From the Vault: Mind Flayers

and its biology, how would that work? Yeah? If you this psychic alien squid creature that that runs amuck in the Dungeons and Dragons universe, what if this was real? What can we look to in the actual scientific world to understand it? And and you know what science can we illuminate by looking to the mind Flair? And you might be wondering, guys, why are you rerunning this episode? And wait, why did this come out on a Friday?

Well it is because and no spoilers here, the mind Flare is brought up in the latest season of Stranger Things. And we know that there are a lot of Stranger Things fans out there because last month we did our Science of Stranger Things episode. I like to think of you, Joe and I as like, what happens when the kids from Stranger Things grow up and like this is what

they do for a living. Uh, And so we thought, hey, you know, let's put this back out there and people who might have binge watched that season in the last seven days will go, oh, now I can really dive into what a mind flare is. And uh, you basically supplement my Stranger Things experience. All right, well let's dive into it. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. From How Stuff Works dot Com. A form slightly larger than Drifts,

but obviously humanoid, drifted around a nearby stalactite. Drifts kicked off a stone to propel himself at it, drawing his other scimitar as he went. He knew his peril a moment later, for his enemy's head resembled a four tentacle octopus. Drifts had never actually viewed such a creature before, but he knew what it was as an ill efid a mind flair, the most evil and most feared monster in all of the under dark. Hey, welcome to Stuff to

Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Sager, and today we're talking about mind flares. That's right. As you get from that quote mind flares. For those of you who aren't aware, we're really diving down the geek well today to get a monster that we both love and grew up with. But this is a creature that was originally created for dungeons and dragons, right, Yeah, it also has a long history that I'm just learning

about in the Final Fantasy Games. And I imagine other other properties as well that that that's that were inspired by, especially early dungeons and dragons. Yeah. But so we're not just talking about this because we're into geeky stuff, right not. That's like, yeah, where you using the mind flair as a jumping off point to look at some really interesting science, both in biology but also a little bit in technology today, in the same way that drifts our hero in the

opening narration used that d stalactite as a springboard. Right. So that was a quote from R. A. Salvatore's Exile, which is part of the Dark Elf trilogy. It's actually booked two in the Dark Elf trilogy. Uh, you may be familiar with this. If you're not, look give you

a quick primer. These are Dungeons and Dragons based novels. Uh, set in the Forgotten realm setting based around this character, dritzto Arden, that is pretty popular with that crowd and still still part of the property the board games that come out He's He's mentioned in the materials for the big current under Dark campaign. I'm pretty sure they're still

coming out with novels with him in it too. Um and these I have a fondness for these novels because they were like my way to wind down my brain after doing too much research, either when I was in graduate school or sometimes from podcasting. So I've read I want to say, there's like these books, and I've probably read three quarters of them. Uh mostly I I refer to them as sword porn because there's just like whole sections, like pages and pages where it's just describing like the

ways in which he moves his swords. I mean just in this one paragraph alone, like they've had to mention like the way he drew a scimitar and everything. But mind Flares are like the primary antagonist in this specific book. So I pulled that quote, and then there's another one later on where I think that this contributed to the

lore surrounding them, so you know, we'll refer back to it. Yeah, So see we're using this, this creature, this though wondrous creature, as as as an opportunity to discuss some some science, and we're using science as a way to explain some of the more fan tactic aspects all of this fictional monster.

It's kind of relationship we come back to time and time again, because, as I like to say, no matter how fantastic, how crazy the imagined monster is, you can you can almost count on nature to have equal or surpassed it in weirdness. Yeah, that's that's exactly what's so wonderful about using this for an episode of the show. And I'd like to point out that this is actually connected to two other things that we do on Stuff to All Your Mind. The first is obviously Robert's Monster

Science that he's been working on for years. If you go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, there are I dare say, a hundred maybe monster science posts like you've covered almost every monster in existence. Um well, well I wouldn't go that far because they're pretty inexhaustible, but um yeah, the monster the Monster of the Week

post or kind of like the monster Science versions. And then there's the video series Monster Science as well, which you can find there or you can find while all the videos are on our Facebook and in our YouTube channel as well. Uh. But also you and Joe are doing an episode coordinated with this that's about mind control. Yeah. It's gonna be titled what Mind Control feels Like, and

it should be the episode that follows this. I think this episode right here is coming out on a Thursday, and then the following one, the mind control episode, will come out on Tuesday. But it'll all come together. So brace yourselves, everybody. We're we're really getting into it with minds, brains and actual brain eating today. Yeah, because one of the things about the mind flares, if you're not familiar and if you're not familiar at all with the mind flares,

just bear with us. We'll get to the real science as well. But they are not only these these octopus headed, purple fleshed evil doers that live in the under dark, this vast subterranean realm in the Dungeons and Dragons world.

They are also uh psychic or psionically gifted creatures that are able to just dominate people left and right with their amazing psychic powers, you know, throwing mind blasts all over the dungeon just really wreaking havoc, but that is their primary power, and they're finishing move is to grab ahold of you with their tentacle mouths and suck your brain right out of your head. It's like, uh, total kill,

like instant kill. I think if you get grappled by a mind flare by the head or whatever, you know. They actually not to skip too far ahead into their anatomy, but they're generally represented as having just four digits on their hands, so they have three knuckles. And I was thinking the other day this would be perfect for a t p K tattoo for flair or total party kill. That's your like your thug mind flare. Yes, I like it. I like for those of you not with the game,

total party Killers. When the creatures in the game were more specifically, the dungeon master kills off the entire party with a generally general this occurs because the encounter is not studematically calibrated. Yeah exactly. So yeah, so we're gonna use these as a jumping off point. And you guys are probably saying to yourselves right now, like WHOA, Like,

this isn't what I signed up for. Just bear with us, because the thing about mind Flavors in particular that is really useful for stuff to blow your mind is they were created for this game, and then it's been a good almost forty years that people have been working on them, whether it's in these novels that I mentioned earlier, or for rule books or for video games or whatever. It's

it's kind of like Star Wars creatures. They've had like more and more tagged onto their fictional biology and culture and philosophy over the years, to the point that it's like it's this fleshed out world, you know, and it's it's really fascinating what multiple people brought to the table with it and how that then subsequently translates because they were obviously inspired by you know, creatures from real life

or or philosophy in different cultures. Oh yeah, indeed. I mean, and in so many cases either the people adding to the mythos so say, the mind flares, they either were directly inspired by natural world organisms or they're just weird

creativity managed to to parallel actual natural world weird. That's that like somebody needs to do it like a history of the mind Flare creation book where they like talk to all these people, because in front of us here in the studio right now is Volo's Guide to Monsters, and it has a pretty comprehensive, like what almost ten page section on mind flares, more more, I dare say, than real world encyclopedias have on some of the real

world animals. We're going to talk about today's episode, but it's really impressive and I would love to see how all these pieces came together. Yeah, and that just came out by the way of anyone out there is interested, uh, just just published now. In terms of what we're not canna attempt to do what we just mentioned here, we're not going to actually uh, you know, go piece by piece through the generation of the mind flare, but we will just touched on its origins, which go back to

