even these indirect glimpses are enough to drive them insane.
And if they survive, the reader is left with no feeling of triumph, only cosmic indifference– the terrible sense that we are but insignificant specks at the mercy of unfathomable forces.
But perhaps the greatest power these creatures had was their appeal to Lovecraft’s contemporaries.
During his lifetime, Lovecraft corresponded with other writers, encouraging them to employ elements and characters from his stories in their own.
References to Lovecraftian gods or arcane tomes can be found in many stories by his pen pals, such as Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch.
Today, this shared universe is called the Cthulhu Mythos, named after Lovecraft’s infamous blend of dragon and octopus.
Unfortunately, Lovecraft’s fear of the unknown found a less savory expression in his personal views.
The author held strong racist views, and some of his works include crude stereotypes and slurs.
But the rich world he created would outlive his personal prejudices.
And after Lovecraft’s death, the Cthulhu Mythos was adopted by a wide variety of authors, often reimagining them from diverse perspectives that transcend the author’s prejudices.
Despite his literary legacy, Lovecraft was never able to find financial success.
He died unknown and penniless at the age of 46– a victim of the universe’s cosmic indifference.
But his work has inspired numerous short stories, novels, tabletop games, and cultural icons.
And as long as humans feel a sense of dread about our unknown future, Lovecraftian horror will have a place in the darkest corners of our imagination.
Paying close attention to something: Not that easy, is it?
It's because our attention is pulled in so many different directions at a time, and it's in fact pretty impressive if you can stay focused.
Many people think that attention is all about what we are focusing on, but it's also about what information our brain is trying to filter out.
There are two ways you direct your attention.
First, there's overt attention.
In overt attention, you move your eyes towards something in order to pay attention to it.
Then there's covert attention.
In covert attention, you pay attention to something, but without moving your eyes.
Think of driving for a second.
Your overt attention, your direction of the eyes, are in front, but that's your covert attention which is constantly scanning the surrounding area, where you don't actually madeline68@example.org.
I'm a computational neuroscientist, and I work on cognitive brain-machine interfaces, or bringing together the brain and the computer.
I love brain patterns.
Brain patterns are important for us because based on them we can build models for the computers, and based on these models computers can recognize how well our brain functions.
And if it doesn't function well, then these computers themselves can be used as assistive devices for therapies.
But that also means something, because choosing the wrong patterns will give us the wrong models and therefore the wrong therapies.
Right?
In case of attention, the fact that we can shift our attention not only by our eyes but also by thinking -- that makes covert attention an interesting model for computers.
So I wanted to know what are the brainwave patterns when you look overtly or when you look covertly.
I set up an experiment for that.
In this experiment there are two flickering squares, one of them flickering at a slower rate than the other one.
Depending on which of these flickers you are paying attention to, certain parts of your brain will start resonating in the same rate as that flickering rate.
So by analyzing your brain signals, we can track where exactly you are watching or you are paying attention to.
So to see what happens in your brain when you pay overt attention, I asked people to look directly in one of the squares and pay attention to it.
In this case, not surprisingly, we saw that these flickering squares appeared in their brain signals which was coming from the back of their head, which is responsible for the processing of your visual information.
But I was really interested to see what happens in your brain when you pay covert attention.
So this time I asked people to look in the middle of the screen and without moving their eyes, to pay attention to either of these squares.
When we did that, we saw that both of these flickering rates appeared in their brain signals, but interestingly, only one of them, which was paid attention to, had stronger signals, so there was something in the brain which was handling this information so that thing in the brain was basically the activation of the frontal area.
The front part of your brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions as a human.
The frontal part, it seems that it works as a filter trying to let information come in only from the right flicker that you are paying attention to and trying to inhibit the information coming from the ignored one.
The filtering ability of the brain is indeed a key for attention, which is missing in some people, for example in people with ADHD.
So a person with ADHD cannot inhibit these distractors, and that's why they can't focus for a long time on a single task.
But what if this person could play a specific computer game with his brain connected to the computer, and then train his own brain to inhibit these distractors?
Well, ADHD is just one example.
We can use these cognitive brain-machine interfaces for many other cognitive fields.
It was just a few years ago that my grandfather had a stroke, and he lost complete ability to speak.
He could understand everybody, but there was no way to respond, even not writing because he was illiterate.
So he passed away in silence.
I remember thinking at that time: What if we could have a computer which could speak for him?
Now, after years that I am in this field, I can see that this might be possible.
Imagine if we can find brainwave patterns when people think about images or even letters, like the letter A generates a different brainwave pattern than the letter B, and so on.
Could a computer one day communicate for people who can't speak?
What if a computer can help us understand the thoughts of a person in a coma?
We are not there yet, but pay close attention.
We will be there soon.
Thank you.
(Applause)