How did the Yeerks Morph while in hosts

[azahran1790]

hi everyone, I'm new, although coming across this forum has been awesome, didn't know there were so many fans from my generation, Ive just finished rereading the entire series, barring the alternamorphs which i never really liked, anyhow, something that bugged me the last time i read the series, has bugged me again, Yeerks morphing while in human hosts or andalite hosts or whatever the case, i never cared for Visser 3 morphing because he always morphed something bigger and i just figured that the creatures he morphed had similar andalite sized or human sized brains, but then they get the morphing cube and all these human controllers can morph now, how did the Yeerk stay inside the brain of the morphed controllers, it doesn't make sense, we know Yeerks are like 3 or 4 inches long and pretty thick and that they wrap themselves around the human brain, but they are still not part of it, so when Tom morphed for instance to Cobra, or the controllers morphed to birds what happened to the Yeerk inside ? we know that they were still in control but it still doesn't make sense, the brain got smaller, the skull got smaller, much smaller, and the yeerk should have exploded against the skull or something, it bugs me...i know its weird but it does, any explanation would be awesome, thanks, 

[DinosaurNothlit]

Hello and welcome to the forum!  Always cool to see a new face. 

To answer your question, I don't know if this is ever explicitly stated in the books, but most fans have assumed that the Yeerks stay in control of their hosts in the same way that the morpher's own mind otherwise would; a connection through z-space.  Even with normal non-Controller morphing, when you morph something small enough not to have much in the way of brain matter, the morpher can't really be controlling the morph from the morph's own brain (because something like an ant simply does not possess enough neurons to store all the information and memories that are in a human brain).  Yet, when the Animorphs morph ants, they retain those thoughts and memories anyway.  How?  Because their real brain is in z-space, and that mind is connected to the morph.  I can't remember when it is that Ax explains this, but I'm pretty sure this is canon (although I could be misremembering, I've done that a time or two).

In any case, it's speculated that it works the same way with Yeerks.  They get extruded into z-space along with the brain (and thus the mind) of the morpher, where they remain in control.  Even though they aren't technically part of the morpher's body, they are 'skintight' with the morpher and thus behave roughly the same way as a morphing suit, disappearing into z-space when you morph and then reappearing as you demorph.  . . . Yanno, if a morphing suit could control your every move. 

[NickDaGriff]

Welcome to the forum!   

I always assumed that when the morphing tech looks at your body to figure out how to morph it, it looks for anything resembling neural activity and copies that into z-space to function as a remote control.  After all, even if it is recycling some or all of your own mass for the morph, your neurological structure is being changed at its most fundamental levels.  So in order to keep your consciousness running uninterrupted and unaltered, it kind of does a livestream to your morph from your brain in z-space.  Your brain in z-space functions exactly as it would normally until the original is reconstructed.  It gets around the Theseus Ship problem by continuing your functions perfectly and having both versions of your brain completely interlinked as the one in normal space is reconstructed, though it's still not quite free of the unpleasant implications.

If you have a yeerk up in the braincase, then the back-and-forth exchange of activity is going to make it seem like the yeerk's body is an organ that's supposed to be there, like a natural extension of the nervous system.  As such, you end up with the same arrangement continuing into z-space, with the yeerk suppressing the human's control as they normally would and dominating the remote control.