Gary Gygax himself, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons. Indeed, he is the guy. He's the guy who started the whole thing. And you've got a nice quote from him here specifically about mind flares. Yeah, he said, quote the mind Flare I made up out of whole cloth, using my imagination, but inspired by the cover of Brian Lumley's novel in paperback edition, the burrowers beneath. So I've never seen this before. What's it looked like? Um? I looked

at it, I will. I looked at the various covers, and the one that I think most modern readers are used to is the one that looks kind of like an eye in the center of a nautilus, And that one looks more mine flairy. Um. But the original cover, the one that I think Guy GaX would have seen, just kind of looks like a silhouette of dark tentacles rising out of a hill. But still, I take the

man into his word. Um lumly of course was Lovecraft influenced, and there's definitely a lot of love Crafty and weirdness to the mind flare. So just just as the fictional race has crossed over from another realm and dungeons and dragons, the very inception is sort of a cross pollination from a different dimension of literary fantasy. Yeah. I think you could probably trace their origins all the way back to

Lovecraft's intense fear of sea life. So, and just to get this out of the way too, because again I know a number of you maybe primarily familiar with these critters from Final Fantasy are their properties. Eltid is definitely a d n D property, but they've got the t M on that. Yeah, so you can't just throw e litids around another games or video games or novels without you know, big dungeon getting a cut. But mind flairs

you'll see elsewhere. Yeah, thats right. In fact, we saw there was a paper that you've found that stunning all about the various types of sort of cephalopod monster mollusks that show up in video games. Oh yeah, yeah, it's an article um that was published in geek Studies, and I'll try to include a link to that on the landing page for this episode. But yeah, just all about

weird squid and octopus monsters from sixteen bit videos. And there was this amazing chart of all of the various ones, uh down to their little like eight bit renderings, and there's the mind flare very recognizable in there. So yeah, again, these are basically purple people with octopus heads. Their mouths are like Lamprey's. We're gonna go through the anatomy pretty carefully because that's how we're going to tie it into

real world science. That's right, all right, So let's dive in let's talk about their origins real quick, which are of course shrouded in mystery. So they're basically two origin stories in play here. Most likely the mind flarees hail from the far Realm, which is an alien dimension of

cosmic horror, and the dn D universe. But there's also this whispered rumor that if from the future and perhaps even the distant highly evolved state of humanoid life in the multiverse, though I'm I'm not sure much stock is

actually put in that interpretation. I want to say that that is that's the one that's heavily Lovecraft influence, because there's and I can't believe I can't remember the name of the monster from one of the Lovecraft short stories, but that's one of the things from his This monster is from the future and it's come back in time to sort of right some wrong or something like that.

And I think this is again not there's no sources behind this, but but if my memory is correct from playing D and D for twenty some odd years, uh, their origin story differs depending on which setting you're playing D and D. And well, that's right, it's a it's a multiverse. And of course they also instill this in you. Your game is not necessarily taking place in the same corner of the multiverse as the campaign across across the Road. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So one of the really important plot points with the Lipids is that an ages path, they carved out an enormous empire for themselves, what the cells one that spanned whole worlds and the material plane as well as other various planes. They they had slash have spaceships called no Alloids that enable travel across the plains. But they've lost the technology of their manufacture, like any you know, decent

elder race. They've they've forgotten how to kind. Yeah, but they built their empire mostly on the back of psionically dominated slave labor. But after time, as you know happens when you build your empire on slave labor, the slaves rose up, they rebelled, and their their empire fell to pieces, and so they had to go out and just sort of find little corners to survive. And and in particular

they end up taking up in the under dark. Uh. And and here they end up, you know, having more slave races, and each one they mess up by just psionically dominating them, altering them changing them into whatever form suits the mind flares and just just causing lots of trauma and mischief, um, just across the world. They remind me kind of of this ant that we've covered on the show before. I'm gonna have trouble remembering its Latin name off the top of my head, but you might

know it Court Accepts. Oh yes, the court aceps. Uh fun guy that end up growing in the ants. Yeah, exactly. Um, so this this fun guy gets inside these aunt brains and it's it sort of controls them to take care of its fungal colony and allow it to take the

ant resources and mind flair. I guess sociology is somewhat similar, and that they they dominate these you know, people of various D and D species, dwarves, elves, human beings, whatever gift Oh yeah, the gift off touching the gift here, and they're the slaves that sort of like work and do all the labor for the mind flares. They even one of the things that the slaves are known to do is they have to scrub down the elder brain and get massage. Oh yeah, and they all their brains

important to that. That's the thing all the all these different elements that we're touching on here. They might sound a bit like fluff, but we're gonna come back to them and discuss some science around them. But real quick about the Gift. The Gift were the the the biggest

mistake that they made. These were the thralls that really rose up and not only helped bring about the follow their empire, but regularly now the Gift regularly venture out from their astral plane headquarters to hunt down and eradicate

elliptid colonies whoever they can find them. And that's one of the key reasons that elipids live and you know, the safety and secret of the under dark or other secluded places and in each separate colonies cut off from all the others while while they calculate and scheme and figure out how they're going to restore their empire. Right. Yeah, So they basically like live in these like deep caves there.

It's like a it's almost like an ant colony, it is, yeah, Yeah, and the it's all based around the center of the elder brain I mentioned earlier, which we're gonna get into. Uh. They but they yeah, they kind of like occasionally just go out grab some slaves pull them back in and like that's how their society runs. Yeah, it's gonna be very helpful as we go far, just to think of them as you social parasites. Yes, they write really like

they have two options. They either capture somebody and eat their brain, or capture them and dominate their mind and make them into a slave. Right, So either way an encounter with the mind flare is going to end up bad, all right, So it's launched into their biology again. Bipedal humanoid bodies, four tentacles, four claude digits per hand. Diet consists mostly of csionic energy, with some additional sub sustenance

stuff from the gobble brains themselves. Now, technically speaking, their troglophiles their cave dwelling creatures that complete their life cycles in a cave, but they can also survive above ground. Help me out with this. Trug l files is a real term. Yeah, yeah, this is This is a real term. It's not done in dragon's terms. This would be the the the natural world classification for a creature like this, though, of course, classifications are difficult when you're considering even fictional

intelligent creatures. You know, one that is choosing to live underground in a subterranean environment for their own purposes, and now their reproductive system is utterly bizarre. And yet uh, there are real world examples that are almost as bizarre.

