From the Vault: Mind Flayers

If you've watched Stranger Things 2, then you know another beloved Dungeons and Dragons monster pops up as an analogy for an extra-dimensional menace: the mind flayer. Join Robert and Christian for the 2016 episode 'The Body Illithid: Science of the Mind Flayers,' in which they explore the real-world science behind these tentacled, brain-sucking monsters.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Land, I'm Christian Sager, and this is a
classic episode that we were returning to. It was a
fun little one that Robert and I put together about
a year ago about a D and D monster called
the mind Flare, and we decided to say, what if
science broke apart of mind flair looked at its anatomy
and its biology, how would that work? Yeah? If you

(00:21):
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?

(00:41):
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

(01:02):
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

(01:26):
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

(01:48):
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

(02:12):
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

(02:33):
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.

(02:56):
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.

(03:17):
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,

(03:37):
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

(04:00):
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,

(04:23):
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

(04:44):
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

(05:05):
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

(05:27):
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,

(05:49):
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.

(06:11):
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

(06:32):
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

(06:58):
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

(07:19):
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

(07:42):
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

(08:02):
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

(08:24):
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

(08:44):
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

(09:06):
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

(09:29):
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

(09:51):
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

(10:11):
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

(10:32):
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

(10:53):
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

(11:15):
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

(11:36):
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

(11:59):
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,

(12:21):
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

(12:42):
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

(13:05):
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

(13:28):
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.

(13:54):
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

(14:14):
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,

(14:37):
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

(14:58):
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

(15:22):
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

(15:47):
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

(16:09):
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

(16:32):
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.

(16:53):
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

(17:15):
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

(17:39):
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

(18:01):
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,

(18:23):
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

(18:44):
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,

(19:05):
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

(19:27):
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

(19:49):
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

(20:09):
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,

(20:35):
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

(20:56):
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,

(21:18):
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

(21:41):
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

(22:03):
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,

(22:25):
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

(22:46):
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

(23:10):
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

(23:31):
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

(23:51):
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

(24:16):
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

(24:39):
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

(25:03):
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,

(25:25):
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

(25:46):
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.

(26:07):
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

(26:30):
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

(26:55):
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

(27:16):
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

(27:40):
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,

(28:03):
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

(28:26):
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.

(28:49):
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

(29:11):
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

(29:33):
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

(29:55):
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

(30:17):
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

(30:37):
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

(31:02):
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,

(31:23):
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

(31:45):
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

(32:08):
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

(32:31):
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

(32:52):
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

(33:14):
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

(33:34):
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

(33:57):
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,

(34:18):
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

(34:42):
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

(35:04):
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

(35:27):
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.

(35:48):
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,

(36:10):
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

(36:30):
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

(36:51):
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

(37:12):
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

(37:37):
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

(37:57):
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.

(38:18):
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

(38:39):
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

(39:00):
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

(39:22):
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,

(39:46):
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.

(40:09):
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

(40:32):
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

(40:54):
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,

(41:18):
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

(41:39):
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

(42:00):
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

(42:20):
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

(42:41):
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

(43:06):
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

(43:29):
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

(43:51):
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

(44:15):
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,

(44:35):
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

(44:59):
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

(45:20):
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

(45:42):
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

(46:05):
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

(46:26):
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

(46:47):
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

(47:10):
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,

(47:33):
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

(47:54):
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

(48:16):
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

(48:36):
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

(48:59):
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,

(49:21):
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.

(49:43):
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,

(50:05):
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

(50:25):
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

(50:47):
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

(51:10):
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

(51:32):
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

(51:53):
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,

(52:14):
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

(52:35):
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

(52:58):
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

(53:21):
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.

(53:44):
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

(54:07):
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,

(54:30):
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,

(54:53):
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

(55:13):
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,

(55:33):
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.

(55:56):
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

(56:19):
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

(56:41):
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

(57:04):
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

(57:25):
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

(57:49):
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

(58:10):
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

(58:30):
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

(58:53):
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

(59:17):
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

(59:38):
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

(59:58):
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

(01:00:20):
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

(01:00:42):
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

(01:01:04):
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

(01:01:25):
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.

(01:01:48):
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

(01:02:10):
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,

(01:02:31):
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

(01:02:54):
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

(01:03:15):
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

(01:03:37):
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,

(01:04:01):
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

(01:04:24):
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

(01:04:46):
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

(01:05:09):
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

(01:05:30):
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

(01:05:52):
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

(01:06:12):
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

(01:06:35):
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

(01:06:58):
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

(01:07:20):
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

(01:07:42):
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

(01:08:05):
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

(01:08:26):
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

(01:08:47):
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

(01:09:10):
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

(01:09:33):
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

(01:09:55):
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,

(01:10:16):
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

(01:10:38):
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

(01:10:59):
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,

(01:11:22):
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

(01:11:45):
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

(01:12:06):
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

(01:12:28):
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

(01:12:51):
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
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(01:13:12):
Works dot com the big