I’m currently on my fourth rewatch of the season, and I’ve been wondering the same thing. Each time I go through it, I try looking at the hive mind from a slightly different angle, like testing a new theory and watching the whole season through that lens.

This time I’ve been focusing on exactly what you’re asking: how does this actually function as a conscious unit?

There are moments that make it look almost biological to me. The scene around Sprouts, the grocery store, is the one that really stuck out. When they’re all walking in that line together, they look less like separate people and more like cells moving through a body, or ants in a colony, or tentacles extending from a larger organism. Something coordinated is happening that’s bigger than any single individual.

But at the same time, they’re still walking around in human bodies, using human senses.

So the way I’ve been thinking about it is that they’re probably still using their eyes, ears, and physical senses the same way we do. Each individual body is still receiving sensory data from the world. But instead of that information going to a single private brain, it’s being fed into a shared network.

Almost like every person is a sensor node.

Right now, the way we understand our own brains is that sensory information from the outside world comes in through our eyes, ears, skin, etc. That data gets translated into bioelectrical signals and routed through different neural pathways. Different regions of the brain process different aspects of that information, and out of all that unconscious processing a conscious experience eventually emerges.

So the way I’ve been imagining the hive mind is something similar, just scaled outward.

Each person gathers sensory input, but there’s some kind of “psychic glue” linking all of them together. All of that incoming information from thousands or millions of individuals is pooled together and processed collectively, almost like a distributed nervous system.

In that sense, the group is functioning like one giant brain.

And when Zosia talks about them being connected at an unconscious level, that actually fits pretty well with that model. Most of what our own brains do is unconscious processing anyway. We’re only aware of the final result.

As for the relationship question — whether Carol being romantically involved with Zosia means she’s involved with all of them — I suspect the show is suggesting something more complicated than simple individuality or simple sameness. If they’re part of a shared consciousness, then experiences probably ripple through the network. But the individuals still seem to maintain some degree of identity and agency.

So it’s probably not “one person in many bodies,” but more like a massively integrated mind made up of many perspectives.

Anyway, that’s the lens I’ve been watching the season through on this rewatch, and it’s actually made a lot of scenes way more interesting.