We suffer from a kind of brain chauvinism. We say, “Well, if it doesn’t have a complex nervous system, if it doesn’t have a brain, it can’t possibly be intelligent, it can’t possibly plan and have foresight and act like we do, behave like we do.” That picture is totally changing now, because we’re beginning to understand that the brain is not necessary to have intelligence; what’s necessary is to have neural networks and to have networks of connections and exchanges. You see these everywhere in nature: the rhizosphere of plants, the mycelial networks with which it interacts, the chemical
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