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

by Merlin Sheldrake

When fungi were grown with algae, they coalesced into visible forms that looked like soft green balls. They weren’t the elaborate lichen forms depicted by Ernst Haeckel and Beatrix Potter. But then they hadn’t spent millions of years in each other’s company.

water. When a volcano creates a new island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the first things to grow on the bare rock are lichens, which arrive as spores or fragments carried by the wind or birds. Likewise when a glacier retreats. The growth of lichens on freshly exposed rock is a variation on the theme of panspermia.

In this view, lichens are dynamic systems, rather than a catalogue of interacting components.

In fact, lichens contain so many bacteria that some researchers hypothesise – in another twist on the panspermia theme – that they act as microbial reservoirs that seed barren habitats with crucial bacterial strains.

Within lichens, some bacteria provide defence; others make vitamins and hormones. Spribille suspects that they might be doing more. ‘I think a few of these bacteria might be necessary to tie the lichen system together and get it to form something other than a blob on a dish.’

‘The human binary view has made it difficult to ask questions that aren’t binary,’ he explained. ‘Our strictures about sexuality make it difficult to ask questions about sexuality, and so on. We ask questions from the perspective of our cultural context. And this makes it extremely difficult to ask questions about complex symbioses like lichens because we think of ourselves as autonomous individuals and so find it hard to

relate.’

cows can’t eat grass, for example, but their microbial populations can, and cows’ bodies have evolved to house the microbes that sustain them.

Neither can we be defined developmentally, as the organism that proceeds from the fertilisation of an animal egg, because we depend, like all mammals, on our symbiotic partners to direct parts of our developmental programmes.

Nor can our immune systems be taken as a measure of individuality, although our immune cells are often thought of as answering this question for us by distinguishing ‘self’ from ‘non-self’.

Immune systems are as concerned with managing our relationships with our resident microbes as fighting off external attackers, and appear to have evolved to enable colonisation by microbes rather than prevent it.

‘There have never been individuals,’ they declare. ‘We are all lichens.’

There is a world beyond ours … That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known … I ask them and they answer me.

entheogen

A fungus had evolved a chemical that had been used to make a drug. Quite by accident, this drug had been discovered to alter human experience. For seven decades or so, LSD’s peculiar effects on our minds had generated astonishment, confusion, evangelical zeal, moral panic and everything in between.

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis,

Mycelium grows from the ant’s feet and stitches them to the plant’s surface. The fungus then digests the ant’s body and sprouts a stalk out of its head, from which spores shower down on ants passing below. If the spores miss their targets, they produce secondary sticky spores which extend outwards on threads that act like trip wires.

Holy shit. Fungus are fucking metal.

pharmacological.

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’.

After decades of research, and many billions of dollars of investment, the ability to regulate human behaviour using drugs is anything but fine-tuned.

He had set up the land in Hawaii as a forest garden, a living library of rare and not-so-rare psychoactive and medicinal plants harvested from many corners of the tropical world.

This plant, like some types of mushroom, could make

us dream.

Many have ‘strange, mystical and confounding’ effects and, like psilocybin mushrooms, are intimately bound up within human cultures and spiritual practices.

Involuntary muscle twitching is one of the primary symptoms of ergotism, and the ability of ergot alkaloids to induce muscle contractions in humans may mirror their role in ants infected by Ophiocordyceps.

some hypothesise 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.

In McKenna’s view, human consumption of psilocybin mushrooms was an even more ancient phenomenon and lay at the root of human biological, cultural and spiritual evolution.

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 Palaeolithic.

Mushrooms were the original tree of knowledge.

As our ancestors roamed the ‘mushroom-dotted grasslands and savannahs of tropical and subtropical Africa’, McKenna conjectured, ‘the psilocybin-containing mushrooms were encountered, consumed and deified. Language, poetry, ritual, and thought emerged from the darkness of the hominid mind.’

Some suspect that ancient Eurasian populations used psilocybin mushrooms as part of religious ceremonies, the best known being the Eleusinian Mysteries, secretive rites celebrated in ancient Greece and thought to have been attended by many luminaries including Plato. But once again there’s no definitive record. And yet the absence of evidence does not provide evidence of absence. This makes speculation inevitable.

It has evolved multiple times across the fungal kingdom in unrelated lineages, and there are numerous non-fungal parasites that are also able to manipulate the minds of their hosts.

There are parallels with Ophiocordyceps. Infected flies climb up high. When they extend their mouth parts to feed, a glue produced by the fungus sticks them to whatever surface they touch. When the fungus has consumed the fly’s body, starting with the fatty parts and finishing with the vital organs, it pushes a stalk out of the fly’s back and ejects spores into the air.

Kasson studies the fungus Massospora, which infects cicadas and causes the rear third of their bodies to disintegrate, allowing it to discharge its spores out of their ruptured back ends.

More astonishing was the presence of psilocybin, which was one of the most abundant chemicals in the fungal plugs

Massospora sits in an entirely different division of the fungal kingdom from the species known to produce psilocybin, separated by a gulf of hundreds of millions of years.

The interaction between gut microbes and brains – the ‘microbiome–gut–brain axis’ – is far-reaching enough to have birthed a new field: neuromicrobiology.

However, mind-manipulating fungi remain some of the most dramatic examples of composite organisms.

In The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins points out that genes don’t just provide the instructions to build the body of an organism. They also provide instructions to build certain behaviours. A bird’s nest is part of the outward expression of the bird’s genome. A beaver’s dam is part of the outward expression of a beaver’s genome. And an ant’s death grip is part of the outward expression of the genome of Ophiocordyceps fungi. Through inherited behaviours, Dawkins argues, the outward expression of an organism’s genes – known as its ‘phenotype’ – extends into the world.

Dawkins was careful to place ‘stringent requirements’ on the idea of the extended phenotype. Although it is a speculative concept, he dutifully reminds us, it is a ‘tightly limited speculation’. There are three crucial criteria that have to be met to prevent phenotypes becoming too extended (if a beaver’s dam is an expression of the beaver’s genome, then what about the pond that forms upstream of the dam, and the fish that live in the pond, and …?).

In The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the extended phenotype, which is the idea that an organism's phenotype (physical and behavioral characteristics) can have an impact on the environment and other organisms. However, he placed "stringent requirements" on this concept, meaning that he set strict rules for when it can be applied.

Psilocybin mushrooms, as a growing number of studies report, have evolved an astonishing ability to cure a wide range of human problems.

After a single dose of psilocybin, 80 per cent of patients showed substantial reductions in their psychological symptoms, reductions that persisted for at least six months after the dose.

Psilocybin reduced ‘demoralisation and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being and increased quality of life’.

Mystical experiences include feelings of awe; of everything being interconnected; of transcending time and space; of profound intuitive understanding about the nature of reality; and of deeply felt love, peace or joy.

In one study, researchers found that a single high dose of psilocybin increased the openness to new experiences, psychological wellbeing and life satisfaction of healthy volunteers, a change that persisted in most cases for more than a year.

our subjective worlds are underpinned by the chemical activity of our brains;

the very same experiences are so powerful as to convince people that a non-material reality – the raw ingredient of religious belief – exists.

By mimicking one of our most widely used chemical messengers, psilocybin, like LSD, infiltrates our nervous systems, intervenes directly in the passage of electrical signals around our bodies, and can even change the growth and structure of neurones.

Cerebral connectivity explodes, and a tumult of new neuronal pathways arise. Networks of activity previously distant from one another link up.

Psilocybin appears to take effect not by pushing a set of biochemical buttons, but by opening patients’ minds to new ways of thinking about their lives and behaviours.