Oh yeah, I mean they're a real world example. When you start looking at complex life cycles, you look at some of the the parasite life cycles out there and various insect life cycles that are not only just like a bizarre circle of parasitic behavior, but also when you see branches in the tree, and this is key to understanding the mind players, when you see various morphs that can emerge. Yeah, so all right, walk us through this.

All right, So you have an egg. That's where it starts, an a litid egg, so a mind for an adult mind flare. What came first, the mind flare the egg. Now an adult mind flare lays an egg. Yes, okay, so they lay an egg. That egg hatches into an a liftid tadpole, so little squirming us a tadpole, a little larval alipid. Now from that point there are a

few different things that can happen. Ideally. There there's a process called a sea morphosis, and this is where adult mind flares would come and pick up the little tadpole and implant in the cranium of a captive humanoid, like a captive kind of like psychically washed humanoid, and they usually put it through the ear. But there's a drawing in Volos Guide of monsters of like it's very based on wrath of calm of like the tadpole like crawling its way up the face towards the eye socket of

a victim. Yeah. So yeah, that exact scenario. So one way or another, they get that dust that puppy into the brain and then it eats the brain, replaces the brain, and then that host body becomes the new mind flare body. Go. You know, I guess it turns per pole, slimy, loses a digit on each hand, gets pretty skinny. Yeah, and then you've got you've got yourself an adult elithid that carries on adult elithid business and eventually it can go

onto legs of its own. Right now, there are two other possible ways that this can go with the elithid tadpole. So sometimes the elithid becomes a you letharid and this is uh, this is essentially a super mind flare that is going to eventually leave the colony with some other mind flares found a new colony and become its elder brain. Okay, so it doesn't have human humanoid form. It's just like

the superpowered tadpole. It's a super powered tadpole, still have to be implanted into a humanoid, but it's destined to be this uh, this this cedar of the new Calling, and it will eventually grow into a giant brain right once it establishes itself elsewhere. And then the other way that things can go is the elithid tadpole can become a neolithid. And this is when they're nobody's taking care

of the tadpoles. Nobody, no mind flares are coming around to look after them and make sure they're stuffed into the right skull. In this case, they all freak out and start eating each other, and whichever one is left grows into a giant, powerful beast intelligence monster. Huh Okay, I have never encountered one of these before. It's just good.

It's like a level wow. Okay, but it but what's going on with both of these cases, and this is where there's a there's a real world parallel that will will break down a little a little more in a bit, is that you essentially have two morphs springing off from

the tadpole. One is caused by negative environmental constraints and that leads to the neolithid, and the other is positive environmental constraints, which leads to the leth All right, so I'm assuming this is dependent on like how many humanoids are available for them to eat brains of, or make slaves into, or or or whatnot, how big the cave system is that they're living within. Yeah, it has to

do with population density. In our real world examples that will get too, so you can think of it in those terms like is the is the colony successful enough to send off anything to found a new colony, or is it even successful enough for the tadpoles to continue to thrive or should they just all e each other out of you know, purely economic cannibalism, which is the

thing that does happen in multiple species. Yeah, right, right, in real species, but also in this fictional when we're talking about right, just in our real world, cannibalism is always the most economic path to avoid wasting the energy that goes into flesh. So we've mentioned this elder brain multiple times, and basically I just said it's a giant brain. But let's let's get a little bit more defined here

on this. Yeah. I mean, essentially, it's just a giant brain in a Brian pool that is in charge of the mind flare colonies. See in the in the Um Drifts books. It's in cerebral fluid. And I always wondered where did they get all that cerebral fluid from, Like maybe they eat the brains and then they like keep they drain the cerebral fluid out to put in their little elder brain pool. But they've got now they just have Amazon weekly deliveries on siling Okay, yeah, well the

two day shipping on projects. Yeah, you gotta do it, even to the under dark exactly. Yeah. So, according to Volos, what's going on here with the elder brain is, so is this to survive and to make the necessary meta calculations in order, you know, to to to actually survive

and to eventually reclaim their empire. Uh, they've either evolved or developed the elder brains and these are giant immobile thought thought organs that flowed in tanks of brine serving as the mind flares colonies, library of knowledge, a history of past lives, and a nexus of meta cognition for the individuals in the colony, and each individual that is going to employ non aliftid thralls as well. Now, this

reminds me of in the Marvel universe. They have a similar thing, the cre alien species, which I haven't seen a lot of the TV show Agents of Shield, but I think they show up in there. They're ruled by a thing that's very similar to this, that's called the Supreme Intelligence. It's kind of the same thing. It's just like a big blob and like a giant canister of cerebral fluid, and it's got some brain tentacles and eyes in the mouth. These don't have eyes in the mouth.

They're just just big brains and they do all sorts of of you know, psionically powerful tactics against anybody that threatens them. But we'll come back to the Elder Brains in a bit, because there are actual parallels to discuss with humans. All right, So that is the crash course in the fictional elithics. Now from here on in the episode, we're gonna largely focus on what the natural world, what real life biology can tell us about what's going on with the elithids and how we can use the elithid

examples the way to explore these examples. Yea. So the way that I approached this was sort of like, let's Frankenstein and from the real world a mind flare out of what we know of how they're described, right, So the their biology, anatomy, all that stuff like what's in the real world that we can bring to our understanding of this. And the first place that I went to was their mouths because they are described as even though they've got these tentacles, they're described as their specific mouths

as being like lamp re mouths. Lampreys, if you're unfamiliar, are jawless fish. Uh. They've got these thorny, suction cup like mouths and they are parasites much like the mind flares and a lot of the creatures we're gonna talk about today. They use their mouths to attach to an animal's body and then they cut with these teeth through surface tissue until they reach the blood and bodily fluids of it um. They're they they're known to live in both coastal and fresh water. They're kind of they look

like eels kind of, but they're not their fish. Uh. There's three types of them. There's flesh eaters, blood drinkers, and just a type that lives for three to seven years in a larval stage and then they only live for six months as adults. But they don't really feed. They just reproduce with other lamp reas and then they die. So an equally weird example from the real world. Now, there is an excellent article on Wired from called Absurd Creature of the Week the lamprey that just really dove

deep into the lamprey's biology. So I turned to that for a real deep description of this mouth. What's going on with this mouth? Now? Uh, flesh eater lampreys and blood drinker lampreys have different types of mouth. So let's go with the flesh eater for today. Since we know that the mind flare is definitely using it to eat brains. So they have a structure that's like a tongue. These

are lampreys, and it's called a piston. It has this convex structure to it that moves both side to side and up and down, basically gouging flesh out of its victim with a strong middle tooth attached to it. And this middle tooth is shaped like a U in the flesh eater lampreys and like a W and the blood drinker lampreys, and for different reasons, with one's better at like pulling flesh into the mouth, the other is better

