Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

by Merlin Sheldrake

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.

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.

“We” are ecosystems that span boundaries and transgress categories. Our selves emerge from a complex tangle of relationships only now becoming known.

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).

Fungal self-identity matters, but it is not always a binary world. Self can shade off into otherness gradually.

When we humanize the world, we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms.

Traditionally, intelligence and cognition have been defined in human terms as something that requires at least a brain and, more usually, a mind. Cognitive science emerged from the study of humans and so naturally placed the human mind at the center of its inquiry. Without a mind, the classical examples of cognitive processes—language, logic, reasoning, recognizing oneself in a mirror—seem impossible. All require high-level mental functioning. But how we define intelligence and cognition is a question of taste. For many, the brain-centric view is too limited.

Complex information processing is evidently not restricted to the inner workings of brains. Some use the term “swarm intelligence” to describe the problem-solving behavior of brainless systems. Others suggest that the behavior of these network-based life-forms can be thought of as arising from “minimal” or “basal” cognition, and argue that the question we should ask is not whether an organism has cognition or not. Rather, we should assess the degree to which an organism might be cognizant. In all these views, intelligent behaviors can arise without brains. A dynamic and responsive network is all that’s needed.

For McKenna, it was psilocybin mushrooms that had ignited the first flickerings of human self-reflection, language, and spirituality, somewhere in the proto-cultural fog of the Paleolithic. Mushrooms were the original tree of knowledge.

The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins

In the words of Matthew Johnson, a psychiatrist and researcher at Johns Hopkins, psychedelics like psilocybin “dope-slap people out of their story. It’s literally a reboot of the system…Psychedelics open a window of mental flexibility in which people can let go of the mental models we use to organize reality.”

By softening the categories that organize human experience, psilocybin and other psychedelics are able to open up new cognitive possibilities.

One of our most robust mental models is that of the self. It is exactly this sense of self that psilocybin and other psychedelics seem to disrupt. Some call it ego dissolution. Some simply report that they lost track of where they ended and their surroundings began. The well-defended “I” that humans depend on for so much can vanish entirely, or just dwindle, shading off into otherness gradually.

“You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day,” the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once observed to his former student Bertrand Russell. “I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.”

In his autobiography, Dennis McKenna

“Our normal waking consciousness,” wrote the philosopher and psychologist William James in 1902, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” For reasons that are poorly understood, certain fungi lead humans out of familiar stories into forms of consciousness that are entirely different, and toward the edge of new questions. “No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded,” James concluded.

the possibility that resources could pass between plants suggested “that we should place less emphasis on competition between plants, and more on the distribution of resources within the community.”

Exactly when humans first started to work with yeast remains an open question. The first unambiguous evidence dates from around nine thousand years ago in China, but microscopic starch grains have been unearthed on stone tools in Kenya that date from a hundred thousand years ago. The shape of the starch grains suggests that the tools had been used to process the African wine palm, Hyphaene petersiana, which is still used to make liquor. Given that any sugary liquid left for longer than a day will start to ferment by itself, it is probable that humans have been brewing for far longer.

The idea occurred to me while on a tour of the Cambridge Botanical Gardens given by their charismatic director. In his company, clouds of stories emanated from even the most unremarkable shrub. One plant, a large apple tree near the entrance, stood out. It grew, we were told, from a cutting taken from a four-hundred-year-old apple tree in the garden of Isaac Newton’s family home, Woolsthorpe Manor. It was the only apple tree that grew there and was old enough to have been around when Newton formulated his theory of universal gravitation. If any tree had dropped an apple that inspired Newton, it was this one.

This wasn’t the only clone. The director informed us that there were two more: one on the site of Newton’s alchemical laboratory, at the front of Trinity College, and the other outside the math faculty. (It later transpired that there are even more—in the president’s garden at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among other places.)

As botanical theater goes, it doesn’t get much better. A plant’s involvement in one of the most significant theoretical breakthroughs in the history of Western thought was being affirmed and denied at the same time. Out of this ambiguity grew actual trees, with actual apples, that fell to the ground and rotted into a pungent alcoholic mess.

Composers make; decomposers unmake. And unless decomposers unmake, there isn’t anything that the composers can make with. It was a thought that changed the way I understood the world.

For the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, life was not populated with things but with stabilized processes. Haldane went as far as to deem “the conception of a ‘thing,’ or material unit,” to be “useless” in biological thinking (Dupré and Nicholson [2018]). For a general introduction to processual biology see Dupré and Nicholson (2018); for the Bateson quote see Bateson (1928), p. 209.

For the snow plant see Muir (1912), ch. 8; for the “thousand invisible cords” see Wulf (2015), ch. 23. This was a recurring theme for Muir, who also wrote of “innumerable unbreakable cords,” besides his more well-known line: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

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