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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 1931043" data-attributes="member: 2209">Structure equals function. The brain is a physiological organ. Do things to the biochemistry and you get behavioural, psychological effects. Certain mental disrders can be linked to chemical imbalances in the brain and treated with drugs to balance things again.Yes, an illiterate staring at sigils of elder sign power will have sanity loss, just like a literate who studies them intensely. Imprinting the signs on your visual cortex causes reactions in your head. Part of the manifestation could be "the growing horror of realization that reality is not how we think of it" so it is a symptom of the problem, not a cause of it. So an illiterate cultist may still want to clutch that mythos book and keep it by his side always for the feeling it gives him, like carrying the bible as a talisman against evil. It is the power inside, not necessarily the writing, although reading exposes your brain more directly than mere proximity.And this jibes with our understanding of paradigm shifts about reality. People don't go horribly insane when they study the Hesisenberg Uncertainty principle, many don't like it or irrationally struggle stubbornly against accepting it, but very few people go insane over it. But in the Mythos you find out that reality is actually that funky "out there" and they get woogy. Not people who hear second hand and have it explained to them, but people who experience it directly.Ooh, a flying squid. Many IRL would say "neat" as many do upon seeing strange undersea creatures. However if there is something about them that affects your brain directly it explains why it would universally incite detrimental long term mental effects.</blockquote>

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