"I'm gonna eat your brains and gain your knowledge!"
In fiction, some creatures are somehow able to obtain the memories of other beings by consuming their grey matter. The possibility of this in real life is unlikely, most evidence suggests that memories are "stored" in the connections between brain cells, which would usually be destroyed in the process of eating a brain. Though there are some hypotheses that memory is at least partially stored as chemicals inside the cells, which might survive something's digestive processes; empirical research into this trope has been controversial, with a famous 1955 study on apparent cannibalism-based memory transfer in planarians being a frequent subject of debate among both neurobiologists and microbiologists.
Sub-Trope of Artistic License – Biology, Cannibalism Superpower and Brain Food. Sister Trope of Genetic Memory, where the memories are instead recorded in the genes. Compare You Are Who You Eat.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- The demon Nao Shi Gui (Brain-eating Demon) from 3×3 Eyes is used by Zhou Gui to find a way across the trap-filled dungeon leading to Kunlun... by slowing consuming the brains of the chief abbot to gain access to his memories and know how to navigate the dungeon. Apparently, he needs some time to obtain all the memories he need, and it also depends on the person's brain.
- Yoma in Claymore normally eat human entrails but can also devour a person's brain to absorb their memories and impersonate them. The impersonation is so convincing that a number of ignorant villagers believe that Yoma are contagious and cast out certain characters who had close contact with them.
Comic Books
- Carnage (2023): The clone of Cletus Kasady created by the Carnage symbiote eats the original Cletus Kasady's brain to absorb his consciousness.
- The Flash: There's at least one version of Gorilla Grodd who does this. In The Black Ring, Lex Luthor uses it against him by allowing him to capture and eat an underling who had been misinformed about Luthor's plans.
- In Rom: Spaceknight, the female Dire Wraiths could do this via a long prehensile tongue with a sharp spike at the end.
- According to Alan Moore's take on the character, Swamp Thing came about in a similar fashion. Initially, the story was that Alec Holland had been working on a serum that would cause plants to grow, but was injured in an explosion; affected by the serum and the local flora, he was transformed into a Plant Person. However, when Moore came on the book, he revealed that Holland had actually died instantly, but the swamp, affected by the residual traces of the serum in his system, "ate" Holland's remains and absorbed his memories and personality, then reconstituted him as a living plant that thought it was Alec Holland. The story in which this is revealed directly references the controversial planarian worm study.
Fan Works
- The Compendium of Forgotten Secrets: The main way the Gelatinous Convocation gains memories is through their component oozes absorbing the dead, an ability that they can also grant to their Warlocks.
- In He Had No Fingers, Naruto gains access to a person's memories when he eats their brain, which is a big help in interrogations.
Films — Live-Action
- Attack of the Crab Monsters: When the Crabs eat someone's brains, that person's consciousness is assimilated into their hivemind and their memories are at the Crabs' disposal.
- The Brain Bugs in Starship Troopers (1997) can eat the brains of humans and implicitly gain their knowledge by doing so, since they were able to set a trap for the humans using their own protocols.
- The Thing (1982): A Thing can do this when it consumes a human being and converts it into a Thing. The new Thing has all of the memories of the original person.
- In Warm Bodies, zombies hunger for brains because they experience the memories when they do, which is the closest they can come now to feeling alive. Besides feeling love, that is.
Literature
- In Book of the New Sun, drinking alzabo gland extract then eating human flesh gives its consumer the memories of whoever was eaten.
- In the Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel Venusian Lullaby, the native intelligent race of Venus can do this, and sharing out the deceased's brain is an important part of their funeral customs.
- Down and Dirty brings us Deadhead, an insane Ace who can access the memories of the dead by eating their flesh. The memories are vague unless he actually eats their brain, but they're strong enough that he no longer eats animal meat.
- Dreams of the Raven: The Raven aliens are able to gain access to their victims' knowledge and memories (to the point of being able to vocally imitate them perfectly) by eating their brains.
- In Piers Anthony's Firefly, a small protoplasmic monster dissolves and absorbs the interior of people's bodies. It gains their memories and personality from their brains.
- Phantoms: A gigantic protoplasmic monster consumes human beings and absorbs their memories from their brains. It's theorized by Dr. Flyte and the rest of the protagonists that the reason the Ancient Enemy believes itself to be Devil himself (and thus goes through so many hoops to obtain a "disciple" in Flyte and act so scary) is because of the many humans it absorbed that in their final moments believed it to be something unholy, so it pretty much started to believe its own hype.
