Nothing Stranger Than a Hive Mind

In a key scene from season four of the popular Netflix show Stranger Things, a scarred, Freddy Krueger-type levitates within a darkened room, slithering tendrils intertwining with his limbs. The tentacles splay out across the walls, forming a connection to the very fabric of the environment, much like a nerve to a muscle. He twitches and stirs with his surroundings… This scene serves as a metaphorical representation of the hive mind and is central to the story of the Netflix show Stranger Things, but what is the real-life inspiration behind it?

The concept of a hive mind, in a science fiction context, describes a universal consciousness shared by many individuals. With the premiere episode of its fifth and final season due to be released on 26 November, Stranger Things has recently popularised this idea. 

For those who are not familiar with the series, it centres around a group of young kids who — following the disappearance of their friend — face supernatural events linked to secret government experiments. In the show, the hive mind manifests in the interconnection between the show’s ultimate antagonist, Vecna, and all other creatures inhabiting the alternate dimension known as “The Upside Down”. 

We see this in the way Vecna forms and harnesses “The Mind Flayer” — a giant spider-like entity which serves as the conduit for controlling other organisms, including humans. The hive mind network, of which Vecna acts as the central hub, is unified in its goals, thinking, strength, and pain — to affect one being in the collective web is to affect all others as well. 

While this shared consciousness is ultimately fictitious, the concept is extrapolated from examples in the natural world. Reminiscent of insects, the term hive mind is indeed analogous to the behaviour of ant colonies when searching for a new nest site. This “house-hunting” behaviour involves a few ants being sent to scout out a new home and, if satisfactory, report back to the original nest to lead the others to this new location. When the population in this new site surpasses a certain threshold, the leaders will register this — via a process known as quorum sensing — and begin physically moving any other ants towards it. This ensures that, if multiple new sites have been scouted, only the highest quality location (marked by the greatest numbers of ants) is fully committed to. As such, the colony appears to make a collective decision to move towards the best site, abandoning all other potential homes. 

House-hunting behaviour demonstrates how, despite being fully capable of functioning as independents, social insects appear to operate for the greater benefit of the herd — something which is akin to the hive mind concept.

A second example of an organism whose behaviour evokes a hive mind mentality is the slime mould. Slime moulds are ancient, single-celled amoebae that can combine to form a large supercell capable of what seems to be intelligent, collective decision-making. When placed in a maze puzzle, the supercell can determine the shortest path to get from one food source to the next, remembering routes and dead ends it has previously explored by leaving a trail of sticky slime behind. Furthermore, when the supercell is severed into smaller fragments and spread across the maze, the individual slime moulds will seek out each other and fuse to reform the single, unified network. Although the precise details are unclear, this behaviour may be the result of individual slime moulds sensing and propagating chemical signals in the environment (either from food sources or other slime moulds). 

Both of these examples have undoubtedly served as natural inspiration for the sci-fi hive mind trope. And in Stranger Things, it is the mechanism by which Vecna gains the upper hand on his victims — something which must be overcome by our beloved protagonists in the highly anticipated final season.

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway