Merlin Sheldrake Quotes

The authors of a seminal paper on the symbiotic view of life take a clear stance on this point. “There have never been individuals,” they declare. “We are all lichens.

A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, “We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.

The difference between animals and fungi is simple: Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.

Science isn’t an exercise in cold-blooded rationality. Scientists are—and have always been—emotional, creative, intuitive, whole human beings, asking questions about a world that was never made to be catalogued and systematized.

One study estimated that if a hypha was as wide as a human hand, it would be able to lift an eight-ton school bus.

There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy.

Sixty percent of the enzymes used in industry are generated by fungi, and fifteen percent of all vaccines are produced by engineered strains of yeast.

Anthropomorphism is usually thought of as an illusion that arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened. There are good reasons for this: when we humanise the world, we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms. But are there things this stance might lead us to pass over – or forget to notice?

A growing number of studies have made a link between animal behavior and the trillions of bacteria and fungi that live in their guts, many of which produce chemicals that influence animal nervous systems. The interaction between gut microbes and brains—the “microbiome-gut-brain axis”—is far-reaching enough to have birthed a new field: neuromicrobiology.

Fungi make worlds. They also unmake them. There are lots of ways to catch them in the act. When you cook mushroom soup, or just eat it. When you go out gathering mushrooms, or buy them. When you ferment alcohol, plant a plant, or just bury your hands in the soil; and whether you let a fungus into your mind, or marvel at the way that it might enter the mind of another. Whether you’re cured by a fungus, or watch it cure someone else; whether you build your home from fungi, or start growing mushrooms in your home, fungi will catch you in the act. If you’re alive, they already have.

all life-forms are in fact processes not things.

Without this fungal web my tree would not exist. Without similar fungal webs no plant would exist anywhere. All life on land, including my own, depended on these networks.

90 percent of the serotonin in our bodies—the neurotransmitter that when abundant makes us feel happy, and when depleted makes us feel depressed—is produced in our guts, and gut microbes play a major role in regulating its production (Yano et al. 2015).

Some fungi have tens of thousands of mating types, approximately equivalent to our sexes (the record holder is the split gill fungus, Schizophyllum commune, which has more than twenty-three thousand mating types, each of which is sexually compatible with nearly every one of the others). The mycelium of many fungi can fuse with other mycelial networks if they are genetically similar enough, even if they aren’t sexually compatible. Fungal self-identity matters, but it is not always a binary world. Self can shade off into otherness gradually.

A slime-mold enthusiast told me about a test he had performed. He frequently got lost in IKEA stores and would spend many minutes trying to find the exit. He decided to challenge his slime molds with the same problem and built a maze based on the floor plan of his local IKEA. Sure enough, without any signs or staff to direct them, the slime molds soon found the shortest path to the exit. “You see,” he said with a laugh, “they’re cleverer than me.

Our eyes can distinguish several million colors, our ears can distinguish half a million tones, but our noses can distinguish well over a trillion different odors.

I have tried to find ways to enjoy the ambiguities that fungi present, but it's not always easy to be comfortable in the space created by open questions. Agoraphobia can set in. It's tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers. I have done my best to hold back. page 14

The “loss of a sense of self-identity, delusions of self-identity and experiences of ‘alien control,’ ” observed an elder statesman in the field of microbiome research, are all potential symptoms of mental illness. It made my head spin to think of how many ideas had to be revisited, not least our culturally treasured notions of identity, autonomy, and independence. It is in part this disconcerting feeling that makes the advances in the microbial sciences so exciting.

Fungi are equipped with different kinds of bodies. They don’t have noses or brains. Instead, their entire surface behaves like an olfactory epithelium. A mycelial network is one large chemically sensitive membrane: A molecule can bind to a receptor anywhere on its surface and trigger a signaling cascade that alters fungal behavior.

When trying to understand the interactions of nonhuman organisms, it is easy to flip between these two perspectives: that of the inanimate behavior of preprogrammed robots on the one hand, and that of rich, lived human experience on the other. Framed as brainless organisms, lacking the basic apparatus required to have even a simple kind of “experience,” fungal interactions are no more than automatic responses to a series of biochemical triggers. Yet the mycelium of truffle fungi, like that of most fungal species, actively senses and responds to its surroundings in unpredictable ways.

We are all lichens

fungal networks form physical connections between plants. It is the difference between having twenty acquaintances and having twenty acquaintances with whom one shares a circulatory system.

Many scientific concepts—from time to chemical bonds to genes to species—lack stable definitions but remain helpful categories to think with. From one perspective, “individual” is no different: just another category to guide human thought and behavior. Nonetheless, so much of daily life and experience—not to mention our philosophical, political, and economic systems—depends on individuals that it can be hard to stand by and watch the concept dissolve. Where does this leave “us”? What about “them”? “Me”? “Mine”? “Everyone”? “Anyone”? My response to the discussions at the conference was not just intellectual

For Adamatzky, the point of fungal computers is not to replace silicon chips. Fungal reactions are too slow for that. Rather, he thinks humans could use mycelium growing in an ecosystem as a “large-scale environmental sensor.” Fungal networks, he reasons, are monitoring a large number of data streams as part of their everyday existence. If we could plug into mycelial networks and interpret the signals they use to process information, we could learn more about what was happening in an ecosystem.

The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, observes that the indigenous Potawatomi language is rich in verb forms that attribute aliveness to the more-than-human world. The word for “hill,” for example, is a verb: to be a hill. Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills.

Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation. In school classrooms children are shown anatomical charts, each depicting different aspects of the human body. One chart reveals the body as a skeleton, another the body as a network of blood vessels, another the nerves, another the muscles. If we made equivalent sets of diagrams to portray ecosystems, one of the layers would show the fungal mycelium that runs through them. We would see sprawling, interlaced webs strung through the soil, through sulfurous sediments hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean, along coral reefs, through plant and animal bodies both alive and dead, in

Fungi are veteran survivors of ecological disruption. Their ability to cling on—and often flourish—through periods of catastrophic change is one of their defining characteristics. They are inventive, flexible, and collaborative. With much of life on Earth threatened by human activity, are there ways we can partner with fungi to help us adapt? These may sound like the delirious musings of someone buried up to their neck in decomposing wood chips, but a growing number of radical mycologists think exactly this. Many symbioses have formed in times of crisis. The algal partner in a lichen can’t make a living on bare rock without striking up a relationship with a fungus. Might it be that we can’t adjust to life on a damaged planet without cultivating new fungal relationships

Fungi, like plants, are decentralized organisms. There are no operational centers, no capital cities, no seats of government. Control is dispersed: Mycelial coordination takes place both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. A fragment of mycelium can regenerate an entire network, meaning that a single mycelial individual—if you’re brave enough to use that word—is potentially immortal.

Further studies on humans have shown that certain probiotic treatments can reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and the occurrence of negative thoughts (Mohajeri et al. [2018] and Valles-Colomer et al. [2019]). However, a multibillion-dollar probiotics industry hovers around the field of neuromicrobiology, and a number of researchers have pointed out the tendency to overhype findings. Gut communities are complex, and manipulating them is a challenge.

Wood-rotting fungi are a rich source of antiviral compounds,

What's astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.

Biology—the study of living organisms—had transformed into ecology—the study of the relationships between living organisms.

LICHENS ENCRUST AS much as eight percent of the planet’s surface, an area larger than that covered by tropical rainforests.

The more plants grow, the more they draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Mushrooms were the original tree of knowledge.

we, like all other life-forms are symborgs, or symbiotic organisms.

Life is nested biomes all the way down.

The idea that a neat line can be drawn that separates nonhumans from humans with “real minds” and “real comprehension” has been curtly dismissed by the philosopher Daniel Dennett as an “archaic myth.” Brains didn’t evolve their tricks from scratch, and many of their characteristics reflect more ancient processes that existed long before recognizable brains arose.

Frank’s findings caught the eye of J.R.R. Tolkien, who had a well-known fondness for plants, and trees in particular. Mycorrhizal fungi soon found their way into The Lord of the Rings.

No matter where fungi grow, they must be able to insinuate themselves within their source of food. To do so, they use pressure. In cases where mycelium has to break through particularly tough barriers, as disease-causing fungi do when infecting plants, they develop special penetrative hyphae that can reach pressures of fifty to eighty atmospheres and exert enough force to penetrate the tough plastics Mylar and Kevlar.

Some organisms—like most animals—find food in the world and put it inside their bodies, where it is digested and absorbed. Fungi have a different strategy. They digest the world where it is and then absorb it into their bodies.

