Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Land, I'm Christian Sager, and this is a
Speaker 1: classic episode that we were returning to. It was a
Speaker 1: fun little one that Robert and I put together about
Speaker 1: a year ago about a D and D monster called
Speaker 1: the mind Flare, and we decided to say, what if
Speaker 1: science broke apart of mind flair looked at its anatomy
Speaker 1: and its biology, how would that work? Yeah? If you
Speaker 1: this psychic alien squid creature that that runs amuck in
Speaker 1: the Dungeons and Dragons universe, what if this was real?
Speaker 1: What can we look to in the actual scientific world
Speaker 1: to understand it? And and you know what science can
Speaker 1: we illuminate by looking to the mind Flair? And you
Speaker 1: might be wondering, guys, why are you rerunning this episode?
Speaker 1: And wait, why did this come out on a Friday?
Speaker 1: Well it is because and no spoilers here, the mind
Speaker 1: Flare is brought up in the latest season of Stranger Things.
Speaker 1: And we know that there are a lot of Stranger
Speaker 1: Things fans out there because last month we did our
Speaker 1: Science of Stranger Things episode. I like to think of you,
Speaker 1: Joe and I as like, what happens when the kids
Speaker 1: from Stranger Things grow up and like this is what
Speaker 1: they do for a living. Uh, And so we thought, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, let's put this back out there and people
Speaker 1: who might have binge watched that season in the last
Speaker 1: seven days will go, oh, now I can really dive
Speaker 1: into what a mind flare is. And uh, you basically
Speaker 1: supplement my Stranger Things experience. All right, well let's dive
Speaker 1: into it. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. From
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works dot Com. A form slightly larger than Drifts,
Speaker 1: but obviously humanoid, drifted around a nearby stalactite. Drifts kicked
Speaker 1: off a stone to propel himself at it, drawing his
Speaker 1: other scimitar as he went. He knew his peril a
Speaker 1: moment later, for his enemy's head resembled a four tentacle octopus.
Speaker 1: Drifts had never actually viewed such a creature before, but
Speaker 1: he knew what it was as an ill efid a
Speaker 1: mind flair, the most evil and most feared monster in
Speaker 1: all of the under dark. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my
Speaker 1: name is Christian Sager, and today we're talking about mind flares.
Speaker 1: That's right. As you get from that quote mind flares.
Speaker 1: For those of you who aren't aware, we're really diving
Speaker 1: down the geek well today to get a monster that
Speaker 1: we both love and grew up with. But this is
Speaker 1: a creature that was originally created for dungeons and dragons, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it also has a long history that I'm just learning
Speaker 1: about in the Final Fantasy Games. And I imagine other
Speaker 1: other properties as well that that that's that were inspired by,
Speaker 1: especially early dungeons and dragons. Yeah. But so we're not
Speaker 1: just talking about this because we're into geeky stuff, right not.
Speaker 1: That's like, yeah, where you using the mind flair as
Speaker 1: a jumping off point to look at some really interesting science,
Speaker 1: both in biology but also a little bit in technology today,
Speaker 1: in the same way that drifts our hero in the
Speaker 1: opening narration used that d stalactite as a springboard. Right.
Speaker 1: So that was a quote from R. A. Salvatore's Exile,
Speaker 1: which is part of the Dark Elf trilogy. It's actually
Speaker 1: booked two in the Dark Elf trilogy. Uh, you may
Speaker 1: be familiar with this. If you're not, look give you
Speaker 1: a quick primer. These are Dungeons and Dragons based novels. Uh,
Speaker 1: set in the Forgotten realm setting based around this character,
Speaker 1: dritzto Arden, that is pretty popular with that crowd and
Speaker 1: still still part of the property the board games that
Speaker 1: come out He's He's mentioned in the materials for the
Speaker 1: big current under Dark campaign. I'm pretty sure they're still
Speaker 1: coming out with novels with him in it too. Um
Speaker 1: and these I have a fondness for these novels because
Speaker 1: they were like my way to wind down my brain
Speaker 1: after doing too much research, either when I was in
Speaker 1: graduate school or sometimes from podcasting. So I've read I
Speaker 1: want to say, there's like these books, and I've probably
Speaker 1: read three quarters of them. Uh mostly I I refer
Speaker 1: to them as sword porn because there's just like whole sections,
Speaker 1: like pages and pages where it's just describing like the
Speaker 1: ways in which he moves his swords. I mean just
Speaker 1: in this one paragraph alone, like they've had to mention
Speaker 1: like the way he drew a scimitar and everything. But
Speaker 1: mind Flares are like the primary antagonist in this specific book.
Speaker 1: So I pulled that quote, and then there's another one
Speaker 1: later on where I think that this contributed to the
Speaker 1: lore surrounding them, so you know, we'll refer back to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So see we're using this, this creature, this though wondrous creature,
Speaker 1: as as as an opportunity to discuss some some science,
Speaker 1: and we're using science as a way to explain some
Speaker 1: of the more fan tactic aspects all of this fictional monster.
Speaker 1: It's kind of relationship we come back to time and
Speaker 1: time again, because, as I like to say, no matter
Speaker 1: how fantastic, how crazy the imagined monster is, you can
Speaker 1: you can almost count on nature to have equal or
Speaker 1: surpassed it in weirdness. Yeah, that's that's exactly what's so
Speaker 1: wonderful about using this for an episode of the show.
Speaker 1: And I'd like to point out that this is actually
Speaker 1: connected to two other things that we do on Stuff
Speaker 1: to All Your Mind. The first is obviously Robert's Monster
Speaker 1: Science that he's been working on for years. If you
Speaker 1: go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, there
Speaker 1: are I dare say, a hundred maybe monster science posts
Speaker 1: like you've covered almost every monster in existence. Um well,
Speaker 1: well I wouldn't go that far because they're pretty inexhaustible,
Speaker 1: but um yeah, the monster the Monster of the Week
Speaker 1: post or kind of like the monster Science versions. And
Speaker 1: then there's the video series Monster Science as well, which
Speaker 1: you can find there or you can find while all
Speaker 1: the videos are on our Facebook and in our YouTube
Speaker 1: channel as well. Uh. But also you and Joe are
Speaker 1: doing an episode coordinated with this that's about mind control. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be titled what Mind Control feels Like, and
Speaker 1: it should be the episode that follows this. I think
Speaker 1: this episode right here is coming out on a Thursday,
Speaker 1: and then the following one, the mind control episode, will
Speaker 1: come out on Tuesday. But it'll all come together. So
Speaker 1: brace yourselves, everybody. We're we're really getting into it with minds,
Speaker 1: brains and actual brain eating today. Yeah, because one of
Speaker 1: the things about the mind flares, if you're not familiar
Speaker 1: and if you're not familiar at all with the mind flares,
Speaker 1: just bear with us. We'll get to the real science
Speaker 1: as well. But they are not only these these octopus headed,
Speaker 1: purple fleshed evil doers that live in the under dark,
Speaker 1: this vast subterranean realm in the Dungeons and Dragons world.
Speaker 1: They are also uh psychic or psionically gifted creatures that
Speaker 1: are able to just dominate people left and right with
Speaker 1: their amazing psychic powers, you know, throwing mind blasts all
Speaker 1: over the dungeon just really wreaking havoc, but that is
Speaker 1: their primary power, and they're finishing move is to grab
Speaker 1: ahold of you with their tentacle mouths and suck your
Speaker 1: brain right out of your head. It's like, uh, total kill,
Speaker 1: like instant kill. I think if you get grappled by
Speaker 1: a mind flare by the head or whatever, you know.
Speaker 1: They actually not to skip too far ahead into their anatomy,
Speaker 1: but they're generally represented as having just four digits on
Speaker 1: their hands, so they have three knuckles. And I was
Speaker 1: thinking the other day this would be perfect for a
Speaker 1: t p K tattoo for flair or total party kill.
Speaker 1: That's your like your thug mind flare. Yes, I like it.