- Realm of the Elderlings: Dragons have a version that goes beyond just brains and is integral to their species. Dragons carry ancestral memories, which are somehow even contained in the cases (like cocoons) serpents build to mature into dragons (and which they eat when they emerge). A dead dragon will be devoured by its mates to pass on the knowledge, and even a human body eaten by a dragon will pass on its memories to the dragon.
- The Runelords: Reavers share a racial memory by eating the brains of their dead. At one point, a child eats a Reaver brain and gains the same benefit, providing an insight into their planning and purpose.
- Skulduggery Pleasant: Skulduggery interrogates a prisoner by convincing them that his friend Tanith Low has the power to do this, and will do so if they refuse to talk. Tanith, not having been told of this plan in advance, has to sell the bluff while simultaneously doing her best to keep a straight face.
- Spots the Space Marine: Fiddlers (humanity's allies) absorb the memories of their predecessors by consuming them alive. The Crabs (enemies) do the same and attempt to do so to captured human marines, though the Fiddler liason who reveals this bit of information believes that their biology is incompatible.
- The Throne Of Bones: Ghouls have this ability, often to the point of forgetting their real identities in favor of that of the person consumed. Eating other parts of a corpse has a lesser effect.
Live-Action TV
- Sylar from Heroes (2006) can copy other peoples' superpowers by taking their brains. It was left vague what he actually did with them until season 3 when Claire accused him of eating brains and he replies that that's disgusting. It's implied that his original power of understanding how things work lets him copy powers by examining brains, though the crew said he was originally intended to eat them.
- Liv of iZombie is a zombie who stays civilized and intelligent by eating the brains of corpses that come into the morgue where she works. She also helps the police by eating murder victims and picking up bits of their memories and skills. She also picks up their quirks and neuroses along the way. This is the case with all zombies, unless they eat a paste made by mixing multiple brains together, which apparently neutralizes the memory and personality transfer.
- In Z Nation, Murphy discovers that he can absorb memories by eating brains, be they human or zombie.
Tabletop Games
- Played for Laughs with the "Erudite Zombies" in Die Laughing (2019), where every time they consume brains, the zombies gradually speak in a more British tone of voice.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Illithids (aka Mind Flayers) not only need to regularly eat brains to survive, but gain memories, skills, and even class levels from their diet. For this reason, adventurers' brains are considered delicacies due to their interesting experiences.
- Aboleths get flashes of emotion and fragments of memory from their victims' brains, which they consider the height of the culinary experience.
- Hc Svnt Dracones: Nymphs, the insect analogues used for environmental maintenance on terraformed Mars and Venus, were designed to gain memories from eating each others' brains to exchange information between colonies and preserve maintenance directives over many generations. 40 years ago some scientist thought it would be a good idea to create a sapient Nymph. It ate him.
- In Myriad Song, the carnivorous plants known as Morphir can be fed the brains of sentient animals and they will grow buds that when smoked as a drug cause hallucinations of the brain-donor's memories. The brains of sapient animals (i.e. humans) produce particularly strong buds, and gradually make the Morphir plant itself intelligent, and mobile, and playable as characters. Not all Morphir characters can suck out people's brains and access their memories, but it's not hard for them to take the abilities as Gifts.
- Warhammer 40,000
- One of a Space Marine's implants is the Omophagea, a nerve bundle connected to the stomach that allows the Astartes to "read" memories or experiences from what he eats. This can cause problems when other Imperial forces misinterpret the use of this ability as some cannibalistic ritual, or when the implant itself mutates and gives certain Space Marine chapters an unnatural hunger for flesh or blood.
- Tyranid creatures with feeder tendrils, most famously lictors, use this to gather information in lieu of a conventional interrogation.
- When Konrad Curze crash-landed on Nostramo, he crawled out of his pod as a Primarch toddler. Delirious, injured, and starving, he killed and ate the first living thing he encountered...which happened to be one of Nostramo's destitute and desperate human populace. Curze's Omophagea kicked in and he absorbed his victim's memories. Curze would keep doing this throughout his childhood to survive on the Wretched Hive of a world that was Nostramo, and this is how he raised himself to adulthood in lieu of any parental figures.