Whether one calls slime molds, fungi, and plants “intelligent” depends on one’s point of view. Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table—a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us—or have brains—they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to “solve problems,” “communicate,” “make decisions,” “learn,” and “remember.” As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change. The second field of research that has guided me in this inquiry concerns the way we think about the microscopic organisms—or microbes—that cover every inch of the planet. In the last four decades, new technologies have granted unprecedented access to microbial lives. The outcome? For your community of microbes—your “microbiome”—your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit. Your gut (which if unfolded would occupy an area of thirty-two square meters), ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin, and every surface, passage, and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your “own” cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy. For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another starts is not generally something we

Our perceptions work in large part by expectation. It takes less cognitive effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new sensory information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch.

The Latin root of the word extravagant means “to wander outside or beyond.” It is a good word for mycelium, which ceaselessly wanders outside and beyond its limits, none of which are present as they are in most animal bodies. Mycelium is a body without a body plan.

Drugs are normally understood to work through a pharmacological circuit that bypasses the conscious mind entirely: A drug affects a receptor, which triggers a change in symptoms. By contrast, psilocybin—like LSD and other psychedelics—appears to act on symptoms of mental illness via the mind.

Japanese researchers released slime molds into petri dishes modeled on the Greater Tokyo area. Oat flakes marked major urban hubs and bright lights represented obstacles such as mountains—slime molds don’t like light. After a day, the slime mold had found the most efficient route between the oats, emanating into a network almost identical to Tokyo’s existing rail network.

Flatworms are well-studied model organisms because of their ability to regenerate. If the head of a flatworm is cut off, it sprouts another head, brain and all. Flatworms can also be trained. The researchers wondered whether, if they trained a flatworm to remember features of its environment and then cut off its head, it would retain the memory when it has grown a new head and brain.

When Olsson inserted the microelectrodes into Armillaria’s hyphal strands, he detected regular action potential–like impulses, firing at a rate very close to that of animals’ sensory neurons—around four impulses per second, which traveled along hyphae at a speed of at least half a millimeter per second, some ten times faster than the fastest rate of fluid flow measured in a fungal hypha.

Cords and rhizomorphs are a good reminder that mycelial networks are transport networks. Boddy’s mycelial road map is another good illustration. Mushroom growth is another: To push their way through asphalt, a mushroom must inflate with water. For this to happen, water must travel rapidly through the network from one place to another and flow into a developing mushroom in a carefully directed pulse.

Objects within a few millimeters cause the fruiting body of Phycomyces to bend away without ever making contact. Regardless of the object—opaque or transparent, smooth or rough—Phycomyces starts to bend away after about two minutes. Electrostatic fields, humidity, mechanical cues, and temperature have all been ruled out. Some hypothesize that Phycomyces uses a volatile chemical signal that deflects around the obstacle with tiny air currents, but this is far from proven.

Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table—a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persist one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us—or have brains—they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to “solve problems,” “communicate,” “make decisions,” “learn,” and “remember.” As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change.

The impact of fungal diseases is increasing across the world: Unsustainable agricultural practices reduce the ability of plants to form relationships with the beneficial fungi on which they depend. The widespread use of antifungal chemicals has led to an unprecedented rise in new fungal superbugs that threaten both human and plant health. As humans disperse disease-causing fungi, we create new opportunities for their evolution. Over the last fifty years, the most deadly disease ever recorded—a fungus that infects amphibians—has been spread around the world by human trade.

Most plants—from a potted snapdragon to a giant sequoia—will develop differently when grown with different communities of mycorrhizal fungus. Basil plants, for example, produce different profiles of the aromatic oils that make up their flavor when grown with different mycorrhizal strains. Some fungi have been found to make tomatoes sweeter than others; some change the essential oil profile of fennel, coriander, and mint; some increase the concentration of iron and carotenoids in lettuce leaves, the antioxidant activity in artichoke heads, or the concentrations of medicinal compounds in Saint-John’s-wort and echinacea.

A fungal computer may sound fantastical, but biocomputing is a fast-growing field. Adamatzky has spent years developing ways to use slime molds as sensors and computers. These prototype biocomputers use slime molds to solve a range of geometrical problems. The slime mold networks can be modified—for instance, by cutting a connection—to alter the set of “logical functions” implemented by the network. Adamatzky’s idea of a “fungal computer” is just an application of slime-mold computing to another type of network-based organism. As Adamatzky observes, the mycelial networks of some species of fungus are more convenient for computing than slime molds.

Entomophthora fungus carries around a type of virus that infects insects, not fungi. The lead author of the study reported it to be “one of the whackiest discoveries” of his time in science. What’s whacky is the implication: that the fungus uses the virus to manipulate the mind of insects. It’s still a hypothesis, but it’s plausible. A number of related viruses specialize in modifying insect behavior. One such virus is injected by parasitic wasps into ladybirds, which tremble, remain rooted to the spot, and become guardians for the wasp’s eggs. Another similar virus makes honeybees more aggressive. By harnessing a mind-manipulating virus, the fungus wouldn’t have to evolve the ability to modify the mind of its insect host.

The jungle bristled with life. There were sloths, pumas, snakes, crocodiles; there were basilisk lizards that could run across the surface of water without sinking. In just a few hectares there lived as many woody plant species as in the whole of Europe. The diversity of the forest was reflected in the rich variety of field biologists who came there to study it. Some climbed trees and observed ants. Some set out at dawn every day to follow the monkeys. Some tracked the lightning that struck trees during tropical storms. Some spent their days suspended from a crane measuring ozone concentrations in the forest canopy. Some warmed up the soil using electrical elements to see how bacteria might respond to global heating. Some studied the way beetles navigate using the stars. Bumblebees, orchids, butterflies—there seemed to be no aspect of life in the forest that someone wasn’t observing.

Mycorrhizal fungi are so prolific that their mycelium makes up between a third and a half of the living mass of soils. The numbers are astronomical. Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal hyphae in the top ten centimeters of soil is around half the width of our galaxy (4.5 × 1017 kilometers of hyphae, versus 9.5 × 1017 kilometers of space). If these hyphae were ironed into a flat sheet, their combined surface area would cover every inch of dry land on Earth two and a half times over. However, fungi don’t stay still. Mycorrhizal hyphae die back and regrow so rapidly—between ten and sixty times per year—that over a million years their cumulative length would exceed the diameter of the known universe (4.8 × 1010 light years of hyphae, versus 9.1 × 109 light years in the known universe). Given that mycorrhizal fungi have been around for some five hundred million years and aren’t restricted to the top ten centimeters of soil, these figures are certainly underestimates.

I thought of the many ways that fungi respond to changing environments and find new ways to live alongside the plants and animals on which they depend. Back in a forest, hunting for truffles, I found myself once again searching for language to describe the lives of these remarkable organisms. Perfumers and wine tasters use metaphors to articulate differences in aromas. A chemical becomes “cut grass,” “sweaty mango,” “grapefruit and hot horses.” Without these references, we would be unable to imagine it. Cis-3-hexenol smells like cut grass. Oxane smells like sweaty mango. Gardamide smells like grapefruit and hot horses. This is not to say oxane is sweaty mango, but if I were to pass you an open vial you’d almost certainly recognize the smell. Correlating human language with an odor involves judgment and prejudice. Our descriptions warp and deform the phenomena we describe, but sometimes this is the only way to talk about features of the world: to say what they are like but are not. Might this also be the case when we talk about other organisms?

In late 2018, a low-frequency seismic hum traveled around the world, evading mainstream earthquake-detection systems. Its trajectory and identity were pieced together in an impromptu collaboration between academic and citizen seismologists interacting on Twitter

I was inspired by the excellent book Sacred Herbal and Healing Beers (Buhner [1998]).

The word “mutualism” was explicitly political for the first decades of its life, describing a school of early anarchist thought.

This planet belongs to microbes.

Ahmadjian V. 1995. Lichens are more important than you think. BioScience 45: 123.

Anderson JB, Bruhn JN, Kasimer D, Wang H, Rodrigue N, Smith ML. 2018. Clonal evolution and genome stability in a 2500-year-old fungal individual. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 285: 20182233.

McGann JP. 2017. Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth. Science 356: eaam7263.

These may sound like the delirious musings of someone buried up to their neck in decomposing wood chips,

Fungi are prodigious decomposers, but of their many biochemical achievements, one of the most impressive is this ability of white rot fungi to break down the lignin in wood. Based on their ability to release free radicals, the peroxidases produced by white rot fungi perform what is technically known as “radical chemistry.

mycelium leather

Fungi Perfecti

Tricked out of our expectations, we fall back on our senses. What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.