getting blood flowing um. And there are very much like other animals that we've talked about when we've covered vampires on the show before. They have glands in their throat that secrete an anticoagulant and that helps keep the blood flowing help get stuffed down their throat. Uh. In the flesh eaters, the anti coagulant glands are much smaller, but they still exist. So presumably a mind flare would have

some kind of anticoagulant gland as well. Now, lampreys have two rings of structures inside the mouth that helps them adhere to their victims through suction. One ring is the oral fimbria, and it basically looks like little leaves that are made of flaps of tissue, and these adhere closely to the skin of the victim and they form a tight seal. Like I mean, I've never been bitten by lamprey, but I imagine like from what I've heard, their next

to impossible to get off of you. Like part of the country that I lived in for a while in New Hampshire was right next to what was called the Lamprey River, and so obviously there are a lot of fresh water lamp freas in there. I never encountered them, but you know, my understanding is like you know, you have to basically kill it to get it off and

then have it I think surgically removed. Um, so it's it's clamped on their tight There's a second ring in the mouth that is made of conical structures known as papal a, and these helped the lamprey actually sense where best to attach themselves. So the blood drinking lampreys, they're so sensitive with this region of their mouth they can actually use it to find underlying blood vessels a victims.

So this is like think of it as like uh, like radar almost right, Like it's a supersensitive organ built into their mouth, so they can find the best possible play to clamp down and start chewing and sucking blood or and or flesh out of you. Now, they don't often go after humans don't be listening to this and like freak out. Oh boy like that. You know, that's pretty rare. I think it. It has happened obviously. But

fun fact that Joe actually told me about. I was talking to him about this episode before we came to the studio and he said, well, did you know this is classic Joe. He's got just like this ample amount of weird knowledge. He goes, did you know Henry the First died from eating a pie fell Lampreys? And I was like, what what are you talking about? Yeah? And he was right. Apparently, King Henry the First died from food poisoning when he ate what was referred to as

a surfeit of Lamprey's in a pie. His physician specifically told him not to because like this is this is a bad idea, and he instead, I think he was like sixty eight sixty nine. He was, you know, for the time, quite elderly, but he was like, nope, I'm eating this pie Fell Lampreys. I can't imagine what that tastes like. It just made me immediately nauseous when Joe told me about it. But by all accounts, there's there's multiple pieces of evidence that this guy ate a lamprey pie.

We'll have to hear from people who have a culinary experience with lampreys. Yeah, maybe they taste great. I don't know. I can't imagine that a creature that solely subsists on just like hanging onto the body of its victim and draining it of blood has got like a lot of like good fatty flesh on it for eating. But I'm also a vegetarian. Now, for the mind flares part, of course, it's it's not so much about blood or meat, it's

about giving that brain. So so I guess the idea here would be if we looked at the lamprey, it would be to either use some sort of specialized tongue after attachment to either like cut its way through an eye socket or some other natural fleshy gateway to the brain,

or just like straight through the skull. Yeah. The way I've always seen it drawn is from behind, Like the of mind flare, tentacles wrap around your face room behind the mouth attaches to the back of your skull, and then presumably this piston thing is in their mouth and just bores through your skull, and subsequently they just chunk the your brain up and suck it up through their mouth. Yeah,

leaving you with a head without a brain. All right, Well, on that note, uh, let's take a quick break and when we come back, we will explore more horrifying wonders related to the elithid body as well as natural world organisms. Okay,

so we're back, Robert. You had previously mentioned the possibilities of tadpoles in real life and in mind flare life being cannibals, So let's talk about this, all right, So once more again, according to Tvolo's guided monsters and elithid las eggs and protected pools and larval tadpole hatcheries, all right, the tadpoles hatch and then they get turned into adult

mind flares, now tadpoles and abandoned pools. These are pools that you know, the mind flares that looked after we're all slain by high level adventures or or or gift coming in from from the outside, so there's nobody to take care of them, so that what they do is they end up eating each other until all you have left is just one mutated survivor known as a neolithid, and this just grows into a monstrous psychic worm. That's the danger to elipids and non elithids alike. Large powerful

animal minded monster with us with some sionic ability. Okay, so there are some real world examples of this, right yeah. Yeah, for the real world world parallel here would be tiger salamander cannibal morphs. So the life cycle of the tiger salamander features an interesting developmental fork. An egg can develop into a normal larval tadpole or we're into this cannibal morph. See. Now, under normal circumstances, tiger salamatter eggs developed into normal tadpoles

and then into normal adult tiger salamanders. But if the population is too large for the available environment, so like they're in a small pool or something. Uh, then consistent tactile interactions with other tadpoles caused some of the eggs to develop into tadpoles with larger heads, bigger mouths, and more well developed teeth. And I'm definitely picturing like a

baby Zeno more. Yeah. So yeah, it's basically the scenario is not to personify uh, you know, non human non intelligent um relationships here, but it's almost like there's a there's somebody in charge of all right, we've got too many. We've got too many salamanders in this pool. Let's just make one that's really good at eating all the other all the other salamanders. Uh and so it basically they have a built in population control system laar of on

larva cannibalism. The broodpools overcrowded and the resources are too scarce, then some tadpoles physically transform in order to better gobble up the others. That is absolutely terrifying. Let's back up for a second here. Let's imagine let's apply this to

human beings. Imagine there's a nursery and it's you know, at the hospital, and it's got all the babies in their little beds, right, and one baby grows a little bit larger, Its head gets bigger, it gets this huge mouth, and it grows well developed teeth, and then it proceeds to crawl around the nursery and eat some of the other babies. That's basically what we're talking that's the basic

scenario here. Yeah, wow, and uh and and after this culling is done, the the cannibal MorphOS salamander, it keeps its large head and bigger mouth, but then goes through its diet normalizes, and it goes through a normal life cycle.

I'm trying to imagine like the animal documentary that's narrated by like Morgan Freeman or Sigourney Weaver or something, and they're like, and here we have the tiger salamander eating all of its fellow tadpole babies, and it's just like, well, that's that's exactly the kind of thing Attenborough would hit us with. Attenborough would love it, that's true, And I would have to I would have to immediately skip the track for my son as we watched the Nature shows. Um,

now let's turn to the neolithid. So, yeah, the neolithid, you can look at and say, this is essentially a cannibal morph. This is one tadpole eating all the other

tadpoles and then growing into this giant thing. So if we're to use nature as our guide here, we can only assume that the neo liftid morph once served in evolutionary purpose, allowing a tadpole pool to survive in times of chaos or abandonment, absorbing the nutrients of its fellow tadpoles with just pure economic ruthlessness, just like the cannibal morphs.

Of tiger salamanders. However, with the mind flares, you can definitely say that the neo lithi is something of of this stigial thing, right because there's there's no information any of the books. I like that that that let us know that. Then the annal lipid continues the a lipid race in any way, shape or form um. It's not going to develop into as far as I can tell, it's not going to develop into an adult mind flare.