Speaker 1: I like for those of you not with the game,
Speaker 1: total party Killers. When the creatures in the game were
Speaker 1: more specifically, the dungeon master kills off the entire party
Speaker 1: with a generally general this occurs because the encounter is
Speaker 1: not studematically calibrated. Yeah exactly. So yeah, so we're gonna
Speaker 1: use these as a jumping off point. And you guys
Speaker 1: are probably saying to yourselves right now, like WHOA, Like,
Speaker 1: this isn't what I signed up for. Just bear with us,
Speaker 1: because the thing about mind Flavors in particular that is
Speaker 1: really useful for stuff to blow your mind is they
Speaker 1: were created for this game, and then it's been a
Speaker 1: good almost forty years that people have been working on them,
Speaker 1: whether it's in these novels that I mentioned earlier, or
Speaker 1: for rule books or for video games or whatever. It's
Speaker 1: it's kind of like Star Wars creatures. They've had like
Speaker 1: more and more tagged onto their fictional biology and culture
Speaker 1: and philosophy over the years, to the point that it's
Speaker 1: like it's this fleshed out world, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: it's really fascinating what multiple people brought to the table
Speaker 1: with it and how that then subsequently translates because they
Speaker 1: were obviously inspired by you know, creatures from real life
Speaker 1: or or philosophy in different cultures. Oh yeah, indeed. I mean,
Speaker 1: and in so many cases either the people adding to
Speaker 1: the mythos so say, the mind flares, they either were
Speaker 1: directly inspired by natural world organisms or they're just weird
Speaker 1: creativity managed to to parallel actual natural world weird. That's
Speaker 1: that like somebody needs to do it like a history
Speaker 1: of the mind Flare creation book where they like talk
Speaker 1: to all these people, because in front of us here
Speaker 1: in the studio right now is Volo's Guide to Monsters,
Speaker 1: and it has a pretty comprehensive, like what almost ten
Speaker 1: page section on mind flares, more more, I dare say,
Speaker 1: than real world encyclopedias have on some of the real
Speaker 1: world animals. We're going to talk about today's episode, but
Speaker 1: it's really impressive and I would love to see how
Speaker 1: all these pieces came together. Yeah, and that just came
Speaker 1: out by the way of anyone out there is interested, uh,
Speaker 1: just just published now. In terms of what we're not
Speaker 1: canna attempt to do what we just mentioned here, we're
Speaker 1: not going to actually uh, you know, go piece by
Speaker 1: piece through the generation of the mind flare, but we
Speaker 1: will just touched on its origins, which go back to
Speaker 1: Gary Gygax himself, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons. Indeed,
Speaker 1: he is the guy. He's the guy who started the
Speaker 1: whole thing. And you've got a nice quote from him
Speaker 1: here specifically about mind flares. Yeah, he said, quote the
Speaker 1: mind Flare I made up out of whole cloth, using
Speaker 1: my imagination, but inspired by the cover of Brian Lumley's
Speaker 1: novel in paperback edition, the burrowers beneath. So I've never
Speaker 1: seen this before. What's it looked like? Um? I looked
Speaker 1: at it, I will. I looked at the various covers,
Speaker 1: and the one that I think most modern readers are
Speaker 1: used to is the one that looks kind of like
Speaker 1: an eye in the center of a nautilus, And that
Speaker 1: one looks more mine flairy. Um. But the original cover,
Speaker 1: the one that I think Guy GaX would have seen,
Speaker 1: just kind of looks like a silhouette of dark tentacles
Speaker 1: rising out of a hill. But still, I take the
Speaker 1: man into his word. Um lumly of course was Lovecraft influenced,
Speaker 1: and there's definitely a lot of love Crafty and weirdness
Speaker 1: to the mind flare. So just just as the fictional
Speaker 1: race has crossed over from another realm and dungeons and dragons,
Speaker 1: the very inception is sort of a cross pollination from
Speaker 1: a different dimension of literary fantasy. Yeah. I think you
Speaker 1: could probably trace their origins all the way back to
Speaker 1: Lovecraft's intense fear of sea life. So, and just to
Speaker 1: get this out of the way too, because again I
Speaker 1: know a number of you maybe primarily familiar with these
Speaker 1: critters from Final Fantasy are their properties. Eltid is definitely
Speaker 1: a d n D property, but they've got the t
Speaker 1: M on that. Yeah, so you can't just throw e
Speaker 1: litids around another games or video games or novels without
Speaker 1: you know, big dungeon getting a cut. But mind flairs
Speaker 1: you'll see elsewhere. Yeah, thats right. In fact, we saw
Speaker 1: there was a paper that you've found that stunning all
Speaker 1: about the various types of sort of cephalopod monster mollusks
Speaker 1: that show up in video games. Oh yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: an article um that was published in geek Studies, and
Speaker 1: I'll try to include a link to that on the
Speaker 1: landing page for this episode. But yeah, just all about
Speaker 1: weird squid and octopus monsters from sixteen bit videos. And
Speaker 1: there was this amazing chart of all of the various ones,
Speaker 1: uh down to their little like eight bit renderings, and
Speaker 1: there's the mind flare very recognizable in there. So yeah, again,
Speaker 1: these are basically purple people with octopus heads. Their mouths
Speaker 1: are like Lamprey's. We're gonna go through the anatomy pretty
Speaker 1: carefully because that's how we're going to tie it into
Speaker 1: real world science. That's right, all right, So let's dive
Speaker 1: in let's talk about their origins real quick, which are
Speaker 1: of course shrouded in mystery. So they're basically two origin
Speaker 1: stories in play here. Most likely the mind flarees hail
Speaker 1: from the far Realm, which is an alien dimension of
Speaker 1: cosmic horror, and the dn D universe. But there's also
Speaker 1: this whispered rumor that if from the future and perhaps
Speaker 1: even the distant highly evolved state of humanoid life in
Speaker 1: the multiverse, though I'm I'm not sure much stock is
Speaker 1: actually put in that interpretation. I want to say that
Speaker 1: that is that's the one that's heavily Lovecraft influence, because
Speaker 1: there's and I can't believe I can't remember the name
Speaker 1: of the monster from one of the Lovecraft short stories,
Speaker 1: but that's one of the things from his This monster
Speaker 1: is from the future and it's come back in time
Speaker 1: to sort of right some wrong or something like that.
Speaker 1: And I think this is again not there's no sources
Speaker 1: behind this, but but if my memory is correct from
Speaker 1: playing D and D for twenty some odd years, uh,
Speaker 1: their origin story differs depending on which setting you're playing
Speaker 1: D and D. And well, that's right, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a multiverse. And of course they also instill this in you.
Speaker 1: Your game is not necessarily taking place in the same
Speaker 1: corner of the multiverse as the campaign across across the Road. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So one of the really important plot points with the
Speaker 1: Lipids is that an ages path, they carved out an
Speaker 1: enormous empire for themselves, what the cells one that spanned
Speaker 1: whole worlds and the material plane as well as other
Speaker 1: various planes. They they had slash have spaceships called no
Speaker 1: Alloids that enable travel across the plains. But they've lost
Speaker 1: the technology of their manufacture, like any you know, decent
Speaker 1: elder race. They've they've forgotten how to kind. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: they built their empire mostly on the back of psionically
Speaker 1: dominated slave labor. But after time, as you know happens
Speaker 1: when you build your empire on slave labor, the slaves
Speaker 1: rose up, they rebelled, and their their empire fell to pieces,
Speaker 1: and so they had to go out and just sort
Speaker 1: of find little corners to survive. And and in particular
Speaker 1: they end up taking up in the under dark. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and here they end up, you know, having more
Speaker 1: slave races, and each one they mess up by just
Speaker 1: psionically dominating them, altering them changing them into whatever form
Speaker 1: suits the mind flares and just just causing lots of
Speaker 1: trauma and mischief, um, just across the world. They remind
Speaker 1: me kind of of this ant that we've covered on
Speaker 1: the show before. I'm gonna have trouble remembering its Latin
Speaker 1: name off the top of my head, but you might
Speaker 1: know it Court Accepts. Oh yes, the court aceps. Uh
Speaker 1: fun guy that end up growing in the ants. Yeah, exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: so this this fun guy gets inside these aunt brains
Speaker 1: and it's it sort of controls them to take care
Speaker 1: of its fungal colony and allow it to take the
Speaker 1: ant resources and mind flair. I guess sociology is somewhat similar,
Speaker 1: and that they they dominate these you know, people of
Speaker 1: various D and D species, dwarves, elves, human beings, whatever
Speaker 1: gift Oh yeah, the gift off touching the gift here,
Speaker 1: and they're the slaves that sort of like work and
Speaker 1: do all the labor for the mind flares. They even
Speaker 1: one of the things that the slaves are known to
Speaker 1: do is they have to scrub down the elder brain
Speaker 1: and get massage. Oh yeah, and they all their brains
Speaker 1: important to that. That's the thing all the all these
Speaker 1: different elements that we're touching on here. They might sound
Speaker 1: a bit like fluff, but we're gonna come back to
Speaker 1: them and discuss some science around them. But real quick
Speaker 1: about the Gift. The Gift were the the the biggest
Speaker 1: mistake that they made. These were the thralls that really
Speaker 1: rose up and not only helped bring about the follow
Speaker 1: their empire, but regularly now the Gift regularly venture out
Speaker 1: from their astral plane headquarters to hunt down and eradicate
Speaker 1: elliptid colonies whoever they can find them. And that's one
Speaker 1: of the key reasons that elipids live and you know,
Speaker 1: the safety and secret of the under dark or other
Speaker 1: secluded places and in each separate colonies cut off from
Speaker 1: all the others while while they calculate and scheme and
Speaker 1: figure out how they're going to restore their empire. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they basically like live in these like deep caves there.
Speaker 1: It's like a it's almost like an ant colony, it is, yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the it's all based around the center of the
Speaker 1: elder brain I mentioned earlier, which we're gonna get into. Uh.
Speaker 1: They but they yeah, they kind of like occasionally just
Speaker 1: go out grab some slaves pull them back in and
Speaker 1: like that's how their society runs. Yeah, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: very helpful as we go far, just to think of
Speaker 1: them as you social parasites. Yes, they write really like
Speaker 1: they have two options. They either capture somebody and eat
Speaker 1: their brain, or capture them and dominate their mind and
Speaker 1: make them into a slave. Right, So either way an
Speaker 1: encounter with the mind flare is going to end up bad,
Speaker 1: all right, So it's launched into their biology again. Bipedal
Speaker 1: humanoid bodies, four tentacles, four claude digits per hand. Diet
Speaker 1: consists mostly of csionic energy, with some additional sub sustenance
Speaker 1: stuff from the gobble brains themselves. Now, technically speaking, their
Speaker 1: troglophiles their cave dwelling creatures that complete their life cycles
Speaker 1: in a cave, but they can also survive above ground.
Speaker 1: Help me out with this. Trug l files is a
Speaker 1: real term. Yeah, yeah, this is This is a real term.
