Everywhere, no matter the place – in the forest, in the laboratory or in the kitchen – mushrooms changed my understanding of Life. These organisms challenge our methods of categorizing, and just thinking about them makes the world look different. It was my growing admiration for the ability of mushrooms to change the way people think that led me to write this book. I’ve tried to settle for the ambiguity that mushrooms offer, but I don’t feel comfortable with unanswered questions, just as some people don’t feel comfortable in the open because they suffer from agoraphobia. Even though I felt tempted to lock myself in narrow rooms with easy answers, I managed to protect myself from it.
One of my friends, the philosopher and magician David Abram, once performed at Alice’s Restaurant in the US state of Massachusetts (famous thanks to Arl Guthrie’s protest song). Every evening, as he moved between the tables, coins passed through his hands, appeared where they shouldn’t, disappeared, multiplied, and were lost for good. One time, two customers returned to the restaurant shortly after leaving and pulled David aside with worried expressions. They claimed that when they came out, the sky became a piercing blue and the clouds were huge and bright. They wanted to know if he had put anything in their drinks. As the weeks passed, the same thing happened: customers returned to report that the traffic was louder than before, the streetlights were brighter, the patterns on the sidewalk seemed more interesting, and the rain seemed more refreshing. Magic tricks changed the way people saw the world.
David explained to me what he thought the reason was. Our senses operate largely on the basis of expectations. It requires much less cognitive effort from a person to understand the world around him thanks to preconceived images, updated only by a small amount of new information, than to form new concepts from scratch. It is thanks to our stereotypical thinking that magicians are able to convince us with their tricks. Conversely, coin tricks weaken our biases about how hands and coins normally behave. After some time, our prejudices towards other things also decrease. We become more susceptible to sensory experiences. When customers left the restaurant, they perceived the sky differently because they saw it as it was in that moment – here and now – and not as they expected it to be. Deprived of preconceived notions, we surrender to the power of our senses. The most astonishing thing is the gap between what we expect to see and what we actually see.
Mushrooms also deprive us of prejudices. Their lives and behaviors are astonishing. The more I explore them, the more I free myself from preconceptions and the stranger the concepts I previously took for granted turn out to be. It is only thanks to two rapidly developing subdisciplines of biological sciences that I somehow find my way in all this and, using their framework, I can further explore the world of fungi.
First, researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the numerous sophisticated problem-solving behaviors that have evolved in non-animal organisms without a central nervous system. The most famous example is a representative of the slime mold Physarum polycephalum (which, however, belongs to the supergroup Amoebozoa, not to the kingdom Fungi, as the English name slime mold might indicate). As we will see, Physarum polycephalum does not have a monopoly on solving problems in the absence of a brain, but it does happen to be a rewarding object of study and, as a model organism, has helped to pioneer a new field. Physarum polycephalum creates exploratory webs made of antenna-like veins and has no central nervous system – or anything corresponding to it. Yet he can make decisions by comparing a number of possible courses of action and find the shortest path between two points in a maze. Japanese researchers placed this slime mold in a Petri dish organized like the Tokyo metropolitan area. Oatmeal corresponded to major urban centers, and bright lights corresponded to obstacles such as mountains – slime molds do not like light. In just one day, Physarum polycephalum found the most efficient route between the oatmeal fields, almost completely replicating Greater Tokyo’s existing rail network. In similar experiments, the slime mold recreated the American highway network and the road system built by the ancient Romans in Central Europe. A slime mold enthusiast told me about a test he conducted himself. Since he regularly got lost in IKEA stores and wasted time trying to find his way out, he decided to pose the same problem to Physarum polycephalum. For this purpose, he created a maze based on the plan of a local IKEA store. As could be expected, the locksmith – without the help of signposts or employees – quickly found the shortest route to the exit.
“So you see,” said the enthusiast with a laugh, “that they’re smarter than me?”
The answer to the question of whether to call slime molds, fungi and plants intelligent depends on your point of view. Classic scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as the benchmark, comparing all other species with them. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans always occupy the highest position in the rankings, followed by animals built similarly to us (common chimpanzees, pygmy chimpanzees, etc.), other higher animals, and so on, according to the “league table” established by the ancient Greeks , and which persists in one way or another to this day. Due to the fact that slime molds, fungi and plants neither look like us nor behave like us – and they have no brain – they are traditionally placed somewhere at the bottom of this scale. Very often they are considered merely a passive background for animal life. Meanwhile, many of them are capable of complex behaviors that make us rethink what concepts such as problem-solving, communicating, decision-making, learning and remembering mean. As a result of these considerations, the established hierarchy of things, which is still the foundation of modern thought, is beginning to shake. Perhaps this will finally change our disastrous attitude towards the more-than-human world?