So this is perhaps in a you know, a fitting accident for a species that has manipulated other species and itself for so long. Under normal condition, larger tad bowls would would be killed and they certainly would not be permitted to mature into annal lipid. Right yeah. I would imagine like in the mind flare society, this isn't always a good thing, right Yeah, it kind of deviates from

your normal routine. It would be like it would be exactly like if humans could do this, you would you would know, never, never, always space your babies out, don't let don't put them too close, or you're gonna end up with a cannibal morph baby. And then what are we gonna do about that? You know, well, so I this isn't directly related to the cannibalism thing, but I found an interesting article about tad holes that I just wanted to throw in here as well to try to

understand the neolithids. So, according to research that was published in apparently tadpoles can see if you attach eyeballs to their tails. Now this is utterly bizarre. Why what what I'm wondering is like, you know what the working conditions are like in this laboratory that basically it was compelling to scientists to study because they wanted to learn how much a tadpole brain could interpret sensory data. So they took the African claw frog Xenopus lavists I believe that's

the Latin pronunciation. They took their tadpoles and they grafted eyeballs onto their torsos and tails, and then they removed their original eyes. So that's the part. To me, I'm like, what mad science is this? That they're just like plucking eyes out of these creatures and then pasting eyes onto other parts of their body. Yeah, who's the awful underdark monster here? Yeah? Exactly, this is very This is the

kind of thing players too. Yeah. Um, then they gave a tadpole vision test, and the way that they did this was they illuminated half the area that the tadpoles were in with red light and half with blue light. And in the red light the tadpoles would get electrocuted. They'd get zapped with electricity. So again, more torture. Right, we've already yanked your eyeballs out, pasted them onto your tail.

Now we're gonna zap you. But apparently some of these tadpoles would go over to the blue light area because they knew that it was safe. So the scientists determined some of them could actually see with their eyeball tails because they stayed in these safe blue areas. So the researchers basically argued, this is evidence that the brain in general is remarkably plastic in its configuration for different body arrangements, like especially at tadpole stage, when it's so um, you know,

you're at the beginning of the life cycle. It can adapt quickly enough to like somehow rewire, so it can attach to these eyeballs that are just not supposed to be there um, And this is what allows mutations in all kinds of body plans. Not just in frogs and tadpoles, to still work with the existing anatomy. So the basic idea here is like, if there's some kind of a mutation in a single organism, it can adapt quickly, or its brain can adapt quickly because like it's designed to

be so I don't know, flexible. Literally, Well, that's that's wonderful because this not only gives us a little more information about tadpoles and how they work, but again it shows it supports the theory that mind flares are essentially us. Yeah, very much so. And I think right, like, can imagine there, here's your D and D campaign, right, you have you

have to hear some adventurers. You have to sneak into a mind flare cave, take some of their tadpoles, and then pull their eyes off and attention to their tails and perform this experiment in uh in D and D time. So we'll see what kind of odd results that would have. Now we're talking about brain eating monsters here, so so one of the most obvious areas to to to explore here would be what animals eat brains. And it's a tricker scenario than we often think because they're playing of

animals that eat brains, humans eat brains totally. Yeah, I mean, oh, this is going to have forever scarred me. But growing up, do you eversey Faces of Death? No? I mean I'm very familiar with them by reputation they were. You're lucky they didn't. But there was one of the like bootlegged VHS copies that I saw back when I was god must have been like fourteen or fifteen years old. Uh. They they did the thing where they put the monkey

in the middle of a table. The table has like the circular entry, and you hit the monkey on the head, open up as skull and people eat the brains. This would be the very thing that was referenced in that awful scene in the second Indiana Jones movie. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if you wonder why I'm a vegetarian, that was probably the beginnings of it right there. Yeah. God, what what an odd I want to go back and watch

that movie sometimes, but don't. There's so much weird xenophobic material. Yeah, yeah, it's Yeah. I feel sorry if our listeners are out

there and you know what I'm talking about. But yeah, so there are a lot of examples, plenty of animals, birds, humans that eat brains, right, But to understand the mind flare affect on uh, the humanoids that they're eating the brains of, I turned to a couple of specific creatures that I think will help us out here, because one of the things about the mind flare is that you know, in a in a very fantasy way, it eats psychic energy. And of course there are no real parallels to that

in the in the real world. Otherwise they're definitely eating the brain and nothing else. So the way to describe this in biology would be to say that they're I obligate, I guess neurovores, and it's difficult to find anything like that in biology. But you have a couple of possibilities here, I do, yeah, all of them much smaller than the mind flare. The first is and again help me with

my Latin here, I think it's Neglia foul Larry. This is referred to in English as the brain eating amba uh, and this amiba is the primary cause of the infectious disease ambic men and joe encephalitis, which is also referred to as just pam P a M. The amiba can exist in different kinds of environments, sometimes in soil, sometimes in fresh water, and that's where it becomes trouble for us as human beings, or it can exist in the human central nervous system. Now, these infections are really rare.

Well we're about to tell you. Don't get super freaked out. It's soup. It's incredibly rare. But when they happen of the time, it's fatal. Like, if you get one of these amiba in you, you've pretty much done for this is this is rolling a one on your Yeah. The CDC actually estimates that there were a hundred and thirty eight cases of PAM reported in the United States between nineteen sixty two and fifteen. Okay, so that gives you an idea of how rare it is. Of those, only

three of the patients survived. Uh so, how do you get it? You're all probably immediately going, oh, I don't want that. How How how do I stay away from that? Well, usually it's from engaging in recreational water activities like swimming or diving, So you know, you basically have to stay away from water fun if if you if you want to totally avoid this thing. The amiba enters the human body through your nose and It attaches itself to the epithel cells that line the inside of the nasal cavity.

Then it migraine it's to the nerves that are situated in the nasal area. Eventually this reaches the central nervous system of your spinal cord and brain, and it induces your body's immune system to activate macrophages and neutrophills to combat infection. Doesn't feel good. And here's why. The amba itself this is very mind flawery. It has food cups on its surface that allow it to capture its own food resources, and this is everything from bacteria and fungi

to human tissue if it's gotten up your nose. In addition, it produces cell destructive molecules that destroy the membrane structure of nerve cells. So the combination of these two things make it really effective at inducing severe nerve damage. It eventually will destroy your entire central nervous system. This makes them a pretty serious public health hazard um because they can be EASi acquired. You know, you're just swimming along, you get one up your nose and boom, and then

they're associated with this really high mortality rate. Now, the symptoms don't show up until about two to eight days after infection, and they include the following and this is I think we can use these as probably an idea of what symptoms would be like of uh be either being under the thrall of mine flares or during the

process of your brain being consumed. Okay, so as they're sucking that brain, just beginning to suck it out, I guess, so sudden headache, that's a that's an obvious one, right, high fever, neck pain, nausea, vomiting, ryanitis, light sensitivity, and eventually seizure, seizures and a coma. So alright, mind flare is probably doing this much quicker than the brain eating amiva, is right, But that's a basic idea, you know, unless they have different culinary styles, you know, maybe there's some

of them. Maybe they like to eat slow. Yeah, I mean I was reading to geek out a little bit. I was reading that supposedly some mind Flare's experiment by say subjecting their they're they're victims to musical thoughts or whatever, like, they'll they'll they'll want a certain mind state before they eat it because it had just later interesting. Okay, So they go to like they go to like a special school to like learn what specific thoughts to beam into

the brain before they eat it. Yeah, do you want your your brain meal to be more a little like of a veal or I wanted to be a sushi you know? Depends. Huh. Well again, I want to remind everybody the brain eating amba is pretty rare. It's so rare that no clinical trials for developing treatments even exist as of Usually, if it's found, it's treated with something called ampho terrisin B, which is an anti fungal drug, as well as a variety of other anti fungal drugs.