Speaker 1: It's not done in dragon's terms. This would be the
Speaker 1: the the natural world classification for a creature like this, though,
Speaker 1: of course, classifications are difficult when you're considering even fictional
Speaker 1: intelligent creatures. You know, one that is choosing to live
Speaker 1: underground in a subterranean environment for their own purposes, and
Speaker 1: now their reproductive system is utterly bizarre. And yet uh,
Speaker 1: there are real world examples that are almost as bizarre.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean they're a real world example. When
Speaker 1: you start looking at complex life cycles, you look at
Speaker 1: some of the the parasite life cycles out there and
Speaker 1: various insect life cycles that are not only just like
Speaker 1: a bizarre circle of parasitic behavior, but also when you
Speaker 1: see branches in the tree, and this is key to
Speaker 1: understanding the mind players, when you see various morphs that
Speaker 1: can emerge. Yeah, so all right, walk us through this.
Speaker 1: All right, So you have an egg. That's where it starts,
Speaker 1: an a litid egg, so a mind for an adult
Speaker 1: mind flare. What came first, the mind flare the egg.
Speaker 1: Now an adult mind flare lays an egg. Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so they lay an egg. That egg hatches into an
Speaker 1: a liftid tadpole, so little squirming us a tadpole, a
Speaker 1: little larval alipid. Now from that point there are a
Speaker 1: few different things that can happen. Ideally. There there's a
Speaker 1: process called a sea morphosis, and this is where adult
Speaker 1: mind flares would come and pick up the little tadpole
Speaker 1: and implant in the cranium of a captive humanoid, like
Speaker 1: a captive kind of like psychically washed humanoid, and they
Speaker 1: usually put it through the ear. But there's a drawing
Speaker 1: in Volos Guide of monsters of like it's very based
Speaker 1: on wrath of calm of like the tadpole like crawling
Speaker 1: its way up the face towards the eye socket of
Speaker 1: a victim. Yeah. So yeah, that exact scenario. So one
Speaker 1: way or another, they get that dust that puppy into
Speaker 1: the brain and then it eats the brain, replaces the brain,
Speaker 1: and then that host body becomes the new mind flare body. Go.
Speaker 1: You know, I guess it turns per pole, slimy, loses
Speaker 1: a digit on each hand, gets pretty skinny. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then you've got you've got yourself an adult elithid that
Speaker 1: carries on adult elithid business and eventually it can go
Speaker 1: onto legs of its own. Right now, there are two
Speaker 1: other possible ways that this can go with the elithid tadpole.
Speaker 1: So sometimes the elithid becomes a you letharid and this
Speaker 1: is uh, this is essentially a super mind flare that
Speaker 1: is going to eventually leave the colony with some other
Speaker 1: mind flares found a new colony and become its elder brain. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't have human humanoid form. It's just like
Speaker 1: the superpowered tadpole. It's a super powered tadpole, still have
Speaker 1: to be implanted into a humanoid, but it's destined to
Speaker 1: be this uh, this this cedar of the new Calling,
Speaker 1: and it will eventually grow into a giant brain right
Speaker 1: once it establishes itself elsewhere. And then the other way
Speaker 1: that things can go is the elithid tadpole can become
Speaker 1: a neolithid. And this is when they're nobody's taking care
Speaker 1: of the tadpoles. Nobody, no mind flares are coming around
Speaker 1: to look after them and make sure they're stuffed into
Speaker 1: the right skull. In this case, they all freak out
Speaker 1: and start eating each other, and whichever one is left
Speaker 1: grows into a giant, powerful beast intelligence monster. Huh Okay,
Speaker 1: I have never encountered one of these before. It's just good.
Speaker 1: It's like a level wow. Okay, but it but what's
Speaker 1: going on with both of these cases, and this is
Speaker 1: where there's a there's a real world parallel that will
Speaker 1: will break down a little a little more in a bit,
Speaker 1: is that you essentially have two morphs springing off from
Speaker 1: the tadpole. One is caused by negative environmental constraints and
Speaker 1: that leads to the neolithid, and the other is positive
Speaker 1: environmental constraints, which leads to the leth All right, so
Speaker 1: I'm assuming this is dependent on like how many humanoids
Speaker 1: are available for them to eat brains of, or make
Speaker 1: slaves into, or or or whatnot, how big the cave
Speaker 1: system is that they're living within. Yeah, it has to
Speaker 1: do with population density. In our real world examples that
Speaker 1: will get too, so you can think of it in
Speaker 1: those terms like is the is the colony successful enough
Speaker 1: to send off anything to found a new colony, or
Speaker 1: is it even successful enough for the tadpoles to continue
Speaker 1: to thrive or should they just all e each other
Speaker 1: out of you know, purely economic cannibalism, which is the
Speaker 1: thing that does happen in multiple species. Yeah, right, right,
Speaker 1: in real species, but also in this fictional when we're
Speaker 1: talking about right, just in our real world, cannibalism is
Speaker 1: always the most economic path to avoid wasting the energy
Speaker 1: that goes into flesh. So we've mentioned this elder brain
Speaker 1: multiple times, and basically I just said it's a giant brain.
Speaker 1: But let's let's get a little bit more defined here
Speaker 1: on this. Yeah. I mean, essentially, it's just a giant
Speaker 1: brain in a Brian pool that is in charge of
Speaker 1: the mind flare colonies. See in the in the Um
Speaker 1: Drifts books. It's in cerebral fluid. And I always wondered
Speaker 1: where did they get all that cerebral fluid from, Like
Speaker 1: maybe they eat the brains and then they like keep
Speaker 1: they drain the cerebral fluid out to put in their
Speaker 1: little elder brain pool. But they've got now they just
Speaker 1: have Amazon weekly deliveries on siling Okay, yeah, well the
Speaker 1: two day shipping on projects. Yeah, you gotta do it,
Speaker 1: even to the under dark exactly. Yeah. So, according to Volos,
Speaker 1: what's going on here with the elder brain is, so
Speaker 1: is this to survive and to make the necessary meta
Speaker 1: calculations in order, you know, to to to actually survive
Speaker 1: and to eventually reclaim their empire. Uh, they've either evolved
Speaker 1: or developed the elder brains and these are giant immobile
Speaker 1: thought thought organs that flowed in tanks of brine serving
Speaker 1: as the mind flares colonies, library of knowledge, a history
Speaker 1: of past lives, and a nexus of meta cognition for
Speaker 1: the individuals in the colony, and each individual that is
Speaker 1: going to employ non aliftid thralls as well. Now, this
Speaker 1: reminds me of in the Marvel universe. They have a
Speaker 1: similar thing, the cre alien species, which I haven't seen
Speaker 1: a lot of the TV show Agents of Shield, but
Speaker 1: I think they show up in there. They're ruled by
Speaker 1: a thing that's very similar to this, that's called the
Speaker 1: Supreme Intelligence. It's kind of the same thing. It's just
Speaker 1: like a big blob and like a giant canister of
Speaker 1: cerebral fluid, and it's got some brain tentacles and eyes
Speaker 1: in the mouth. These don't have eyes in the mouth.
Speaker 1: They're just just big brains and they do all sorts
Speaker 1: of of you know, psionically powerful tactics against anybody that
Speaker 1: threatens them. But we'll come back to the Elder Brains
Speaker 1: in a bit, because there are actual parallels to discuss
Speaker 1: with humans. All right, So that is the crash course
Speaker 1: in the fictional elithics. Now from here on in the episode,
Speaker 1: we're gonna largely focus on what the natural world, what
Speaker 1: real life biology can tell us about what's going on
Speaker 1: with the elithids and how we can use the elithid
Speaker 1: examples the way to explore these examples. Yea. So the
Speaker 1: way that I approached this was sort of like, let's
Speaker 1: Frankenstein and from the real world a mind flare out
Speaker 1: of what we know of how they're described, right, So
Speaker 1: the their biology, anatomy, all that stuff like what's in
Speaker 1: the real world that we can bring to our understanding
Speaker 1: of this. And the first place that I went to
Speaker 1: was their mouths because they are described as even though
Speaker 1: they've got these tentacles, they're described as their specific mouths
Speaker 1: as being like lamp re mouths. Lampreys, if you're unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: are jawless fish. Uh. They've got these thorny, suction cup
Speaker 1: like mouths and they are parasites much like the mind
Speaker 1: flares and a lot of the creatures we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about today. They use their mouths to attach to an
Speaker 1: animal's body and then they cut with these teeth through
Speaker 1: surface tissue until they reach the blood and bodily fluids
Speaker 1: of it um. They're they they're known to live in
Speaker 1: both coastal and fresh water. They're kind of they look
Speaker 1: like eels kind of, but they're not their fish. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's three types of them. There's flesh eaters, blood drinkers,
Speaker 1: and just a type that lives for three to seven
Speaker 1: years in a larval stage and then they only live
Speaker 1: for six months as adults. But they don't really feed.
Speaker 1: They just reproduce with other lamp reas and then they die.
Speaker 1: So an equally weird example from the real world. Now,
Speaker 1: there is an excellent article on Wired from called Absurd
Speaker 1: Creature of the Week the lamprey that just really dove
Speaker 1: deep into the lamprey's biology. So I turned to that
Speaker 1: for a real deep description of this mouth. What's going
Speaker 1: on with this mouth? Now? Uh, flesh eater lampreys and
Speaker 1: blood drinker lampreys have different types of mouth. So let's
Speaker 1: go with the flesh eater for today. Since we know
Speaker 1: that the mind flare is definitely using it to eat brains.
Speaker 1: So they have a structure that's like a tongue. These
Speaker 1: are lampreys, and it's called a piston. It has this
Speaker 1: convex structure to it that moves both side to side
Speaker 1: and up and down, basically gouging flesh out of its
Speaker 1: victim with a strong middle tooth attached to it. And
Speaker 1: this middle tooth is shaped like a U in the
Speaker 1: flesh eater lampreys and like a W and the blood
Speaker 1: drinker lampreys, and for different reasons, with one's better at
Speaker 1: like pulling flesh into the mouth, the other is better
Speaker 1: getting blood flowing um. And there are very much like
Speaker 1: other animals that we've talked about when we've covered vampires
Speaker 1: on the show before. They have glands in their throat
Speaker 1: that secrete an anticoagulant and that helps keep the blood
Speaker 1: flowing help get stuffed down their throat. Uh. In the
Speaker 1: flesh eaters, the anti coagulant glands are much smaller, but
Speaker 1: they still exist. So presumably a mind flare would have
Speaker 1: some kind of anticoagulant gland as well. Now, lampreys have
Speaker 1: two rings of structures inside the mouth that helps them
Speaker 1: adhere to their victims through suction. One ring is the
Speaker 1: oral fimbria, and it basically looks like little leaves that
Speaker 1: are made of flaps of tissue, and these adhere closely
Speaker 1: to the skin of the victim and they form a
Speaker 1: tight seal. Like I mean, I've never been bitten by lamprey,
Speaker 1: but I imagine like from what I've heard, their next
Speaker 1: to impossible to get off of you. Like part of
Speaker 1: the country that I lived in for a while in
Speaker 1: New Hampshire was right next to what was called the
Speaker 1: Lamprey River, and so obviously there are a lot of
Speaker 1: fresh water lamp freas in there. I never encountered them,
Speaker 1: but you know, my understanding is like you know, you
Speaker 1: have to basically kill it to get it off and
Speaker 1: then have it I think surgically removed. Um, so it's
Speaker 1: it's clamped on their tight There's a second ring in
Speaker 1: the mouth that is made of conical structures known as
Speaker 1: papal a, and these helped the lamprey actually sense where
Speaker 1: best to attach themselves. So the blood drinking lampreys, they're
Speaker 1: so sensitive with this region of their mouth they can
Speaker 1: actually use it to find underlying blood vessels a victims.
Speaker 1: So this is like think of it as like uh,
Speaker 1: like radar almost right, Like it's a supersensitive organ built
Speaker 1: into their mouth, so they can find the best possible
Speaker 1: play to clamp down and start chewing and sucking blood
Speaker 1: or and or flesh out of you. Now, they don't
Speaker 1: often go after humans don't be listening to this and
Speaker 1: like freak out. Oh boy like that. You know, that's
Speaker 1: pretty rare. I think it. It has happened obviously. But
Speaker 1: fun fact that Joe actually told me about. I was
Speaker 1: talking to him about this episode before we came to
Speaker 1: the studio and he said, well, did you know this
Speaker 1: is classic Joe. He's got just like this ample amount
Speaker 1: of weird knowledge. He goes, did you know Henry the
Speaker 1: First died from eating a pie fell Lampreys? And I
Speaker 1: was like, what what are you talking about? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: he was right. Apparently, King Henry the First died from
Speaker 1: food poisoning when he ate what was referred to as
Speaker 1: a surfeit of Lamprey's in a pie. His physician specifically
Speaker 1: told him not to because like this is this is
Speaker 1: a bad idea, and he instead, I think he was
Speaker 1: like sixty eight sixty nine. He was, you know, for
Speaker 1: the time, quite elderly, but he was like, nope, I'm
Speaker 1: eating this pie Fell Lampreys. I can't imagine what that
Speaker 1: tastes like. It just made me immediately nauseous when Joe
Speaker 1: told me about it. But by all accounts, there's there's
Speaker 1: multiple pieces of evidence that this guy ate a lamprey pie.
Speaker 1: We'll have to hear from people who have a culinary
Speaker 1: experience with lampreys. Yeah, maybe they taste great. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine that a creature that solely subsists on
Speaker 1: just like hanging onto the body of its victim and
Speaker 1: draining it of blood has got like a lot of
Speaker 1: like good fatty flesh on it for eating. But I'm
Speaker 1: also a vegetarian. Now, for the mind flares part, of course,
Speaker 1: it's it's not so much about blood or meat, it's
Speaker 1: about giving that brain. So so I guess the idea
Speaker 1: here would be if we looked at the lamprey, it
Speaker 1: would be to either use some sort of specialized tongue
Speaker 1: after attachment to either like cut its way through an
Speaker 1: eye socket or some other natural fleshy gateway to the brain,
Speaker 1: or just like straight through the skull. Yeah. The way
Speaker 1: I've always seen it drawn is from behind, Like the
Speaker 1: of mind flare, tentacles wrap around your face room behind
Speaker 1: the mouth attaches to the back of your skull, and
Speaker 1: then presumably this piston thing is in their mouth and
Speaker 1: just bores through your skull, and subsequently they just chunk
Speaker 1: the your brain up and suck it up through their mouth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: leaving you with a head without a brain. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, uh, let's take a quick break and
Speaker 1: when we come back, we will explore more horrifying wonders
Speaker 1: related to the elithid body as well as natural world organisms. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're back, Robert. You had previously mentioned the possibilities
Speaker 1: of tadpoles in real life and in mind flare life
Speaker 1: being cannibals, So let's talk about this, all right, So
Speaker 1: once more again, according to Tvolo's guided monsters and elithid
Speaker 1: las eggs and protected pools and larval tadpole hatcheries, all right,
Speaker 1: the tadpoles hatch and then they get turned into adult
Speaker 1: mind flares, now tadpoles and abandoned pools. These are pools
Speaker 1: that you know, the mind flares that looked after we're
Speaker 1: all slain by high level adventures or or or gift
Speaker 1: coming in from from the outside, so there's nobody to
Speaker 1: take care of them, so that what they do is
Speaker 1: they end up eating each other until all you have
Speaker 1: left is just one mutated survivor known as a neolithid,
Speaker 1: and this just grows into a monstrous psychic worm. That's
Speaker 1: the danger to elipids and non elithids alike. Large powerful
Speaker 1: animal minded monster with us with some sionic ability. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there are some real world examples of this, right yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for the real world world parallel here would be tiger
Speaker 1: salamander cannibal morphs. So the life cycle of the tiger
Speaker 1: salamander features an interesting developmental fork. An egg can develop
Speaker 1: into a normal larval tadpole or we're into this cannibal morph. See. Now,
Speaker 1: under normal circumstances, tiger salamatter eggs developed into normal tadpoles
Speaker 1: and then into normal adult tiger salamanders. But if the
Speaker 1: population is too large for the available environment, so like
Speaker 1: they're in a small pool or something. Uh, then consistent
Speaker 1: tactile interactions with other tadpoles caused some of the eggs
Speaker 1: to develop into tadpoles with larger heads, bigger mouths, and
Speaker 1: more well developed teeth. And I'm definitely picturing like a
Speaker 1: baby Zeno more. Yeah. So yeah, it's basically the scenario
Speaker 1: is not to personify uh, you know, non human non
Speaker 1: intelligent um relationships here, but it's almost like there's a
Speaker 1: there's somebody in charge of all right, we've got too many.
Speaker 1: We've got too many salamanders in this pool. Let's just
Speaker 1: make one that's really good at eating all the other
Speaker 1: all the other salamanders. Uh and so it basically they
Speaker 1: have a built in population control system laar of on
Speaker 1: larva cannibalism. The broodpools overcrowded and the resources are too scarce,
Speaker 1: then some tadpoles physically transform in order to better gobble
Speaker 1: up the others. That is absolutely terrifying. Let's back up
Speaker 1: for a second here. Let's imagine let's apply this to
Speaker 1: human beings. Imagine there's a nursery and it's you know,
Speaker 1: at the hospital, and it's got all the babies in
Speaker 1: their little beds, right, and one baby grows a little
Speaker 1: bit larger, Its head gets bigger, it gets this huge mouth,
Speaker 1: and it grows well developed teeth, and then it proceeds
Speaker 1: to crawl around the nursery and eat some of the
Speaker 1: other babies. That's basically what we're talking that's the basic
Speaker 1: scenario here. Yeah, wow, and uh and and after this
Speaker 1: culling is done, the the cannibal MorphOS salamander, it keeps
Speaker 1: its large head and bigger mouth, but then goes through
Speaker 1: its diet normalizes, and it goes through a normal life cycle.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to imagine like the animal documentary that's narrated
Speaker 1: by like Morgan Freeman or Sigourney Weaver or something, and
Speaker 1: they're like, and here we have the tiger salamander eating
Speaker 1: all of its fellow tadpole babies, and it's just like, well,
Speaker 1: that's that's exactly the kind of thing Attenborough would hit
Speaker 1: us with. Attenborough would love it, that's true, And I
Speaker 1: would have to I would have to immediately skip the
Speaker 1: track for my son as we watched the Nature shows. Um,
Speaker 1: now let's turn to the neolithid. So, yeah, the neolithid,
Speaker 1: you can look at and say, this is essentially a
Speaker 1: cannibal morph. This is one tadpole eating all the other
Speaker 1: tadpoles and then growing into this giant thing. So if
Speaker 1: we're to use nature as our guide here, we can
Speaker 1: only assume that the neo liftid morph once served in
Speaker 1: evolutionary purpose, allowing a tadpole pool to survive in times
Speaker 1: of chaos or abandonment, absorbing the nutrients of its fellow
Speaker 1: tadpoles with just pure economic ruthlessness, just like the cannibal morphs.