Secondly, science is starting to look differently at single-celled organisms – or microbes, as they are also called – which occupy every square centimeter of our globe. Over the past four decades, we have gained unprecedented insight into microbial life thanks to new technologies. Result? To your microbiome – your microbial community – your body is like an entire planet. Some prefer the temperate climate of the forest of hair on your head, others feel best on the barren plains of your forearms, others wouldn’t trade the damp forest of your armpits or crotch for anything. Your intestine (which, if ironed out, would cover an area of 32 square meters), ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin, as well as every surface, every isthmus and every cavity of your body are teeming with bacteria and fungi. You have more microbes than your own cells. There are more bacteria living in your digestive tract than there are stars in our galaxy.
We humans rarely wonder where one person ends and another begins. It is usually taken for granted – at least in modern industrialized society – that everyone begins where his body begins and ends where his body ends. The development of medicine, including organ transplantation, is challenging these boundaries, and the discoveries of microbiology are shaking the foundations of what we previously took for granted. Each person is an ecosystem in itself – an ecosystem composed of (and decomposed by) microbes. Their full significance is only just beginning to emerge. The approximately 40 trillion microorganisms living on the surface of our skin and inside our bodies not only enable us to digest food, but also produce minerals that are crucial to our well-being. Like fungi living in plants, they protect us against diseases. They influence the development of our body and immune system, and also influence our behavior. If left uncontrolled, they can lead to illness and even death. We are no exception. Bacteria also carry viruses (nanobiome?). Viruses also carry smaller viruses within them (picobiome?). Symbiosis is an inherent feature of life.
While attending a three-day scientific conference on tropical microbes in Panama, I, along with many other scientists, was amazed at the implications of our research. One of the lecturers talked about a plant that produces a specific group of chemical compounds in its leaves. Until then, these compounds were considered the defining feature of that particular plant. Meanwhile, it turned out that the compounds mentioned are actually produced by fungi that live in the leaves of this plant. Our idea of her had to be reshaped. Another researcher suggested that perhaps the producers of chemical compounds are not fungi living in leaves, but bacteria living in mushrooms. Similar conclusions were drawn from the remaining speeches. Already on the second day, our understanding of the individual was deeper than ever and changed beyond recognition. There was actually no point in talking about individuals. Biology – the study of living organisms – has evolved into ecology – the study of relationships between living organisms. In addition, most of these relationships were incomprehensible to us. When the microbiome projections appeared on the screen, a large part of them was marked with the caption “no data”. It reminded me of the way modern physicists view the universe, which is over 95 percent made up of dark matter and dark energy. They are called both “dark” because we know nothing about them. The lack of data in biology is precisely this kind of dark matter – or rather “dark life”.
Many scientific concepts – ranging from “time” to “chemical bonds” to “genes” and “species” – have no fixed definition, even though they are helpful constructs that allow you to think in specific terms. To some extent, “individual” is also such a concept – another category organizing human thought and behavior. Yet so much of everyday life and experience – not to mention our philosophical, political and economic systems – is based on the individual that it is difficult to stand still and watch this idea fade away. What will happen to “us”? And what will happen to “them”? And I”? “My”? “All”? “Someone”? My reaction to the debate during the conference was not only intellectual. Just like a customer at Alice’s Restaurant, I felt that something had changed: the familiar had suddenly become foreign.
As microbiome research pioneer David Relman noted, “loss of sense of self, delusions of misidentification, and the feeling that ‘someone else is in control'” are all possible symptoms of mental illness. My head was spinning when I thought about how many concepts would have to be redefined, including the concepts of integrity, autonomy and independence, which are so important in our culture. It’s partly this unsettling feeling that makes progress in the field of microbiology so exciting. It’s hard to imagine relationships more intimate than those at the microscopic level. Expanding knowledge about them changes the way we perceive our bodies and places of existence. Each person is a whole ecosystem that bridges divisions and goes beyond established categories. The “I” emerges from a complicated tangle of relationships that we are only just beginning to understand.
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Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
