Fungus might be smarter than we are – but think well before you eat it

I like news stories to trigger these columns – and I couldn’t resist this week’s tale of the childhood pals bringing “functional mushrooms” to your local big-brand supermarket.

Based on their Marcassie farm lab near the Cairngorms, Erik Lang and Smith Feeney are extracting compounds from Reishi, Cordyceps and Lion’s Mane fungi. They then sell them as capsules and tinctures in Tesco’s (branded “Love Mushrooms”, in a three-for-two offer).

So far, so eco-entrepreneurial. If you put “mushroom farms” into a Scotland-focused mapping app, you can see what opportunities this still-roomy wee country offers the world.

I won’t directly challenge the mushroom health science (though many do). Love Mushrooms claims its product “improves concentration, stress, anxiety, energy and immunity”.

But I also came upon a different scientific account of fungi this week. It utterly disrupts the idea that they can be retailed as a “wellness product” in a consumerist setting.

What if mushrooms, and the underground mycelial networks they arise from, are the ultimate symbol of ecological connectedness? What if they can teach us what it might be like to be truly symbiotic with nature, rather than carving it up or crushing it into a commodity?

That’s the case made by Merlin Sheldrake in his 2020 book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures.

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Sheldrake tells some wonderful science stories here. But the general thrust is towards placing “funga”, alongside “flora” and “fauna”, as a distinct element of nature.

The claims are dizzying. Sheldrake reports that the early years of plant life on Earth relied on fungal networks in the soil. They brought nutrients to these organisms, long before the trick of photosynthesis (energy from sunlight) was evolved.

We still live in a biosphere where 90% of plants are deeply interwoven with mycelial networks, both feeding into and feeding off them.

And such networks! Their filaments spread very much like neurons in the soil, displaying what seems like enough intelligence to seek out food and resources in any circumstance.

There’s even evidence that electrical signals course through them to guide their progress – just like brains. (Hilariously, Sheldrake reports that when given an abstract map of an IKEA store, mycelial networks were quicker than human researchers to find the exit door.)

However, I’ll stop short of accepting that fungal organisms can give humanity too many lessons.

Granted, many environmental radicals would disagree. They want our civilisations to make the shift from “ego” to “eco”. So the imagery of mycelia as an invisible web, deeply connecting and sustaining most natural entities behind their backs, entirely services the deep-green agenda.

Quoted in the New York Times last year, Sheldrake evokes this post-egoic fantasy well. Imagine you had “no head, no heart, no centre of operations … if you could taste with your whole body. If you could take a fragment of your toe or your hair and it would grow into a new you – and hundreds of these new yous could fuse together into some impossibly large togetherness.

“And when you wanted to get around, you would produce spores, this little condensed part of you that could travel in the air.”

As the NYT writer tartly notes: “In the [Hampstead] audience, the woman next to me gave a long, affirming hum.”

But isn’t human imagination and cognition – our subjective ability to analyse and project beyond our immediate constraints – also a “natural” outcome of evolution?

Even more dizzyingly, aren’t our current powerful AIs somewhat “mycelial”? That is, they calculate the best next move (or statement) by spreading out their algorithms through vast banks of data, like fungal filaments through rich soil?

I’ve always wondered whether an artificial intelligence left free to develop itself might choose not to simulate human thought, but rather something else. Maybe more like the relentless searching, connecting and sustaining of mycelial networks? We may not have that long to find out.

As many scientists note, fungi kill and blight as much as they support and sustain – there’s no need to idealise their function. The same goes for AI. How do we develop the wisdom to use these science-driven understandings, along pathways that don’t lead to annihilation or degradation?

There’s another fungal sprouting in my life which is linked to this quest – but it’s all too personal.

And that’s the reports we’re getting from friends and acquaintances, beset by grief, depression and dispiritedness, who turn to psychotropic mushrooms as a way to break up these inner logjams.

One powerful published account from a lifetime anorexic talks of the effects of taking hallucinogens, including psilocybin (a psychoactive element extractable from certain fungi): “For the first time in my life, I looked inside and saw a me that I could love. For someone who has struggled with intense self-hatred since childhood, that was incredibly profound, and it shook me down to my foundation.”

Psychonauts of a certain age will recall the thesis from New Age guru Terence McKenna – that it was the eating of fungal hallucinogens that triggered a self-aware and sapient human species.

This always felt like a stretch. Given their ability to endlessly graze at anything that lies before them, why don’t we have super-sentient cows, sheep and goats? Biologists are also noting how these mycelial drugs boost links between plant organisms in what’s called the “wood wide web” – and have done so for hundreds of millions of years.

Yet using their intelligence, memory and traditions to discriminate between useful bits of nature is what humans, well, naturally do. So I take seriously the scientific efforts to harness psilocybin to anti-depressant uses.

Below the federal level in the US, states like Colorado and Oregon have legislated for access to this substance – derived directly from the plants, not synthesized in a lab – for therapeutic purposes.

It’s still a Class-A drug, transatlantically – and here isn’t the time or place to delve into the ethical innards of that status. But I will admit to being chastened by the line in Wikipedia which notes how difficult it is to discern a toxic from a non-toxic mushroom.

“Common mushroom hunting advice is that if a mushroom cannot be positively identified, it should be considered poisonous and not eaten.” So I cheer on all expertise and research in these matters!

But in the end, it feels good to tarry a little with the fungi in my life. They seem adaptable, flexible, inventive, irrepressible – not a bad metaphor for surviving a world of permacrisis.

Accessed via the local megamarket as a popped pill? I’m not so sure. But that’s humans for you.