Speaker 1: Of tiger salamanders. However, with the mind flares, you can
Speaker 1: definitely say that the neo lithi is something of of
Speaker 1: this stigial thing, right because there's there's no information any
Speaker 1: of the books. I like that that that let us
Speaker 1: know that. Then the annal lipid continues the a lipid
Speaker 1: race in any way, shape or form um. It's not
Speaker 1: going to develop into as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: it's not going to develop into an adult mind flare.
Speaker 1: So this is perhaps in a you know, a fitting
Speaker 1: accident for a species that has manipulated other species and
Speaker 1: itself for so long. Under normal condition, larger tad bowls
Speaker 1: would would be killed and they certainly would not be
Speaker 1: permitted to mature into annal lipid. Right yeah. I would
Speaker 1: imagine like in the mind flare society, this isn't always
Speaker 1: a good thing, right Yeah, it kind of deviates from
Speaker 1: your normal routine. It would be like it would be
Speaker 1: exactly like if humans could do this, you would you
Speaker 1: would know, never, never, always space your babies out, don't
Speaker 1: let don't put them too close, or you're gonna end
Speaker 1: up with a cannibal morph baby. And then what are
Speaker 1: we gonna do about that? You know, well, so I
Speaker 1: this isn't directly related to the cannibalism thing, but I
Speaker 1: found an interesting article about tad holes that I just
Speaker 1: wanted to throw in here as well to try to
Speaker 1: understand the neolithids. So, according to research that was published
Speaker 1: in apparently tadpoles can see if you attach eyeballs to
Speaker 1: their tails. Now this is utterly bizarre. Why what what
Speaker 1: I'm wondering is like, you know what the working conditions
Speaker 1: are like in this laboratory that basically it was compelling
Speaker 1: to scientists to study because they wanted to learn how
Speaker 1: much a tadpole brain could interpret sensory data. So they
Speaker 1: took the African claw frog Xenopus lavists I believe that's
Speaker 1: the Latin pronunciation. They took their tadpoles and they grafted
Speaker 1: eyeballs onto their torsos and tails, and then they removed
Speaker 1: their original eyes. So that's the part. To me, I'm like,
Speaker 1: what mad science is this? That they're just like plucking
Speaker 1: eyes out of these creatures and then pasting eyes onto
Speaker 1: other parts of their body. Yeah, who's the awful underdark
Speaker 1: monster here? Yeah? Exactly, this is very This is the
Speaker 1: kind of thing players too. Yeah. Um, then they gave
Speaker 1: a tadpole vision test, and the way that they did
Speaker 1: this was they illuminated half the area that the tadpoles
Speaker 1: were in with red light and half with blue light.
Speaker 1: And in the red light the tadpoles would get electrocuted.
Speaker 1: They'd get zapped with electricity. So again, more torture. Right,
Speaker 1: we've already yanked your eyeballs out, pasted them onto your tail.
Speaker 1: Now we're gonna zap you. But apparently some of these
Speaker 1: tadpoles would go over to the blue light area because
Speaker 1: they knew that it was safe. So the scientists determined
Speaker 1: some of them could actually see with their eyeball tails
Speaker 1: because they stayed in these safe blue areas. So the
Speaker 1: researchers basically argued, this is evidence that the brain in
Speaker 1: general is remarkably plastic in its configuration for different body arrangements,
Speaker 1: like especially at tadpole stage, when it's so um, you know,
Speaker 1: you're at the beginning of the life cycle. It can
Speaker 1: adapt quickly enough to like somehow rewire, so it can
Speaker 1: attach to these eyeballs that are just not supposed to
Speaker 1: be there um, And this is what allows mutations in
Speaker 1: all kinds of body plans. Not just in frogs and tadpoles,
Speaker 1: to still work with the existing anatomy. So the basic
Speaker 1: idea here is like, if there's some kind of a
Speaker 1: mutation in a single organism, it can adapt quickly, or
Speaker 1: its brain can adapt quickly because like it's designed to
Speaker 1: be so I don't know, flexible. Literally, Well, that's that's
Speaker 1: wonderful because this not only gives us a little more
Speaker 1: information about tadpoles and how they work, but again it
Speaker 1: shows it supports the theory that mind flares are essentially us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very much so. And I think right, like, can imagine there,
Speaker 1: here's your D and D campaign, right, you have you
Speaker 1: have to hear some adventurers. You have to sneak into
Speaker 1: a mind flare cave, take some of their tadpoles, and
Speaker 1: then pull their eyes off and attention to their tails
Speaker 1: and perform this experiment in uh in D and D time.
Speaker 1: So we'll see what kind of odd results that would have.
Speaker 1: Now we're talking about brain eating monsters here, so so
Speaker 1: one of the most obvious areas to to to explore
Speaker 1: here would be what animals eat brains. And it's a
Speaker 1: tricker scenario than we often think because they're playing of
Speaker 1: animals that eat brains, humans eat brains totally. Yeah, I mean, oh,
Speaker 1: this is going to have forever scarred me. But growing up,
Speaker 1: do you eversey Faces of Death? No? I mean I'm
Speaker 1: very familiar with them by reputation they were. You're lucky
Speaker 1: they didn't. But there was one of the like bootlegged
Speaker 1: VHS copies that I saw back when I was god
Speaker 1: must have been like fourteen or fifteen years old. Uh.
Speaker 1: They they did the thing where they put the monkey
Speaker 1: in the middle of a table. The table has like
Speaker 1: the circular entry, and you hit the monkey on the head,
Speaker 1: open up as skull and people eat the brains. This
Speaker 1: would be the very thing that was referenced in that
Speaker 1: awful scene in the second Indiana Jones movie. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And if you wonder why I'm a vegetarian, that was
Speaker 1: probably the beginnings of it right there. Yeah. God, what
Speaker 1: what an odd I want to go back and watch
Speaker 1: that movie sometimes, but don't. There's so much weird xenophobic material. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's Yeah. I feel sorry if our listeners are out
Speaker 1: there and you know what I'm talking about. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so there are a lot of examples, plenty of animals, birds,
Speaker 1: humans that eat brains, right, But to understand the mind
Speaker 1: flare affect on uh, the humanoids that they're eating the
Speaker 1: brains of, I turned to a couple of specific creatures
Speaker 1: that I think will help us out here, because one
Speaker 1: of the things about the mind flare is that you know,
Speaker 1: in a in a very fantasy way, it eats psychic energy.
Speaker 1: And of course there are no real parallels to that
Speaker 1: in the in the real world. Otherwise they're definitely eating
Speaker 1: the brain and nothing else. So the way to describe
Speaker 1: this in biology would be to say that they're I obligate,
Speaker 1: I guess neurovores, and it's difficult to find anything like
Speaker 1: that in biology. But you have a couple of possibilities here,
Speaker 1: I do, yeah, all of them much smaller than the
Speaker 1: mind flare. The first is and again help me with
Speaker 1: my Latin here, I think it's Neglia foul Larry. This
Speaker 1: is referred to in English as the brain eating amba uh,
Speaker 1: and this amiba is the primary cause of the infectious
Speaker 1: disease ambic men and joe encephalitis, which is also referred
Speaker 1: to as just pam P a M. The amiba can
Speaker 1: exist in different kinds of environments, sometimes in soil, sometimes
Speaker 1: in fresh water, and that's where it becomes trouble for
Speaker 1: us as human beings, or it can exist in the
Speaker 1: human central nervous system. Now, these infections are really rare.
Speaker 1: Well we're about to tell you. Don't get super freaked out.
Speaker 1: It's soup. It's incredibly rare. But when they happen of
Speaker 1: the time, it's fatal. Like, if you get one of
Speaker 1: these amiba in you, you've pretty much done for this
Speaker 1: is this is rolling a one on your Yeah. The
Speaker 1: CDC actually estimates that there were a hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: eight cases of PAM reported in the United States between
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two and fifteen. Okay, so that gives you
Speaker 1: an idea of how rare it is. Of those, only
Speaker 1: three of the patients survived. Uh so, how do you
Speaker 1: get it? You're all probably immediately going, oh, I don't
Speaker 1: want that. How How how do I stay away from that? Well,
Speaker 1: usually it's from engaging in recreational water activities like swimming
Speaker 1: or diving, So you know, you basically have to stay
Speaker 1: away from water fun if if you if you want
Speaker 1: to totally avoid this thing. The amiba enters the human
Speaker 1: body through your nose and It attaches itself to the
Speaker 1: epithel cells that line the inside of the nasal cavity.
Speaker 1: Then it migraine it's to the nerves that are situated
Speaker 1: in the nasal area. Eventually this reaches the central nervous
Speaker 1: system of your spinal cord and brain, and it induces
Speaker 1: your body's immune system to activate macrophages and neutrophills to
Speaker 1: combat infection. Doesn't feel good. And here's why. The amba
Speaker 1: itself this is very mind flawery. It has food cups
Speaker 1: on its surface that allow it to capture its own
Speaker 1: food resources, and this is everything from bacteria and fungi
Speaker 1: to human tissue if it's gotten up your nose. In addition,
Speaker 1: it produces cell destructive molecules that destroy the membrane structure
Speaker 1: of nerve cells. So the combination of these two things
Speaker 1: make it really effective at inducing severe nerve damage. It
Speaker 1: eventually will destroy your entire central nervous system. This makes
Speaker 1: them a pretty serious public health hazard um because they
Speaker 1: can be EASi acquired. You know, you're just swimming along,
Speaker 1: you get one up your nose and boom, and then
Speaker 1: they're associated with this really high mortality rate. Now, the
Speaker 1: symptoms don't show up until about two to eight days
Speaker 1: after infection, and they include the following and this is
Speaker 1: I think we can use these as probably an idea
Speaker 1: of what symptoms would be like of uh be either
Speaker 1: being under the thrall of mine flares or during the
Speaker 1: process of your brain being consumed. Okay, so as they're
Speaker 1: sucking that brain, just beginning to suck it out, I guess,
Speaker 1: so sudden headache, that's a that's an obvious one, right,
Speaker 1: high fever, neck pain, nausea, vomiting, ryanitis, light sensitivity, and
Speaker 1: eventually seizure, seizures and a coma. So alright, mind flare
Speaker 1: is probably doing this much quicker than the brain eating amiva,
Speaker 1: is right, But that's a basic idea, you know, unless
Speaker 1: they have different culinary styles, you know, maybe there's some
Speaker 1: of them. Maybe they like to eat slow. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I was reading to geek out a little bit.
