SIO501: What Pluribus Gets Right about Neuroscience
Serious Inquiries Only
Thomas Smith
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
Subject of much sci-fi media and philosophy discussions, the "hive mind" is also a key element of Vince Gilligan's (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) new show, Pluribus. Dr. Jenessa Seymour joins the pod to walk us through examples that we have studied of hive mind behavior (in the insect world), and why we can reasonably assert that you could not maintain your individuality if our brains directly communicated with each other (in the human world).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to series inquires only. |
| 0:13.5 | This is episode 501. |
| 0:15.5 | I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and got another fun science one for you. |
| 0:19.8 | Have you been watching Pluribus? Oh, we have. |
| 0:22.4 | Enjoyed it. Pretty good. Pretty good. Well, so has Dr. Janessa Seymour. And she wanted to talk about |
| 0:27.9 | some interesting science that actually has some relevance to Pluribus. What might a hive mind |
| 0:33.4 | actually be like? What would happen if our brains were maybe connected in some way? As much as that |
| 0:39.0 | sounds like just pure sci-fi, turns out we can't actually know something about that because of |
| 0:44.0 | strange things that have happened to people's brains and then scientists studied those people. |
| 0:48.2 | It's another brainisode. We get to learn about experiments with ants as well, because they're kind of |
| 0:52.7 | hive-minded things, sort of. So much fun stuff. And don't worry, no spoilers for Pluribus beyond like the first, like, few minutes of the show. The basic concept. All right, well, thanks so much for listening. As always, thanks so much for supporting. You can do so at patreon.com slash series pod. You can avoid the ads and get a warm, fuzzy feeling in our hive mind that we all share. |
| 1:11.7 | All right, after this, I'll be on with Janessa. |
| 1:25.6 | Jennifer, how's it going today? |
| 1:26.7 | Pretty good. I got some bread rising for dinner later today. I got a new video game I'm excited about. Life is going good and I'm pretending bad things aren't happening. That's fun. Well, what are we doing here then? Yeah, you know, you're taking me away from it just so you can feel bad. We're going to talk about pluribus. Finnelli just aired. Obviously, I don't like spoilers. We don't need to spoil. But pretty good show. I liked it. It had a lot of the Vince Gilligan, nothing happens stuff. But it wasn't like for my money. It didn't quite as much earn it as say a Breaking Bad or a Better Call Saul, but was still enjoyable. I watched it. |
| 2:01.4 | But we don't need to get too into spoilers or anything. |
| 2:04.5 | Like I said, we can focus on just the central concept and do a bit of an old like |
| 2:10.4 | philosophers and space type thing, I think. |
| 2:12.7 | But there's a science tie-in that you wanted to discuss. |
| 2:15.3 | Yeah. |
| 2:15.8 | So there's a theme that is not a spoiler because you will figure this out from like episode |
| 2:22.4 | one. |
| 2:23.4 | We have essentially a hive mind scenario. |
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