And I've got some examples for you. In fact, these are the three survivors in the US um one of the Now, there's been seven survivors in the whole world, three in the US. One of them was a nine year old girl in California who was infected in nineteen and she caught it by swimming in Deep Creek hot springs in San Bernardino National Forest. She was treated with exactly what I just described. They gave her Ampho terris and be some other antifungal drugs intravenously, and she beat

it and lived through the experience. Now, two other children were reported survivors of this just in two thousand thirteen, so just three years ago, and they were twelve and eight years old. And the twelve year old first contracted it at a water park that was near Little Rock, Arkansas. So don't think to yourself like, oh, this is only if I swim in like natural water, because apparently they

got it at this water park as well. Uh. In addition to the anti fungal treatments that they usually give, this girl was so bad off that they had to subject her to induced hypothermia to reduce her brain swelling. So this is pretty nasty disease. Um. But also, you know, let's keep it in mind when we're thinking about, boy, this mind flare, it's got its lampory mouth attached and it's piston drilling through my head. What's that going to

feel like? So this would be an example of a creature that certainly doesn't depend on human brains at all exactly, but this is it. But it also gives us an example of what brain eating in the real world consists of. Yep, we have a couple other examples here too. The next one is neurosister curosis, which is a type of tape worm that usually lives in pigs. This is very stuff

to blow your mind. You must have covered the pork tapeworm. Uh. Pork tape worm produced larva that can latch onto cranium, whether it's pigs cranium or human cranium, and they show up as large white cysts. They usually disperse through a pig's blood stream, so when you're eating undercooked pork, you could be eating their larva. Uh. So when they enter a human, usually from eating undercooked pork, they still flow through our blood stream and they get stuck inside the

fluid filled cavities in our brains. These can lead to a coma, loss of motor functions, violent seizures, or blindness. And the reason why they're eating holes into your brain. Now, my understanding of this scenario is that essentially you have a parasite that is lost in an unfamiliar host exactly. Yeah, and it's just doing what it thinks it's supposed to do and it results in this. Yeah. Now, it's unlike the amiba. This is more common than you might think.

It's estimated that two thousand people have them in the US. In twenty nine million in Latin America. Now, these are just pork tape worms going about their regular business, not not necessarily getting lost to winding up of the brain though, Yeah, I believe that's true. Yeah, which can be right, It can subsequently lead to that. The other one that's related to this similar effect, very different being is prion disease, and we've we've talked about this occasionally on the show

um Prions. There are a variety of fatal neurological illnesses that are associated with them. They are abnormal proteins and you can both inherit them or have them transmitted into your body through infected animal tissue. They result in symptoms of dementia or a taxio which is impaired motor control, and they eventually lead to death and it can take anywhere from weeks two months. UM. You might have heard

of this as Kreuzfeldt Jakob disease. Uh, there's also new variant Kreutzfeld Jakob disease, crew Gerstmann Stralser Shinker syndrome, and fatal familial insomnia. So all of these are caused by prion proteins in the brain. Kuru in particular is the one that is associated with traditional acts of funeral cannibalism um in in certain parts of the world. And yeah, exactly what it leads to disease. Yeah, so all of us are probably most familiar with these from the animal

form that we referred to as mad cow disease. It's caused by a similar thing with prions. Now, we've known about this in sheep and goats for hundreds of years. It's referred to as scrappy in sheeps and goats, but we didn't know that it was actually transmittable until the nineteen thirties. So basically what happens here is these diseases are caused by proteins that are misshapen um. That's why

we refer to them as prions. They clump together and proliferate by inducing shape changes in our normal proteins, and this causes sponge like lesions in the brain that disrupt brain function. So there's your three examples. You got the prions, the pork tape worm, and the brain eating amiva. Basically, you know, very different kinds of creatures that can get into your nervous system and wreck havoc. But good examples

of probably what's going on with mind flare consumption. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and we come back. We're going to compare the elethids to a certain conge

eating parasite. So we talked about this earlier. But the creation of the mind flare and it's I guess lore throughout the last forty odd years is so amazing that they've actually come up with a detailed process with its own title called ceremorphosis, which is basically the idea of how it reproduces parasitically, right right, Yeah, it's that example

we talked about earlier. The the little tadpole is shoved up into the cranium and then it eats the host brain and it attaches there to the brainstorm swells up, grows into the new brain for this body, and then transforms the body. Now here's a here's a nerdy little bit that I remember about illids. Sometimes when they do this, they take on like mental ticks from the host that they grow within. Uh. And this is considered like social flaw. It's like a it's a real like bad sign of

manners in mind flare society. So they try to hide it from the rest of their speechies. So like let's say, like, um, all right, we'll use Joe as an example. Let's say Joe has like a tick where he picks at his fingernails, and then they insert a mind flare tadpole into Joe.

It eats his brain, It turns Joe into a mind flare, regrows as his brain, but it may still have that tick where it picks at its fingernails, but it has to hide it constantly from other mind flairs or else they'll they'll be like, oh, there's something off with you. You're not mind flawery enough. You didn't discard the human shell that you So it's so you're weak because you're

in a since you're letting your your clothing control you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Alright, So you're probably wondering, well, this sounds just monstrous and awful and other worldly. What's what possible parallel was there? Well, there's a wonderful one and in the form of Simothia exigua. Oh yeah, this is the stuff to blow your my classic. We talked about this one on the Strain episode. Yeah, this is the tongue eating ice apod. You might be familiar with these from a movie that came out a

couple of years ago. It's a found footage horror movie called The Bay, and I think the premise I watched it a while ago, but the premise was something like, there was some kind of pollutant in the waters around this coastal town. It caused the the isopods to mutate, uh, and so they started infecting human beings instead of fish. Yeah. Now, luckily, luckily they don't actually affect humans. But there hasn't been a lot of new research published on these creatures. It's

it's they're they're quite rare. They're possibly popping up more these days due to over fishing. But essentially what you have here, this is the scenario as we understanding. This little crustacean sneaks in through the gills of a fish. It sets up shop on the host taste buds, and then there's there's only so much room and a fish is in a fish mouth, So you can imagine what

the the louse's first meal is. It has a tasty helping of tongue juice, starts sucking on that tongue juice, and once the allows drains the tongue of enough blood, Uh, it attaches itself to the atrophied stump of the tongue and essentially becomes the new tongue for the fish. And every time the host opens its mouth for a meal, the allows you know, helps itself to a little food on the way down. Yeah, you can easily, uh find a Google image search of what these things look like.