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse has the Eaters of the Dead, a small cult of Silent Strider werewolves who've discovered a magic rite that lets them absorb memories and skills from other supernaturals by eating their brains. Habitual use of this rite has turned them into paranoid, blood-crazed serial killers, and quite wrecked their sanity. Their original goals were to use the rite temporarily until they found a better way to permanently regain all that their tribe had lost. But at this point they just wander around looking for other supernatural creatures to murder — the older, the better.
Video Games
- In Board Game Online, a player can eat a human brain to learn a new feat and move a few spaces forward.
- The "Medium?" legacy in Cultist Simulator eventually gains the ability to consume the bodies of the dead to receive their memories. They can use the strongest such memories on their path to ascension, while lesser memories make them money in their Not-So-Phony Psychic routine. This also feeds their Horror Hunger; going too long without doing so has unpleasant consequences.
- It's implied that the Combine Advisors of Half-Life 2 can do this with their 'tongue' appendage, burrowing into the victim's neck to do... something with their brains. Human brains are far too small to sustain an Advisor, which is the size of a bus, and it's often suspected that what they're really after is information. If true, this makes Eli Vance's death from being brain-sucked by an advisor all the more harrowing — now they know everything. At least until the G-Man's "nudge" in Half-Life: Alyx.
- In Kingdom of Loathing, the Zombie Master Special Challenge Path uses "Hunter brains" to level up their Skill Trees. The use message for "Good brain" is "Oh, man is that Gravity's Rainbow? Oh, just, like, the first third. Still, though!" Decent brains give the urge to go watch TV (but not reality TV, so it's OK), and Crappy brains "...smell of illiteracy and superstition."
- [PROTOTYPE] and [PROTOTYPE 2] have Mercer and Heller eat entire people, including their brains, in order to assimilate their memories. This is used to learn new skills, such as piloting helicopters, and to understand pieces of Web of Intrigue, linking together the grand conspiracy behind Gentek. It's a plot point the brain must be intact before consumption to gain the knowledge within, so one of Mercer's would-be victims shoots his own brains out first.
- In Sword of the Stars, Hiver princesses and queens can eat the brains of their deceased subjects and imprint them on new embryos. This allows a form of reincarnation, with the possibility of moving up in the Hive Caste System.
- Weird West (2022): Sirens can absorb the memories of those they eat. Some people actually want a siren to eat them because they view this as Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence. Jane Bell encounters such a character, a man who calls himself "Snack" and claims that he knows where to find the villain you're tracking but refuses to tell you, instead demanding that you guide him to a specific siren who will absorb the information from his memories. Snack specifies that he doesn't need to be alive for this; you can also kill him and just bring his brain to the siren in question.
Webcomics
- In The Bikini Bottom Horror, the plot is set in motion when Patrick eats an undercooked Krabby Patty made out of a clone of himself and assimilates the clone's memories, causing him to go berserk and destroy the city.
- A guy is so desperate in The Parking Lot Is Full that he eatd his teacher's brain
◊ hoping to pass an algebra exam.
- In Schlock Mercenary, Carbosilicate Amorphs evolved from an ancient civilization's pseudo-organic memory storage devices; they've developed into Blob Monsters whose entire bodies are brains (and muscle, all at once) and they can exchange memories by breaking off bits of themselves and feeding them to other Amorphs. As cannibalism was the only way for tribal Amorphs to kill one another without plasguns, wars often brought tribes closer together.
- Sluggy Freelance: After Dr. Crabtree becomes the Nanite Queen she gains this ability, but with the side effect of temporarily taking on characteristics of the people she eats. After eating Sam's brain she briefly becomes really dumb, and eating some Christmas elves leaves her skipping and singing everywhere she goes.
Web Videos
- Vampires SMP: Or rather, Eat Blood For Memories. It is suggested that vampires take in the memories and interests of the people whose blood they drink, such as Pyro developing an interest in Bigfoot after turning Shelby, Owen gaining a memory of "a war unlike any [he'd] seen" from Dr Legs after feeding from him, and Scott learning that Avid is not Pyro's first kill due to having converted them. Episode 7 also shows Shelby getting mental flashes of Avid's death from his perspective when she finds out about it happening, with the visions lasting up until she kills Pyro and avenges her fledgling in the finale.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons, "The Spy Who Learned Me":
Burns: Oh, pish — when I was in Africa, I had my skull cracked open by cannibals, and I'm still kicking.
Smithers: Sir, that was your partner. You betrayed him to the cannibals.
Burns: Oh, right, I have his memories because I ate his brain.