Speaker 1: I was reading that supposedly some mind Flare's experiment by
Speaker 1: say subjecting their they're they're victims to musical thoughts or whatever, like,
Speaker 1: they'll they'll they'll want a certain mind state before they
Speaker 1: eat it because it had just later interesting. Okay, So
Speaker 1: they go to like they go to like a special
Speaker 1: school to like learn what specific thoughts to beam into
Speaker 1: the brain before they eat it. Yeah, do you want
Speaker 1: your your brain meal to be more a little like
Speaker 1: of a veal or I wanted to be a sushi
Speaker 1: you know? Depends. Huh. Well again, I want to remind
Speaker 1: everybody the brain eating amba is pretty rare. It's so
Speaker 1: rare that no clinical trials for developing treatments even exist
Speaker 1: as of Usually, if it's found, it's treated with something
Speaker 1: called ampho terrisin B, which is an anti fungal drug,
Speaker 1: as well as a variety of other anti fungal drugs.
Speaker 1: And I've got some examples for you. In fact, these
Speaker 1: are the three survivors in the US um one of
Speaker 1: the Now, there's been seven survivors in the whole world,
Speaker 1: three in the US. One of them was a nine
Speaker 1: year old girl in California who was infected in nineteen
Speaker 1: and she caught it by swimming in Deep Creek hot
Speaker 1: springs in San Bernardino National Forest. She was treated with
Speaker 1: exactly what I just described. They gave her Ampho terris
Speaker 1: and be some other antifungal drugs intravenously, and she beat
Speaker 1: it and lived through the experience. Now, two other children
Speaker 1: were reported survivors of this just in two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: so just three years ago, and they were twelve and
Speaker 1: eight years old. And the twelve year old first contracted
Speaker 1: it at a water park that was near Little Rock, Arkansas.
Speaker 1: So don't think to yourself like, oh, this is only
Speaker 1: if I swim in like natural water, because apparently they
Speaker 1: got it at this water park as well. Uh. In
Speaker 1: addition to the anti fungal treatments that they usually give,
Speaker 1: this girl was so bad off that they had to
Speaker 1: subject her to induced hypothermia to reduce her brain swelling.
Speaker 1: So this is pretty nasty disease. Um. But also, you know,
Speaker 1: let's keep it in mind when we're thinking about, boy,
Speaker 1: this mind flare, it's got its lampory mouth attached and
Speaker 1: it's piston drilling through my head. What's that going to
Speaker 1: feel like? So this would be an example of a
Speaker 1: creature that certainly doesn't depend on human brains at all exactly,
Speaker 1: but this is it. But it also gives us an
Speaker 1: example of what brain eating in the real world consists of. Yep,
Speaker 1: we have a couple other examples here too. The next
Speaker 1: one is neurosister curosis, which is a type of tape
Speaker 1: worm that usually lives in pigs. This is very stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind. You must have covered the pork tapeworm. Uh.
Speaker 1: Pork tape worm produced larva that can latch onto cranium,
Speaker 1: whether it's pigs cranium or human cranium, and they show
Speaker 1: up as large white cysts. They usually disperse through a
Speaker 1: pig's blood stream, so when you're eating undercooked pork, you
Speaker 1: could be eating their larva. Uh. So when they enter
Speaker 1: a human, usually from eating undercooked pork, they still flow
Speaker 1: through our blood stream and they get stuck inside the
Speaker 1: fluid filled cavities in our brains. These can lead to
Speaker 1: a coma, loss of motor functions, violent seizures, or blindness.
Speaker 1: And the reason why they're eating holes into your brain. Now,
Speaker 1: my understanding of this scenario is that essentially you have
Speaker 1: a parasite that is lost in an unfamiliar host exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's just doing what it thinks it's supposed to
Speaker 1: do and it results in this. Yeah. Now, it's unlike
Speaker 1: the amiba. This is more common than you might think.
Speaker 1: It's estimated that two thousand people have them in the US.
Speaker 1: In twenty nine million in Latin America. Now, these are
Speaker 1: just pork tape worms going about their regular business, not
Speaker 1: not necessarily getting lost to winding up of the brain though, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I believe that's true. Yeah, which can be right, It
Speaker 1: can subsequently lead to that. The other one that's related
Speaker 1: to this similar effect, very different being is prion disease,
Speaker 1: and we've we've talked about this occasionally on the show
Speaker 1: um Prions. There are a variety of fatal neurological illnesses
Speaker 1: that are associated with them. They are abnormal proteins and
Speaker 1: you can both inherit them or have them transmitted into
Speaker 1: your body through infected animal tissue. They result in symptoms
Speaker 1: of dementia or a taxio which is impaired motor control,
Speaker 1: and they eventually lead to death and it can take
Speaker 1: anywhere from weeks two months. UM. You might have heard
Speaker 1: of this as Kreuzfeldt Jakob disease. Uh, there's also new
Speaker 1: variant Kreutzfeld Jakob disease, crew Gerstmann Stralser Shinker syndrome, and
Speaker 1: fatal familial insomnia. So all of these are caused by
Speaker 1: prion proteins in the brain. Kuru in particular is the
Speaker 1: one that is associated with traditional acts of funeral cannibalism
Speaker 1: um in in certain parts of the world. And yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly what it leads to disease. Yeah, so all of
Speaker 1: us are probably most familiar with these from the animal
Speaker 1: form that we referred to as mad cow disease. It's
Speaker 1: caused by a similar thing with prions. Now, we've known
Speaker 1: about this in sheep and goats for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: It's referred to as scrappy in sheeps and goats, but
Speaker 1: we didn't know that it was actually transmittable until the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. So basically what happens here is these diseases
Speaker 1: are caused by proteins that are misshapen um. That's why
Speaker 1: we refer to them as prions. They clump together and
Speaker 1: proliferate by inducing shape changes in our normal proteins, and
Speaker 1: this causes sponge like lesions in the brain that disrupt
Speaker 1: brain function. So there's your three examples. You got the prions,
Speaker 1: the pork tape worm, and the brain eating amiva. Basically,
Speaker 1: you know, very different kinds of creatures that can get
Speaker 1: into your nervous system and wreck havoc. But good examples
Speaker 1: of probably what's going on with mind flare consumption. All right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break and we come back.
Speaker 1: We're going to compare the elethids to a certain conge
Speaker 1: eating parasite. So we talked about this earlier. But the
Speaker 1: creation of the mind flare and it's I guess lore
Speaker 1: throughout the last forty odd years is so amazing that
Speaker 1: they've actually come up with a detailed process with its
Speaker 1: own title called ceremorphosis, which is basically the idea of
Speaker 1: how it reproduces parasitically, right right, Yeah, it's that example
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier. The the little tadpole is shoved
Speaker 1: up into the cranium and then it eats the host
Speaker 1: brain and it attaches there to the brainstorm swells up,
Speaker 1: grows into the new brain for this body, and then
Speaker 1: transforms the body. Now here's a here's a nerdy little
Speaker 1: bit that I remember about illids. Sometimes when they do this,
Speaker 1: they take on like mental ticks from the host that
Speaker 1: they grow within. Uh. And this is considered like social flaw.
Speaker 1: It's like a it's a real like bad sign of
Speaker 1: manners in mind flare society. So they try to hide
Speaker 1: it from the rest of their speechies. So like let's say, like, um,
Speaker 1: all right, we'll use Joe as an example. Let's say
Speaker 1: Joe has like a tick where he picks at his fingernails,
Speaker 1: and then they insert a mind flare tadpole into Joe.
Speaker 1: It eats his brain, It turns Joe into a mind flare,
Speaker 1: regrows as his brain, but it may still have that
Speaker 1: tick where it picks at its fingernails, but it has
Speaker 1: to hide it constantly from other mind flairs or else
Speaker 1: they'll they'll be like, oh, there's something off with you.
Speaker 1: You're not mind flawery enough. You didn't discard the human
Speaker 1: shell that you So it's so you're weak because you're
Speaker 1: in a since you're letting your your clothing control you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Alright,
Speaker 1: So you're probably wondering, well, this sounds just monstrous and
Speaker 1: awful and other worldly. What's what possible parallel was there? Well,
Speaker 1: there's a wonderful one and in the form of Simothia exigua.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this is the stuff to blow your my classic.
Speaker 1: We talked about this one on the Strain episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the tongue eating ice apod. You might be
Speaker 1: familiar with these from a movie that came out a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago. It's a found footage horror movie
Speaker 1: called The Bay, and I think the premise I watched
Speaker 1: it a while ago, but the premise was something like,
Speaker 1: there was some kind of pollutant in the waters around
Speaker 1: this coastal town. It caused the the isopods to mutate, uh,
Speaker 1: and so they started infecting human beings instead of fish. Yeah. Now, luckily,
Speaker 1: luckily they don't actually affect humans. But there hasn't been
Speaker 1: a lot of new research published on these creatures. It's
Speaker 1: it's they're they're quite rare. They're possibly popping up more
Speaker 1: these days due to over fishing. But essentially what you
Speaker 1: have here, this is the scenario as we understanding. This
Speaker 1: little crustacean sneaks in through the gills of a fish.
Speaker 1: It sets up shop on the host taste buds, and
Speaker 1: then there's there's only so much room and a fish
Speaker 1: is in a fish mouth, So you can imagine what
Speaker 1: the the louse's first meal is. It has a tasty
Speaker 1: helping of tongue juice, starts sucking on that tongue juice,
Speaker 1: and once the allows drains the tongue of enough blood, Uh,
Speaker 1: it attaches itself to the atrophied stump of the tongue
Speaker 1: and essentially becomes the new tongue for the fish. And
Speaker 1: every time the host opens its mouth for a meal,
Speaker 1: the allows you know, helps itself to a little food
Speaker 1: on the way down. Yeah, you can easily, uh find
Speaker 1: a Google image search of what these things look like.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of pictures of people prying fish mouths opening.
Speaker 1: You can see the little icebod inside out. Yeah, every
Speaker 1: time I show my wife, she just goes like she
Speaker 1: does the voice of the isopod saying like hello, like
Speaker 1: speaking out from inside this fish mouth. Fun fact, not
Speaker 1: these specific isopods that that it regrow as tongues, but
Speaker 1: other isopods can grow to be over two point five
Speaker 1: feet long. And uh, these aren't the tongue replaces this
Speaker 1: that these are the kind that scavenge the carcasses of whales,
Speaker 1: which we've talked about before the show as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so these are really I mean, I don't I don't
Speaker 1: know how to describe isopods verbally on the show, but
Speaker 1: they're real creepy looking critters and just imagine them crawling
Speaker 1: along the corpse of whale, just slowly chewing their way
Speaker 1: through it. Yeah, to drag in another fictional comparison, they
Speaker 1: remind me a lot of the Gartham from the Dark
Speaker 1: Crystal of the beetle creatures. Yeah, Yeah, that's good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good example. So with Samothia exigua, you have
Speaker 1: a creature here that that mainly you know, sucks on
Speaker 1: tongue juice, attaches itself to the stump, while the elithid
Speaker 1: tadpole goes far beyond that. The the elithid tadpole is
Speaker 1: replacing the central organ of the nervous system. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it's it's quite appropriate to think of this as an
Speaker 1: act that just kills the host, but it really serves
Speaker 1: as a sort of of of parasitism. The body continues
Speaker 1: to live, I'll be it in a different form, and
Speaker 1: many natural world parasites inflict behavioral and physical changes on
Speaker 1: their hosts. It also gives us a rough evolutionary idea
Speaker 1: of where the elithids came from or would have come
Speaker 1: from in a natural system, right brain replacing parasites that
Speaker 1: eventually transcend into something greater. Yeah, So I mean, if
Speaker 1: you really think about it, like they have to, even
Speaker 1: though like mind players best operate in the dark and
Speaker 1: hide an attack. They have to come into contact with
Speaker 1: other humanoid species because otherwise they're just gonna only exist
Speaker 1: as tadpole form, right, they have to. They have to
Speaker 1: use humans for bodies, they have to use humans for food.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, because also, yeah, you can think of it
Speaker 1: this way. So the parasitic form that goes inside the
Speaker 1: host is physically eating the brain from the out, from
Speaker 1: the inside out. But then as adults they have to
Speaker 1: crack open skulls and get brains, you know, in a
Speaker 1: different way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wonder what happens if
Speaker 1: a mind flare eats a pryon infected brain. That would
Speaker 1: be that would be an interesting plot porn infected brains
Speaker 1: and how maybe they can detect them and know not
Speaker 1: to them. Maybe that's it. That's like the oh, it's
Speaker 1: like it's like an alien three when they the aliens
Speaker 1: don't attack Sigourney Weaver because spoilers, she's got one of
Speaker 1: them in her. But like the mind flares will like
Speaker 1: kill everybody except for one person, and it's because they
Speaker 1: can sense that they've got you know, either pryon related
Speaker 1: disease or like a pork tape worm or something. But
Speaker 1: this would be a wonderful plot for anybody out there
Speaker 1: who's putting together a campaign. Imagine a scenario in which
Speaker 1: the big threat that the mind flares are facing, or
Speaker 1: perhaps the the methodology that's being employed by their enemies
Speaker 1: is a pry on. It's being induced to the populations
Speaker 1: that the mind flavors depend on for food. Mad mind
Speaker 1: flare disease. Alright, but we've got some more biological parallels,
Speaker 1: specifically with locusts. Right, yes, so remember the olethard that
Speaker 1: we have mentioned earlier. This is the super mind flare.
Speaker 1: So again, the scenario here is you have tadpoles growing
Speaker 1: into adult mind flares. Everything is going like normal, but
Speaker 1: then there's an exceptional mind flare adult who starts uh
Speaker 1: rivaling the elder brain. You know, they're they're disagreeing on everything.
Speaker 1: And finally the elder brain says, all right, go do
Speaker 1: your own thing, take your followers, get out of here,
Speaker 1: start your own colony. And that's what happens, seeds a
Speaker 1: new colony. And again you can think of this as
Speaker 1: a morph a version of the species that's going to
Speaker 1: go out and uh and and found a new colony. Okay,
Speaker 1: And the best example that that I came across to
Speaker 1: to discuss this is that of the desert locust. So
Speaker 1: desert locust feature both a gregarious and a solitary morph.
Speaker 1: A gregarious morph arises as a response to population density.
Speaker 1: It's more adapted flying, so it can it can get
Speaker 1: the heck out of that immediate area, go off and
Speaker 1: help found a new population of desert locusts. So I
Speaker 1: think that's what we have. We have here with the olythics.
Speaker 1: You have a model that closely resembles morphs that develop
Speaker 1: due to population density in order to spread out and
Speaker 1: establish new community. So in this case, it's it's the
Speaker 1: idea there's there's enough of them around that it means
Speaker 1: that the population is healthy, the resources are abundant enough,
Speaker 1: and the colony can actually uh you know, depart, splinter
Speaker 1: and form new populations of the species. Now, what's inherent
Speaker 1: about that, especially for these mind flares, is that they're hermaphrodites,
Speaker 1: so they don't need mates in order to create more
Speaker 1: mind flares. So I was thinking about this, I was like,
Speaker 1: all right, her mapphroditic reproduction is is definitely a real thing.
Speaker 1: But let's look to another example to try to figure
Speaker 1: out how that would work with mind flares, and the
Speaker 1: one I turned to was CE elegants, which is a
Speaker 1: type of nematode of roundworm or threadworm uh, And it
Speaker 1: lives in the soil, usually sometimes rotting vegetation, and it
Speaker 1: basically feeds on bacteria. And they're they're very primitive, but
Speaker 1: we human beings study them a lot, and why because
Speaker 1: they share essential characteristics with human biology, so you know,
Speaker 1: they're great for studying the effects of certain things on
Speaker 1: without doing it to humans or I don't know, ferrets,
Speaker 1: which are another sort of I guess if you're thinking
Speaker 1: about it in terms of evolved life forms higher up
Speaker 1: the chain that has human characteristics, except some of C.
Speaker 1: Elegans are self fertilizing hermaphrodites, just like the mind flayers
Speaker 1: are uh. And the way that they do this is
Speaker 1: they cleave embryonically. So I would assume this is something
Speaker 1: that happens in the mind flare. It proceeds through morpha
Speaker 1: genesis and then they grow into an adult. Now we've
Speaker 1: been told by Volo's Guide of Monsters that mind flares
Speaker 1: lay an egg, but this is all right, not trying
Speaker 1: to be gross here, but I'm trying to figure this out. Right,
Speaker 1: You go through ceremorphosis, changes your body, turns your head
Speaker 1: into an octopus. Presumably it creates some kind of orifice
Speaker 1: that you can lay an egg through. Yeah, I would
Speaker 1: guess so. Or it's utilizing an existing orifice in some way,
Speaker 1: shape or form. Okay, um, but I'm wondering if maybe
Speaker 1: what's happening is it's because it's creating its own eggs.
Speaker 1: It's it's cleaving embryonically inside of itself, laying that as
Speaker 1: an egg, and then that egg hatches, proceeds through morpha genesis,
Speaker 1: and then goes through the ceremorphosis procedure that we've already
Speaker 1: described right now. See elegants also has only male counterparts.
Speaker 1: So there's hermaphrodites and there's males, but there aren't females.
Speaker 1: It's kind of fascinating. Most of their volume when you
Speaker 1: look at their anatomy, is taken up by their reproductive system.