Your olfactory sense can split complex mixtures into their constituent chemicals, just as a prism can split white light into its constituent colors. To do this, it must detect the precise arrangement of atoms within a molecule.

Truffle fruiting bodies house thriving communities of bacteria and yeasts—between a million and a billion bacteria per gram of dry weight. Many members of truffles’ microbiomes are able to produce the distinctive volatile compounds that contribute to truffles’ aromas, and it is likely that the cocktail of chemicals that reaches your nose is the work of more than a single organism. The chemical basis of truffles’ allure remains uncertain. In 1981, a study published by German researchers found that both Piedmont white truffles (Tuber magnatum) and Périgord black truffles (Tuber melanosporum) produced androstenol—a steroid with a musky scent—in non-negligible quantities. In pigs, androstenol functions as a sex hormone. It is produced by males and prompts the mating posture in sows.

There are two key moves by which fungal hyphae become a mycelial network. First, they branch. Second, they fuse. (The process by which hyphae merge with each other is known as “anastomosis,” which in Greek means “to provide with a mouth.”) If hyphae couldn’t branch, one hypha could never become many. If hyphae couldn’t fuse with one another, they would not be able to grow into complex networks. However, before they fuse, hyphae must find other hyphae, which they do by attracting one another, a phenomenon known as “homing.

The way that hierarchal classification systems order different species can be seen, by extension, as species racism.

However, it turns out not to be the fungus that confers the ability to survive high temperatures after all. Rather, it is a virus that lives within the fungus that confers heat tolerance. When grown without the virus, neither fungus nor plant can survive high temperatures.

a pheromone that attracts and “excites” the other. Through this back-and-forthing—“as if throwing a ball,” write the authors of one study—hyphae are able to entrain and home in on each other by falling into rhythm. It is this oscillation—a chemical rally—that allows them to lure the other without stimulating themselves. When they are serving, they aren’t able to detect the pheromone. When the other serves, they are stimulated

The “moving hypothesis” posits that brains evolved as a cause and a consequence of the need for animals to move around.

It is as if chemists called any compound that contained carbon—from diamond to methane to methamphetamine—carbon.

Ecovative

Look at the network, and it starts to look back at you.

The scent of alcohol produced by yeasts was a reliable way to find ripe fruit as it rotted on the ground.

Whether an apple had actually inspired Newton to derive his theory of gravitation had long ceased to matter. The trees grew; the story thrived.

Composers make pieces of music. These were decomposers, who unmake pieces of life.

It appears that there are only so many ways to make a life as a network.

the way hyphae grew together to make complex forms was one of the central riddles in all of developmental biology.

it may be helpful to think of mycelial networks as a type of “liquid computer,

Many gut microbes produce chemicals which influence the activity of the nervous system, including neurotransmitters and short chain fatty acids (SCFAs).

For leaf-cutter ants foraging for psilocybin mushrooms see Masiulionis et al. (2013);

for vulnerability of scale-free networks see Albert et al. (2000)

The closer we get to lichens, the stranger they seem.

Writing the fungus into the story encourages us to adopt a more fungal point of view.

Fungal networks provide highways for bacteria to migrate around the obstacle course of the soil.

plant communication through fungal networks is one of the most compelling aspects of mycorrhizal behavior.

You’re just eavesdropping on their response to a particular situation.

The idea that plants are talking to each other and warning each other of imminent attack is an anthropomorphic delusion.

In 1967, the visionary American biologist Lynn Margulis became a vocal proponent of a controversial theory that gave symbiosis a central role in the evolution of early life. Margulis argued that some of the most significant moments in evolution had resulted from the coming together—and staying together—of different organisms.

The ability to metabolize alcohol, they speculate, played a crucial role in the ability of primates to make a living on the forest floor by opening up a new dietary niche: overripe, fermented fruit that had fallen from trees.

Mycologos.

Six Ways that Mushrooms Can Save the World

A species isolated from mining waste is one of the most radiation-resistant organisms ever discovered and may help to clean up nuclear waste sites. The blasted nuclear reactor at Chernobyl is home to a large population of such fungi. A number of these radio-tolerant species even grow toward radioactive “hot” particles, and appear to be able to harness radiation as a source of energy, as plants use the energy in sunlight.