The Conscious Intelligence Of Fungi | Nicholas P. Money ~ ATTMind 193

- Hello everyone and welcome back to Adventures to the Mind podcast. This is a show that explores topics relevant and related to psychedelic culture, medicine, spirituality, and research. And I'm your host as always, James W. Jesso. Today's interview is with Nicholas P. Money, who is a science writer and mycologist and a professor of biology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He's the author of the 2024 book, "Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines."

But I've got him on the show predominantly to talk about the thesis he presents in his 2021 paper, "Hyphal and Mycelial Consciousness, "The Concept of the Fungal Mind," published in Fungal Biology.

Now I can assure you that although the title of that sounds very complex, the conversation itself is very progressive in the topics we cover, as I really wanted to get a full picture of fungi, of funguses and mushrooms as organisms, before him and I started to explore what denotes intelligence generally, and is it such that mushrooms are intelligent and as to the thesis that he presents in his paper, exploring the very tips of the mycelial network, what are called heifei,

as having their own consciousness, each one of them even as a part of a larger organism. To me, super interesting stuff. I hope you find it interesting as well.

A note is that having just come out of an interview with John Seed and stuff around climate and ecology being really top of mind for me when I interviewed Nicholas Money here, we ended up going into that for a bit, somewhat accidentally, right at the beginning, talking about ecology and the climate, and kind of debating the value of human beings as a species, the value of human beings as contributing in some way to the larger ecosystem of the planet, the larger sort of meta ecosystem

that is the whole planet Earth. And Nicholas and I, we take very different stances. So there's definitely some discussion specifically about that peppered throughout, but mostly in the beginning, before we get into the larger discussion about fungal, excuse me, fungi and fungal intelligence. And that's all for the intro. And I hope that you enjoy this interview with Nicholas Money here on Adventures Through the Mind, episode 193. Dr. Nicholas Money, welcome to Adventures Through the Mind.

- Thank you for inviting me. Looking forward to a vibrant conversation. - Well, fingers crossed at least. - Thank you. - On your end, I assume, but we'll see how I show up. Now you are the author of the new book, "Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicine," that just came, actually, would you hold up? Would you hold up, do you have a copy there? I don't have one at home, so. - This stellar contribution to the mycological literature. I've written about a dozen books, so this is the most recent.

- Yeah, and it looks quite exciting. - It's very exciting, and it deserves far more interest from popular readers than it's received so far. But I could probably say that about most of my back catalog, but it is a work of heartbreaking genius. And I'd recommend everyone on planet Earth try and read this before it's too late. - Wow, just going for the big ones right from the get-go.

We don't have a lot of time left as a species, and I think people would be ill-advised to ignore the truth about our relationship with fungi. That's what I'd-- - There's actually-- - That's my niche. I think I wanna learn as much about things before I and the rest of Homo sapiens exit. - There's a man who I'm not gonna mention, 'cause he has since become quite maligned, I'd say, started adopting and promoting some worldviews that, well, I just don't wanna promote them any further.

But at one point, I went to a lecture that he gave, and it was all about mushrooms. And it was all about basically the many times in which the larger planetary ecology was jeopardized by mass cataclysm or dramatic change and how in the midst of all of that, it seemed like mushrooms were the predominant player that helped maintain stability long enough for stability to find its way.

Essentially, the fungi kingdom played very important roles in sustaining life in the midst of every one of these cataclysms or extinction-type events. I don't know how true that is, but one thing that really stuck with me, and I feel personally true, may be objectively true, which is like, if you wanna make your way through crisis, align yourself with the fungi. So I've taken that to personal heart, even if it may not end up being scientific truth.

- Yeah. What, sorry, so do I think there's something to it? I mean, I guess I'm skeptical about all worldviews in which we're placing humans at the center of our concerns. So the fungi don't give a flying about, fuck about whether we survive or not, but we can get into that perhaps a little later. But of the fungi played a role in sustaining life on Earth? Yeah, certainly.

You could make a very significant case that planktonic organisms, particularly the photosynthetic ones, have also played what a massive role in making the planet habitable for animals, including us. - Yeah, a previous guest I had on the show, actually just interviewed him yesterday.

I don't know if it's a previous guest, depends on when it all comes out, but he was mentioning about the shift in geology, or like the planet's sort of presence of life from predominantly anaerobic bacteria to these oxygen producing species, and how much of a crisis that was at the time for the anaerobic life forms. - I mean, oxygen is, from that viewpoint, is an extremely poisonous chemical. And there wasn't a lot of it around before there was oxygen producing photosynthesis.

