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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

all life-forms are in fact processes not things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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, 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.

Stories are told to modify our perceptions of the world, so it’s rare that they don’t do all these things to us.

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.

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

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.

Life is nested biomes all the way down.

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

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.

A friend of mine who studies tropical insects showed me a video of orchid bees crowding around a crater in a rotting log. Male orchid bees collect scents from the world and amass them into a cocktail that they use to court females. They are perfume makers. Mating takes seconds, but gathering and blending their scents takes their entire adult lives. Although he hadn’t yet tested the hypothesis, my friend had a strong hunch that the bees were harvesting fungal compounds to add to their bouquets.

When trying to understand the interactions of non-human organisms, it is easy to flip between these two perspectives: that of the inanimate behaviour of pre-programmed 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. Their hyphae are chemically irritable, responsive, excitable. It is this ability to interpret the chemical emissions of others that allows fungi to negotiate a series of complex trading relationships with trees; to knead away at stores of nutrients in the soil; to have sex; to hunt; or to fend off attackers.

In many traditional cultures, it is believed that composite creatures exist, and that the boundaries between organisms are fluid.

If you’re alive, they already have.

These fungi weave themselves through the gaps between plant cells in an intimate brocade and help to defend plants against disease.

Metabolism is the art of chemical transformation.

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.

Termites are reported to consume between $1.5 and $20 billion a year of property in the United States every year. (As Lisa Margonelli observes in Underbug, North American termites are most commonly described as eating ‘private’ property, as if they had some intentional anarchist or anti-capitalist sentiment.) In 2011 termites found their way into a bank in India and ate ten million rupees in banknotes – around $225,000. In a twist on the theme of radical fungal partnerships, one of Paul Stamets’ ‘six ways that fungi can save the world’ involves tweaking the biology of certain disease-causing fungi so they are able to bypass termites’ defences, and exterminate their colonies (this is the same fungus – the mould Metarhizium – that shows promise in eliminating populations of malarial mosquitoes).31

Ambiguity isn’t as itchy as it was; it’s easier for me to resist the temptation to remedy uncertainty with certainty.

Nor can our immune systems be taken as a measure of individuality, because they are as concerned with managing our relationships with resident microbes, as fighting off external attackers, and appear to have evolved to enable colonisation by microbes rather than prevent it. Where does this leave you? Or perhaps y'all?

Our eyes can distinguish several million colours, our ears can distinguish half a million tones, but our noses can distinguish well over a trillion different odours. Humans can detect virtually all volatile chemicals ever tested. Smells feature in our choice of sexual partners and in our ability to detect fear, anxiety or aggression in others. Human noses can detect some compounds at as low a concentration as 34,000 molecules in one square centimetre, the equivalent of a single drop of water in 20,000 Olympic swimming pools. For an animal to experience a smell, a molecule must land on their olfactory epithelium. In humans, this is a membrane up and behind the nose. The molecule binds to a receptor, and nerves fire. The brain gets involved as chemicals are identified or trigger thoughts and emotional responses. 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 signalling cascade that alters fungal behaviour. Fungi live their lives bathed in a rich field of chemical information. Truffle fungi use chemicals to communicate to animals their readiness to be eaten; they also use chemicals to communicate with plants, animals, other fungi – and themselves. Through smell, we can participate in the molecular discourse fungi use to organise much of their existence.

Humans wear perfumes produced by other organisms, and it is not uncommon for fungal aromas to be incorporated into our own sexual rituals. Agarwood, or oudh, is a fungal infection of Aquilaria trees found in India and south-east Asia and one of the most valuable raw materials in the world. It is used to make a scent – dank nuts, dark honey, rich wood – and has been coveted at least since the time of the ancient Greek physician Dioscorides. The best oudh is worth more, gram for gram, than gold or platinum – as much as $100,000 per kilogram – and the destructive harvest of Aquilaria trees has driven them to near extinction in the wild.

The rootlets branched like a small tree and their surface was covered with a filmy layer which appeared fresh and sticky. It was these delicate structures I wanted to examine. From these roots, a fungal network laced out into the soil and around the roots of nearby trees. 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. I tugged lightly on my root and felt the ground move.

Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been – and continue to be – a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around 500 million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve their own. Today, more than 90 per cent of plants depend on these ‘mycorrhizal’ fungi. This ancient association gave rise to all recognisable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of plants and fungi to form healthy relationships.

Radical fungal technologies can help us respond to some of the many problems that arise from ongoing environmental devastation. Antiviral compounds produced by fungal mycelium reduce colony collapse disorder in honeybees. Voracious fungal appetites can be deployed to break down pollutants, such as crude oil from oil spills, in a process known as mycoremediation. In mycofiltration, contaminated water is passed through mats of mycelium, which filter out heavy metals and break down toxins. In mycofabrication, building materials and textiles are grown out of mycelium and replace plastics and leather in many applications.

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, 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. We are ecosystems, composed of – and decomposed by – an ecology of microbes, without which we could not grow and behave as we do. The forty-odd trillion microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food and produce key minerals that nourish us. Like the fungi that live within plants, they protect us from disease. They guide the development of our bodies and immune systems and influence our behaviour. If not kept in check, they can cause illnesses and even kill us. We are not a special case. Even bacteria have viruses within them. Even viruses can contain smaller viruses. Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life.

honey fungi, or Armillaria, which are among the largest organisms in the world. The current record holder, in Oregon, weighs hundreds of tons, spills across 10 square kilometres, and is somewhere between 2,000 and 8,000 years old. There are probably many larger, older specimens that remain undiscovered.

In 2017, researchers reconstructed the diets of Neanderthals, cousins of modern humans who went extinct approximately 50,000 years ago. They found that an individual with a dental abscess had been eating a type of fungus – a penicillin-producing mould – implying knowledge of its antibiotic properties. There are other less ancient examples, including the Iceman, an exquisitely well-preserved Neolithic corpse found in glacial ice, dating from around 5,000 years ago. On the day he died, the Iceman was carrying a pouch stuffed with wads of the tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius) that he almost certainly used to make fire, and carefully prepared fragments of the birch polypore mushroom (Fomitopsis betulina) most probably used as a medicine. The indigenous peoples of Australia treated wounds with moulds harvested from the shaded side of eucalyptus trees. Ancient Egyptian papyruses from 1500 BCE refer to the curative properties of mould, and in 1640, the King’s herbalist in London, John Parkinson, described the use of moulds to treat wounds.

However, the LSD had forced me to admit that I had an imagination and I now saw fungi differently. I wanted to understand fungi, not by reducing them to ticking, spinning, bleeping mechanisms, as we so often do. Rather, I wanted to let these organisms lure me out of my well-worn patterns of thought, to imagine the possibilities they face, to let them press against the limits of my understanding, to give myself permission to be amazed – and confused – by their entangled lives.

There are few pockets of the globe where fungi can’t be found; from deep sediments on the sea floor to the surface of deserts, to frozen valleys in Antarctica, to our guts and orifices. The capacity of fungi to prosper in such a variety of habitats depends on their diverse metabolic abilities. Metabolism is the art of chemical transformation. Fungi are metabolic wizards and can explore, scavenge and salvage ingeniously, their abilities rivalled only by bacteria. Using cocktails of potent enzymes and acids, fungi can break down some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, from lignin, wood’s toughest component, to rock, crude oil, polyurethane plastics and the explosive TNT. Few environments are too extreme.

THE MID-1980S, the American musicologist Louis Sarno recorded the music of the Aka people living in the forests of the Central African Republic. One of these recordings is called “Women Gathering Mushrooms.” As they wander around collecting mushrooms, their steps tracing the underground form of a mycelial network, the women sing amid the sounds of the animals in the forest. Each woman sings a different melody; each voice tells a different musical story.

Spribille told me about a paper called “Queer theory for lichens.” (“It comes up as the first thing in Google when you enter ‘queer’ and ‘lichen.’ ”) Its author argues that lichens are queer beings that present ways for humans to think beyond a rigid binary framework: The identity of lichens is a question rather than an answer known in advance. In turn, Spribille has found queer theory a helpful framework to apply to lichens. “The human binary

We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.” When we see an organism, from a fungus to a pine tree, we catch a single moment in its continual development.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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);

mycelium leather

Fungi Perfecti

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