Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.
I had an unusual introduction to fungi 30 years ago by way of French philosophy and family therapy. Now I am learning the rest of the story from a terrific book entitled Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake.
Fungi “make up one of life’s kingdoms as broad and busy as that of “animals” or “plants.” They range from microscopic yeasts to some of the largest organisms in the world, like the honey fungi that can weigh hundreds of tons, spread out over an area of more than six square miles, and live to be eight thousand years old.
The root-like structure of a fungus, spreading out in what seems like an endless maze of branching, is called mycelium. Amazingly, there are “hundreds or thousands of meters of fungal mycelium in just a teaspoon of healthy soil” and “more bacteria, protists, insects, and arthropods than the number of humans who have ever lived on Earth.”
Sheldrake admits his investigations have blown away his preconceptions about “[e]volution, ecosystems, individuality, intelligence, life — none are quite what I thought they were. My hope is that this book loosens some of your certainties, as fungi have loosened mine.”
One preconception flying out the window is how we define intelligence which we tend to associate only with big-brained animals. But, as biology professor Nicholas Money has written, recent “experiments have shown that fungi operate as individuals, engage in decision-making, are capable of learning, and possess short-term memory.” These findings make clear that what we call the mind may well span the entire natural world.
One of the most striking examples of this is exhibited by what is called “zombie fungi.” One particular fungus in this class organizes its life around the carpenter ant, which it transforms into a willing slave by injecting it with a drug similar to LSD. The highjacked ant is now programmed to climb a particular plant it would never normally climb to a certain optimal height and bite into a major vein in the plant stem, which it would never normally do because the plant is poisonous. After the ant dies, the fungus digests the ant’s body while simultaneously spouting a fungal stalk out of its head that releases a cloud of spores which infects the ants passing by on the ground below, thus completing the fungi’s life cycle.
Sheldrake’s study of fungi and microbes also demolishes the notion that we are distinct individuals. Instead, we are each an ecosystem, a community of microbes, “every surface, passage, and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your “own” cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy.”
Sheldrake confesses that learning about fungi has caused him to “reexamine much of what he thought he knew.” It’s done the same for me, making me ponder, in particular, the nature of free will. If a fungus can take over the mind of an ant, why can’t it do the same to us?
It sounds like science fiction, but it happens. We know, for instance, that fungal molecules like LSD and psilocybin can profoundly affect our behavior. Scientists now say that our gut, filled with microbes, acts like our second brain. How do these microbes influence our behavior? A new field called neuromicrobiology has arisen to study this.
In another sense, fungi have influenced me since attending graduate school many years ago, when I was introduced to Lynn Hoffman’s theories. She was a visionary family therapist who rejected the conventional metaphor that family therapy was a top-down hierarchy like the structure of a tree. She also spurned the notion that the family was a formally constructed interrelated system. She wanted a more collaborative model.
She found what she was looking for from the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who proposed a metaphor based on the complex branching stem of fungi we now call mycelium. Because mycelium have no center or hierarchy, they are neither a rigid system derived from technology nor a tree that grows from top to bottom by predictable branching.
Instead, mycelium are unpredictable shape shifters, able to put out an underground root, grow an aerial shoot, or even sprout up in an entirely new location. They provided Hoffman with the perfect metaphor for family therapy. Like mycelia, each session is unique, not knowable in advance, only understandable by observing it in real-time as it unfolds.
Fungi might be our next new frontier. Sheldrake tells us that 95% percent of our universe is “dark matter.” That means we don’t know anything about it. We have the same situation with biology, knowing nothing about 94% percent of microbes and fungi that populate our bodies and make up our world.
I am indebted to Professor Stephan Harding for writing, in a different context, the perfect conclusion to this essay:
“After reading Sheldrake’s masterpiece, I am more convinced than ever that we will never solve the grave problems of our times unless we deeply re-entangle our lives ‘fungus-style’ into the living fabric of our lustrous planet.”