There's plenty of pictures of people prying fish mouths opening. You can see the little icebod inside out. Yeah, every time I show my wife, she just goes like she does the voice of the isopod saying like hello, like speaking out from inside this fish mouth. Fun fact, not these specific isopods that that it regrow as tongues, but other isopods can grow to be over two point five feet long. And uh, these aren't the tongue replaces this that these are the kind that scavenge the carcasses of whales,

which we've talked about before the show as well. Yeah, so these are really I mean, I don't I don't know how to describe isopods verbally on the show, but they're real creepy looking critters and just imagine them crawling along the corpse of whale, just slowly chewing their way through it. Yeah, to drag in another fictional comparison, they remind me a lot of the Gartham from the Dark Crystal of the beetle creatures. Yeah, Yeah, that's good. Yeah,

that's a good example. So with Samothia exigua, you have a creature here that that mainly you know, sucks on tongue juice, attaches itself to the stump, while the elithid tadpole goes far beyond that. The the elithid tadpole is replacing the central organ of the nervous system. Uh. And it's it's quite appropriate to think of this as an act that just kills the host, but it really serves

as a sort of of of parasitism. The body continues to live, I'll be it in a different form, and many natural world parasites inflict behavioral and physical changes on their hosts. It also gives us a rough evolutionary idea of where the elithids came from or would have come from in a natural system, right brain replacing parasites that

eventually transcend into something greater. Yeah, So I mean, if you really think about it, like they have to, even though like mind players best operate in the dark and hide an attack. They have to come into contact with other humanoid species because otherwise they're just gonna only exist as tadpole form, right, they have to. They have to use humans for bodies, they have to use humans for food. It's yeah, because also, yeah, you can think of it

this way. So the parasitic form that goes inside the host is physically eating the brain from the out, from the inside out. But then as adults they have to crack open skulls and get brains, you know, in a different way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wonder what happens if a mind flare eats a pryon infected brain. That would be that would be an interesting plot porn infected brains and how maybe they can detect them and know not

to them. Maybe that's it. That's like the oh, it's like it's like an alien three when they the aliens don't attack Sigourney Weaver because spoilers, she's got one of them in her. But like the mind flares will like kill everybody except for one person, and it's because they can sense that they've got you know, either pryon related disease or like a pork tape worm or something. But this would be a wonderful plot for anybody out there

who's putting together a campaign. Imagine a scenario in which the big threat that the mind flares are facing, or perhaps the the methodology that's being employed by their enemies is a pry on. It's being induced to the populations that the mind flavors depend on for food. Mad mind flare disease. Alright, but we've got some more biological parallels, specifically with locusts. Right, yes, so remember the olethard that we have mentioned earlier. This is the super mind flare.

So again, the scenario here is you have tadpoles growing into adult mind flares. Everything is going like normal, but then there's an exceptional mind flare adult who starts uh rivaling the elder brain. You know, they're they're disagreeing on everything. And finally the elder brain says, all right, go do your own thing, take your followers, get out of here, start your own colony. And that's what happens, seeds a

new colony. And again you can think of this as a morph a version of the species that's going to go out and uh and and found a new colony. Okay, And the best example that that I came across to to discuss this is that of the desert locust. So desert locust feature both a gregarious and a solitary morph. A gregarious morph arises as a response to population density. It's more adapted flying, so it can it can get the heck out of that immediate area, go off and

help found a new population of desert locusts. So I think that's what we have. We have here with the olythics. You have a model that closely resembles morphs that develop due to population density in order to spread out and establish new community. So in this case, it's it's the idea there's there's enough of them around that it means that the population is healthy, the resources are abundant enough, and the colony can actually uh you know, depart, splinter

and form new populations of the species. Now, what's inherent about that, especially for these mind flares, is that they're hermaphrodites, so they don't need mates in order to create more mind flares. So I was thinking about this, I was like, all right, her mapphroditic reproduction is is definitely a real thing.

But let's look to another example to try to figure out how that would work with mind flares, and the one I turned to was CE elegants, which is a type of nematode of roundworm or threadworm uh, And it lives in the soil, usually sometimes rotting vegetation, and it

basically feeds on bacteria. And they're they're very primitive, but we human beings study them a lot, and why because they share essential characteristics with human biology, so you know, they're great for studying the effects of certain things on without doing it to humans or I don't know, ferrets, which are another sort of I guess if you're thinking about it in terms of evolved life forms higher up the chain that has human characteristics, except some of C.

Elegans are self fertilizing hermaphrodites, just like the mind flayers are uh. And the way that they do this is they cleave embryonically. So I would assume this is something that happens in the mind flare. It proceeds through morpha genesis and then they grow into an adult. Now we've been told by Volo's Guide of Monsters that mind flares lay an egg, but this is all right, not trying

to be gross here, but I'm trying to figure this out. Right, You go through ceremorphosis, changes your body, turns your head into an octopus. Presumably it creates some kind of orifice that you can lay an egg through. Yeah, I would guess so. Or it's utilizing an existing orifice in some way, shape or form. Okay, um, but I'm wondering if maybe what's happening is it's because it's creating its own eggs.

It's it's cleaving embryonically inside of itself, laying that as an egg, and then that egg hatches, proceeds through morpha genesis, and then goes through the ceremorphosis procedure that we've already described right now. See elegants also has only male counterparts. So there's hermaphrodites and there's males, but there aren't females. It's kind of fascinating. Most of their volume when you look at their anatomy, is taken up by their reproductive system.

