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

by Merlin Sheldrake

(Many fungi produce plant and animal hormones to alter the physiology of their associates.)

Piedmont white truffles and other prized mycorrhizal fungi, such as porcini, chanterelle, and matsutake, have never been domesticated in part because of the fluidity of their relationships with plants, and in part because of the intricacies of their sex lives. There are too many gaps in our understanding of how basic fungal communication happens.

To grow truffles, you have to grow trees. You have to acknowledge that the soil is full of life. You can’t cultivate truffles without thinking at the level of the ecosystem.

Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation.

One way to think about mycelial networks is as swarms of hyphal tips.

Researchers at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England have used slime molds to calculate efficient fire evacuation routes from buildings.

Unconventional Computing nice But also are slime molds better than just using A* or another graph search algo?

Setting out to find water in a desert, we’d have to pick one direction to explore. Fungi can choose all possible routes at once.

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

In 1995, the artist Francis Alÿs walked around São Paulo carrying a can of blue paint with a hole punched in the bottom. Over many days, as he moved through the city, a continuous stream of paint dribbled onto the ground in a trail behind him. The line of blue paint made a map of his journey, a portrait of time. Alÿs’s performance illustrates hyphal growth. Alÿs himself is the growing tip. The winding trail he leaves behind him is the body of the hypha.

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.” When we see an organism, from a fungus to a pine tree, we catch a single moment in its continual development.

“Women Gathering Mushrooms” is an example of musical polyphony. Polyphony is singing more than one part, or telling more than one story, at the same time.

When you look at mushrooms, you’re looking at fruit. Imagine bunches of grapes growing out of the ground in their place. Then imagine the vine that produced them, twisting and branching below the surface of the soil.

Despite decades of painstaking investigation, the avoidance response remains an enigma. Objects within a few millimeters cause the fruiting body of Phycomyces to bend away without ever making contact.

There are different parts of a mycelial network or a plant, but they aren’t unique. There are many of everything. How, then, do sensory data streams come together within a mycelial network? How do brainless organisms link perception with action?

Hyphal tips are the parts of the mycelium that grow, change direction, branch, and fuse. They are the part of the mycelium that do the most.

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.

Animals run at 4 hz?

Olsson hypothesized that electrical signaling was a realistic way for a wide variety of fungi to send messages between different parts of themselves, messages that conveyed information about “food sources, injury, local conditions within the fungus, or the presence of other individuals around it.”

That fungi could use electrical signaling as a basis for rapid communication has not been lost on Andrew Adamatzky, the director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory. In 2018, he inserted electrodes into whole oyster mushrooms sprouting in clusters from blocks of mycelium and detected spontaneous waves of electrical activity. When he held a flame up to a mushroom, different mushrooms within the cluster responded with a sharp electrical spike. Shortly afterward, he published a paper called “Towards fungal computer.” In it, he proposed that mycelial networks “compute” information encoded in spikes of electrical activity.

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. Fungi could report changes in soil quality, water purity, pollution, or any other features of the environment that they are sensitive to.

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.”

The Latin root of the word intelligence means “to choose between.”

Remarkably unchanged, mycelium has persisted for more than half of the four billion years of life’s history, through countless cataclysms and catastrophic global transformations.

A sophisticated understanding of mycelium is yet to emerge. We are standing at the entrance to one of the oldest of life’s labyrinths.

“You see,” wrote the English mycologist Beatrix Potter, best known for her children’s books, “we do not believe in Schwendener’s theory.”

Beatrix Potter was a mycologist? My mind is exploding Similar to finding out the puberty book guy also wrote A year in provence

The names used to describe lichens sound like afflictions, words that get stuck in your teeth: crustose (crusty), foliose (leafy), squamulose (scaly), leprose (dusty), fruticose (branched).

Just as bacteria could fast-forward evolution by picking up DNA horizontally, so the arrival of foreign DNA on Earth could “short-circuit” the otherwise “tortuous” process of evolution, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

The ancestors of all modern eukaryotes horizontally acquired a bacterium with a preexisting ability to release energy using oxygen. Likewise, the ancestors of today’s plants horizontally acquired bacteria with the ability to photosynthesize, ready-evolved.

Spribille seems unperturbed by the fact that it isn’t possible to provide a single, stable definition of what a lichen actually is. It is a point Goward often returns to, relishing the absurdity: “There is an entire discipline that can’t define what it is that they study?” “It doesn’t matter what you call it,” writes Hillman on lichens. “Anything so radical & ordinary stands for something.”