Speaker 1: So you'd have to imagine maybe mind flares would be
Speaker 1: the same way. Like other than the big head, everything
Speaker 1: from the neck down is reproductive system. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: they probably don't need much in the way of a
Speaker 1: traditional digestive system because they're only getting a limited amount
Speaker 1: of sustenance out of that brain. Yeah. Um, and then
Speaker 1: and then who knows how they defecate. Maybe they just
Speaker 1: they're always covered in slime, so maybe they just maybe
Speaker 1: they just secrete it through their cores. Well. Um, the
Speaker 1: sea elegance of their nine dred and fifty nine cells,
Speaker 1: three hundred of them are neurons. This sounds about right
Speaker 1: for a larval mind flare, especially if it's you know,
Speaker 1: primarily using its thoughts, its brain, it's thinking capacity. See,
Speaker 1: elegants also have neural structures. These are just in nematodes
Speaker 1: mind you that include sense organs for taste, ill, temperature,
Speaker 1: and touch. They don't have eyes, but they do respond
Speaker 1: to light. Hopefully nobody starts sewing eyes onto these guys
Speaker 1: anytime soon. But they they are responsive to light as well. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they move by flexing and relaxing their dorsal ventral
Speaker 1: waves along their body to propel themselves along. And this
Speaker 1: was how I was imagining the mind flare. Larvae must
Speaker 1: have to have some kind of locomotion, right, whether it's
Speaker 1: moving through cerebral fluid, that it's swimming around in or
Speaker 1: it's crawling up into somebody's skull. So it probably does
Speaker 1: a similar thing right by flexing and relaxing until it
Speaker 1: burrows up in there and eats the brain. So I
Speaker 1: think see elegants as a nematode is a pretty good start.
Speaker 1: There's lots of hermaphroditic creatures out there that we could
Speaker 1: look to, but this seems plausible for how the mind
Speaker 1: flare I guess the reproductive part inside the actual adult
Speaker 1: mind flare's bodies working. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's an
Speaker 1: interesting spin on it. And certainly flesh is out something
Speaker 1: that at least in the guides I've looked at, they
Speaker 1: don't really put a lot of detail into. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's probably a little too much for your your average
Speaker 1: A D and D reader that's in Volos Additional Guy,
Speaker 1: the Midnight glos Erotic Guide, the Monsters. Um, okay, so
Speaker 1: we've talked a lot about this on the side, but
Speaker 1: let's really get into it. The elder brain. So can
Speaker 1: you imagine like if we just had rather rather than
Speaker 1: like um, a boss at work instead, where your boss's
Speaker 1: office is, there's just a big baby pool that's filled
Speaker 1: with cerebral fluid and a giant brain, and that's what
Speaker 1: tells you what your duties are for the day. I'm
Speaker 1: picturing it right now. I mean I could probably get
Speaker 1: behind it after after a while. Yeah, yeah, you could
Speaker 1: trust an elder brain. Yeah, I mean that's the older brain.
Speaker 1: Who's who's going to question the elder brain? But you,
Speaker 1: I certainly wouldn't know. But uh, dritzt Ordn did. That's
Speaker 1: a spoiler for that book Exile. Uh speaking of which, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is actually a quote from it, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna give you a little bit of an idea of
Speaker 1: from the prose what they're like. The inside of the
Speaker 1: giant stone structure was ringed by balconies and spiraling stairways,
Speaker 1: each level housing several of the mind flares, But it
Speaker 1: was the bottom chamber, unadorned and circular, that held the
Speaker 1: most important being of all, the central brain. Fully twenty
Speaker 1: feet in diameter, This boneless lump of pulsating flesh tied
Speaker 1: the mind flare community together in telepathic symbiosis. The central
Speaker 1: brain was the composite of their knowledge, the mental eye
Speaker 1: that guarded their outside chambers, and which had heard the
Speaker 1: warning cries of the Illapid from the drows city many
Speaker 1: miles to the east to the Illatids of the community.
Speaker 1: The central brain was the coordinator of their entire existence
Speaker 1: and nothing short of their odd Thus, only a very
Speaker 1: few slaves were allowed with this special tower, captives with
Speaker 1: sensitive and delicate fingers that could massage the illeted god
Speaker 1: thing and soothe it with tender brushes and warm fluids.
Speaker 1: So it's a little insight into what goes on with
Speaker 1: the elder brains. Well, you've got to keep the the
Speaker 1: elder brain well scrubbed. It's like constantly, like at a
Speaker 1: day spa. Yeah. So again, you get back into this
Speaker 1: idea that either they developed this overtime or they evolved
Speaker 1: to have the elder brain as part of their their
Speaker 1: biology essentially um but part of their They're just there
Speaker 1: their life cycle. I tend to like the idea that
Speaker 1: they they developed it or they turned to it after
Speaker 1: the fall, because the mind flays endlessly plot the restoration
Speaker 1: of their empire, and to do so, they have to
Speaker 1: maintain a perfect balance of secrecy and exploration, ever clawing
Speaker 1: out the shortest a fist path, much like the Spacing
Speaker 1: Guild and the Dune Yeah, yeah, I can't make big
Speaker 1: risks because because if they don't pay off, they could
Speaker 1: lose everything. Right, so to survive and to make the
Speaker 1: necessary meta calculations. Here, the elethids have this elder brain,
Speaker 1: uh again, giant immobile thought organ in a tank of brine.
Speaker 1: It's the colony's library of knowledge, a history of all
Speaker 1: their past lives. When they die, their their their own
Speaker 1: brains are returned to the older brain. It's the a
Speaker 1: nexus of meta cognition for the individuals in the colony,
Speaker 1: and likewise kind of serves the thralls as well. You
Speaker 1: know what that sounds like to me? What cyborg ism? Yeah,
Speaker 1: except for it's using organic material. It sounds very much
Speaker 1: like what we talked about in our episode on cyborg
Speaker 1: is m. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't help but think
Speaker 1: about human computing. The entire system resembles in many ways
Speaker 1: human information networking systems and the ever evolving supercomputers that
Speaker 1: manage it were the externalization and interconnect of it of thought.
Speaker 1: And as we drift ever closer to the technological singularity,
Speaker 1: when computer superintelligence truly eclipses that of humanity, it seems
Speaker 1: like we could be approaching our own age of the
Speaker 1: elder brain. Right, Yeah, I mean, well, think about it
Speaker 1: the cloud, the way everybody talks about the cloud, We're
Speaker 1: just like offloading information to the cloud. And I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess we do have like people whose
Speaker 1: whole job is to maintain the cloud. I don't know
Speaker 1: that they're necessarily giving it a delicate finger massages, but
Speaker 1: you know that they work inside these data centers that
Speaker 1: house all this information. That's our version of the elder
Speaker 1: We put all of our human knowledge into it. We
Speaker 1: put all these details about our daily life. Even when
Speaker 1: we die, information about us lives on. Yeah, I mean what, yeah,
Speaker 1: what is the internet? What is the cloud but an
Speaker 1: elder brain? And you know, the more I think about it,
Speaker 1: I would I think I'd be okay with trusting. I'd
Speaker 1: be I feel safer trusting the world to an elder
Speaker 1: brain or or in the human variation here, a super
Speaker 1: advanced artificial intelligence. Yeah. So you're ready to give up
Speaker 1: to sky Net at this point, You're like, maybe it'll
Speaker 1: do a better job than we have. It's kind of
Speaker 1: the sky Net situation, right because the mind flares are saying, look,
Speaker 1: we screw this up. We're done, We're doomed, we're done.
Speaker 1: So let's let's let's have this elder brain that's going
Speaker 1: to take care of all those choices for us, and
Speaker 1: this way we can survive and maybe even rise again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I'm trying to think to like parallels of
Speaker 1: this if you you know, like so in the stories
Speaker 1: of mind flares, basically they'll protect the elder brain at
Speaker 1: all costs. Uh. It's you know, as you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: I think it's a pretty high level monster to fight
Speaker 1: an elder brain or something. Right, It's like pretty like
Speaker 1: they'll just like psychically wipe you out if you try
Speaker 1: to hurt them. But but like, imagine if you just
Speaker 1: destroyed the Internet, you just took out the cloud. Now
Speaker 1: I know that's like, you know, pretty much as much
Speaker 1: fantasy as mind flares at this point, right, But like
Speaker 1: a world right now without all of that data backed
Speaker 1: up that we've got would be an utter chaos, And
Speaker 1: so what are we gonna do for now? We're going
Speaker 1: to protect it at all costs. Right, That's like information
Speaker 1: is our primary resource right now. It's kind of crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you sound like a modern human, you also sound like
Speaker 1: a mind flare and saying that, which brings us back
Speaker 1: again to this area, this idea that the mind flares
Speaker 1: are essentially us. They may have tentacles, they may eat
Speaker 1: more brains than we do on a daily basis, but
Speaker 1: they're essentially humans with a with a very similar reliance
Speaker 1: on information and informational systems. Um. So think about that
Speaker 1: the next time you encounter one, you know, no one
Speaker 1: of your adventures. Yeah, absolutely, be a little bit more
Speaker 1: humane with the mind flares that you may be attacking. Yes,
Speaker 1: in humans before before you rule your initiative, I think twice.
Speaker 1: All right, So there you have it. The lited the
Speaker 1: mind flare again a fun Dungeons and Dragons monster and
Speaker 1: iconic Dungeons and Dragons monster that was referenced in season
Speaker 1: two of Stranger Things. Yes, suddenly, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it's way more relevant to people who aren't just D
Speaker 1: and D nerds like us or monster fans. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: if you watch Stranger Things season two and you thought
Speaker 1: that this helped out, or you thought, hey, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: that's not like a mind flare at all, you guys
Speaker 1: described the real mind flare right to us. We're on
Speaker 1: social media all over the place. You can get us
Speaker 1: on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler or Instagram. That's right. You can
Speaker 1: head on over to the mother ship stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com and you'll find all the episodes
Speaker 1: we've done before, including there's one what does mind Control
Speaker 1: Feel Like? That Joe and I did, and then all
Speaker 1: three of us jumped in on the Live Stranger Things
Speaker 1: episode just a couple of months ago. Yeah, exactly. So
Speaker 1: the other way that you can get in touch with
Speaker 1: us is the direct way that and I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about telepathy, I'm talking about email. Here, let's blow the
Speaker 1: mind at how stuff works dot com for more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com the big