So you'd have to imagine maybe mind flares would be the same way. Like other than the big head, everything from the neck down is reproductive system. Yeah, I mean, they probably don't need much in the way of a traditional digestive system because they're only getting a limited amount of sustenance out of that brain. Yeah. Um, and then and then who knows how they defecate. Maybe they just they're always covered in slime, so maybe they just maybe

they just secrete it through their cores. Well. Um, the sea elegance of their nine dred and fifty nine cells, three hundred of them are neurons. This sounds about right for a larval mind flare, especially if it's you know, primarily using its thoughts, its brain, it's thinking capacity. See, elegants also have neural structures. These are just in nematodes mind you that include sense organs for taste, ill, temperature, and touch. They don't have eyes, but they do respond

to light. Hopefully nobody starts sewing eyes onto these guys anytime soon. But they they are responsive to light as well. Uh. And they move by flexing and relaxing their dorsal ventral waves along their body to propel themselves along. And this was how I was imagining the mind flare. Larvae must have to have some kind of locomotion, right, whether it's moving through cerebral fluid, that it's swimming around in or

it's crawling up into somebody's skull. So it probably does a similar thing right by flexing and relaxing until it burrows up in there and eats the brain. So I think see elegants as a nematode is a pretty good start. There's lots of hermaphroditic creatures out there that we could look to, but this seems plausible for how the mind flare I guess the reproductive part inside the actual adult mind flare's bodies working. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's an

interesting spin on it. And certainly flesh is out something that at least in the guides I've looked at, they don't really put a lot of detail into. Right, Yeah, that's probably a little too much for your your average A D and D reader that's in Volos Additional Guy, the Midnight glos Erotic Guide, the Monsters. Um, okay, so we've talked a lot about this on the side, but

let's really get into it. The elder brain. So can you imagine like if we just had rather rather than like um, a boss at work instead, where your boss's office is, there's just a big baby pool that's filled with cerebral fluid and a giant brain, and that's what tells you what your duties are for the day. I'm picturing it right now. I mean I could probably get behind it after after a while. Yeah, yeah, you could trust an elder brain. Yeah, I mean that's the older brain.

Who's who's going to question the elder brain? But you, I certainly wouldn't know. But uh, dritzt Ordn did. That's a spoiler for that book Exile. Uh speaking of which, Yeah, so this is actually a quote from it, and I'm gonna give you a little bit of an idea of from the prose what they're like. The inside of the giant stone structure was ringed by balconies and spiraling stairways, each level housing several of the mind flares, But it was the bottom chamber, unadorned and circular, that held the

most important being of all, the central brain. Fully twenty feet in diameter, This boneless lump of pulsating flesh tied the mind flare community together in telepathic symbiosis. The central brain was the composite of their knowledge, the mental eye that guarded their outside chambers, and which had heard the warning cries of the Illapid from the drows city many miles to the east to the Illatids of the community.

The central brain was the coordinator of their entire existence and nothing short of their odd Thus, only a very few slaves were allowed with this special tower, captives with sensitive and delicate fingers that could massage the illeted god thing and soothe it with tender brushes and warm fluids. So it's a little insight into what goes on with the elder brains. Well, you've got to keep the the elder brain well scrubbed. It's like constantly, like at a

day spa. Yeah. So again, you get back into this idea that either they developed this overtime or they evolved to have the elder brain as part of their their biology essentially um but part of their They're just there

their life cycle. I tend to like the idea that they they developed it or they turned to it after the fall, because the mind flays endlessly plot the restoration of their empire, and to do so, they have to maintain a perfect balance of secrecy and exploration, ever clawing out the shortest a fist path, much like the Spacing Guild and the Dune Yeah, yeah, I can't make big risks because because if they don't pay off, they could lose everything. Right, so to survive and to make the

necessary meta calculations. Here, the elethids have this elder brain, uh again, giant immobile thought organ in a tank of brine. It's the colony's library of knowledge, a history of all their past lives. When they die, their their their own brains are returned to the older brain. It's the a nexus of meta cognition for the individuals in the colony, and likewise kind of serves the thralls as well. You know what that sounds like to me? What cyborg ism? Yeah,

except for it's using organic material. It sounds very much like what we talked about in our episode on cyborg is m. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't help but think about human computing. The entire system resembles in many ways human information networking systems and the ever evolving supercomputers that manage it were the externalization and interconnect of it of thought.

And as we drift ever closer to the technological singularity, when computer superintelligence truly eclipses that of humanity, it seems like we could be approaching our own age of the elder brain. Right, Yeah, I mean, well, think about it the cloud, the way everybody talks about the cloud, We're just like offloading information to the cloud. And I don't know, I mean, I guess we do have like people whose

whole job is to maintain the cloud. I don't know that they're necessarily giving it a delicate finger massages, but you know that they work inside these data centers that house all this information. That's our version of the elder We put all of our human knowledge into it. We put all these details about our daily life. Even when we die, information about us lives on. Yeah, I mean what, yeah, what is the internet? What is the cloud but an elder brain? And you know, the more I think about it,

I would I think I'd be okay with trusting. I'd be I feel safer trusting the world to an elder brain or or in the human variation here, a super advanced artificial intelligence. Yeah. So you're ready to give up to sky Net at this point, You're like, maybe it'll do a better job than we have. It's kind of the sky Net situation, right because the mind flares are saying, look, we screw this up. We're done, We're doomed, we're done.

So let's let's let's have this elder brain that's going to take care of all those choices for us, and this way we can survive and maybe even rise again. Yeah, and so I'm trying to think to like parallels of this if you you know, like so in the stories of mind flares, basically they'll protect the elder brain at all costs. Uh. It's you know, as you mentioned earlier, I think it's a pretty high level monster to fight

an elder brain or something. Right, It's like pretty like they'll just like psychically wipe you out if you try to hurt them. But but like, imagine if you just destroyed the Internet, you just took out the cloud. Now I know that's like, you know, pretty much as much fantasy as mind flares at this point, right, But like a world right now without all of that data backed up that we've got would be an utter chaos, And so what are we gonna do for now? We're going

to protect it at all costs. Right, That's like information is our primary resource right now. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, you sound like a modern human, you also sound like a mind flare and saying that, which brings us back again to this area, this idea that the mind flares are essentially us. They may have tentacles, they may eat more brains than we do on a daily basis, but they're essentially humans with a with a very similar reliance

on information and informational systems. Um. So think about that the next time you encounter one, you know, no one of your adventures. Yeah, absolutely, be a little bit more humane with the mind flares that you may be attacking. Yes, in humans before before you rule your initiative, I think twice. All right, So there you have it. The lited the mind flare again a fun Dungeons and Dragons monster and iconic Dungeons and Dragons monster that was referenced in season

two of Stranger Things. Yes, suddenly, all of a sudden, it's way more relevant to people who aren't just D and D nerds like us or monster fans. Yeah. So, if you watch Stranger Things season two and you thought that this helped out, or you thought, hey, wait a minute, that's not like a mind flare at all, you guys described the real mind flare right to us. We're on social media all over the place. You can get us

on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler or Instagram. That's right. You can head on over to the mother ship stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and you'll find all the episodes we've done before, including there's one what does mind Control Feel Like? That Joe and I did, and then all three of us jumped in on the Live Stranger Things episode just a couple of months ago. Yeah, exactly. So the other way that you can get in touch with us is the direct way that and I'm not talking

about telepathy, I'm talking about email. Here, let's blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com the big