Nor is it possible to define us genetically, as bodies made up of cells that share an identical genome—many of our symbiotic microbial partners are inherited from our mothers alongside our “own” DNA, and at points in our evolutionary history, microbial associates have permanently insinuated themselves into the cells of their hosts: Our mitochondria have their own genome as do plants’ chloroplasts, and at least eight percent of the human genome originated in viruses (we can even swap cells with other humans when we grow into “chimeras,” formed when mothers and fetuses exchange cells or genetic material in utero).

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.”

Nor is it known whether the fungus is able to cut the ant’s brain off from its body and coordinate its muscle contractions directly. However, Ophiocordyceps is closely related to the ergot fungi, from which the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann originally isolated the compounds used to make LSD, and is able to produce the family of chemicals that LSD derives from—a group known as “ergot alkaloids.”

There are many examples of intoxication in the animal world—birds eat inebriating berries, lemurs lick millipedes, moths drink the nectar of psychoactive flowers—and it is likely that we have been using mind-altering drugs for longer than we have been human.

A number of the horrors depicted by the Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch are thought to have been inspired by the symptoms of ergot poisoning, and some hypothesize that the numerous outbreaks of “dancing mania” between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which hundreds of townspeople took to dancing for days without rest, were caused by convulsive ergotism.

By harnessing a mind-manipulating virus, the fungus wouldn’t have to evolve the ability to modify the mind of its insect host.

IN THE CASE of Ophiocordyceps, an infected ant’s behavior can be thought of as fungal behavior. The death grip, summit disease—these are extended characteristics of the fungus, part of its extended phenotype. Can the alterations in human consciousness and behavior brought about by psilocybin mushrooms be thought of as part of the extended phenotype of the fungus?

And yet, amid the slow-burning disputes that surround the early history of life, one piece of academic consensus stands out: It was only by striking up new relationships with fungi that algae were able to make it onto land.

As long as fungi and algae have a good ecological fit—as long as they sing a metabolic “song” together that neither can sing alone—they will coalesce into entirely new symbiotic relationships. In this sense, the union of fungi and algae that gave rise to plants is part of a larger story, an evolutionary refrain.

Mycorrhizal fungi are so prolific that their mycelium makes up between a third and a half of the living mass of soils.

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).

I really like that this book doesnt try to wow you with big facts. It shows you the numbers

Plants pack up light and carbon dioxide into sugars and lipids. Mycorrhizal fungi unpack nutrients bound up in rock and decomposing material. These are fungi with a dual niche: Part of their life happens within the plant, part in the soil. They are stationed at the entry point of carbon into terrestrial life cycles and stitch the atmosphere into relation with the ground.

What we call “plants” are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.

The experiment was simple. If the same species of strawberry was grown with different species of fungus, would the flavor of the strawberries change? He conducted blind taste tests and found that different fungal communities did seem to change the flavor of the fruit. Some had more flavor, some were juicier, some were sweeter.

HOW DELICATE IS the mechanism by which the balance of power is maintained among members of the soil population,” reflected the mycologist Mabel Rayner in Trees and Toadstools, a book on mycorrhizal relationships, published in 1945.

In one set of experiments, she found that plant roots were able to supply carbon preferentially to fungal strains that provided them with more phosphorus.

We should expand our definition of intelligence

The fungus actively transported phosphorus—using its dynamic microtubule “motors”—from areas of abundance, where it fetched a low price when exchanged with a plant root, to areas of scarcity, where it was in higher demand and fetched a higher price. By doing so, the fungus was able to transfer a greater proportion of its phosphorus to the plant at the more favorable exchange rate, thus receiving larger quantities of carbon in return.

Arbitrage!!

Simard’s and Read’s findings suggested that it might not be appropriate to think of plants as such neatly separable units. As Read wrote in his commentary in Nature, 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.”

A mycorrhizal fungus that can keep its various plants alive is at an advantage: a diverse portfolio of plant partners insures it against the death of one of them. If a fungus depends on several orchids, and one of them won’t be able to supply it with carbon until it grows larger, the fungus will benefit by supporting the young orchid while it grows—to let it “take now,” provided it will “pay later.”

One species of mycorrhizal fungus, the thick-footed morel (Morchella crassipes), actually farms the bacteria that live within its networks: The fungus “plants” bacterial populations, then cultivates, harvests, and consumes them. There is a division of labor across the network, with some parts of the fungus responsible for food production and some for consumption.

If you take a myco-centric point of view it all makes sense.”

Brains, like fungal networks, reconfigure themselves—or “adaptively rewire”—in response to new situations.