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

by Merlin Sheldrake

Fungi may not have brains, but their many options entail decisions. Their fickle environments entail improvisation. Their trials entail errors. Whether in the homing response of hyphae within a mycelial network, the sexual attraction between two hyphae in separate mycelial networks, the vital fascination between a mycorrhizal hypha and a plant root, or the fatal attraction of a nematode to a fungal toxic droplet, fungi actively sense and interpret their worlds, even if we have no way of knowing what it is like for a hypha to sense or interpret. Perhaps it isn’t so strange to think of fungi as articulating themselves using a chemical vocabulary, arranged and rearranged in such a way that it might be interpreted by other organisms, whether nematode, tree root, truffle dog or New York restaurateur. Sometimes – as with truffles – these molecules might translate into a chemical language we can, in our way, understand. The vast majority will always pass over our heads, or under our feet.