Yeah, it's really interesting. What we're engaging in now, though, is our own experiment in reorganizing planet and planetary chemistry. And so that's obviously, that is the source of my bleak assessment of our future, whether or not the fungi are here. And they'll be here long after we're gone. - Something will prevail. It'd be nice if it was more of us for longer, but something that probably prevails. - I don't know. I don't think so.

I think we're a rather unpleasant, I think the bad outweighs the good when it comes to Homo sapiens. So the sooner that we're swept away, the better, I think. The planet would be a place of less suffering. There will be less net suffering in the universe if we were whipped away, which we surely will be. - Respectfully, I disagree. I do believe that we are doing incredible harm and orchestrating a lot of suffering.

But it's not as though nature without us is this Disney world that doesn't include suffering and death and destruction and all that. - Absolutely. I mean, I don't know whether, can I use the F word? I mean, zoology is a fucking nightmare. I mean, that's the truth. Darwin knew this and he edged around that issue, issue of suffering in nature.

So yeah, whether humans are here or not, we're, yeah, sentient life, consciousness is a bad thing when it comes to, well, it provides the option to suffer, the option, the ability to suffer. The difference is though with us is that we can make, we might not believe in free will, but we have the fantasy of being able to make decisions and the decisions that we do make, for example, in what? Industrialized agriculture, for example, that's a net source of suffering that is avoidable.

And so we deserve to be, the aliens are watching us and yeah, they're not gonna, we're not gonna get out of, we won't get a get out of jail free card because we also see that other species of mammals are attacking one another. - I mean, certainly not. - We're particularly nasty. We're probably not the smartest organisms on the planet. There are recitations, there are whales with immensely larger brains, but yeah, they don't engage in any industrialized forms of suffering.

- I mean, have yet to evolve the capacity to do so perhaps. - Flippers, I mean, this was very, Huxley recognized this in the 19th century. Here's the problem, it's the hand. - You just got rid of those pesky thumbs. - We do a lot of batshit with our hands and with our brains and yeah, a whale can't build a prison. - Yeah. - I am almost, I'd say like too often have the tendency to lean into a more sort of bleak outlook on how this is all going.

And also again, I respectfully disagree around humanity. I think if we can't get our stuff together and make some serious positive changes, then we've got what's coming down the pipeline is what we deserve.

And still, I think that, and this is a quote that I read even just today actually, it was something to the effect of like, how we perceive the world has a big influence on how we act and how we act has a big influence on the impact we have on the world and thus the sum total of those impact really matter.

And that when the choice is between sort of like pessimism or optimism, optimism tends to be a better choice, not because it's like woo or naive to like eliminate the bad, but because it just seems like a sort of pessimistic outlook doesn't create, certainly won't create a better world. And an optimistic one might if we choose to. And so I just don't wanna throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think humanity has a lot of potential and some beautiful things have come through us.

And if we could start sort of shifting the ratio between the beautiful things that we can create and the harm that we're being, that's been done and that we are doing, I think it would be worth us sticking around. And if we can't, like I said, then we've got coming down the pipeline as we're gonna get what we deserve. - I mean, I think the, for me as a teacher, as a professor, I don't project an entirely pessimistic view of the future.

I think that would be unethical toward people that are, I'm 62, that students that I'm teaching are teenagers. I think what I would like to do though, in the years that remain for me as a teacher is to at least engender a love of nature and particularly among a love of microscopic forms of nature. I mean, there is still what tremendous joy to be had, irrespective of age, in collecting and looking at pond water and looking at the effusion of life in freshwater ponds.

I mean, this is something that I've enjoyed doing throughout my life. I inherited this from one of my grandmothers. So even so what? So even though my view of the future is very pessimistic, that doesn't mean I can't be extraordinarily happy in looking at slices of nature now. That is what gives me joy. Hope? No, I think in that sense, I'm a very hopeless person, but I'm not depressed. I'm not depressed. Yeah, how does that work?

I'm convinced that we're on the way out much sooner, sooner rather than later. And yet I'm a fairly happy person. And some of that happiness comes from where we go, whoa, there we go. - I have no idea why that's happening. - I thought you did. - That wasn't me. Okay. - I didn't do anything. Wow, somebody's watching this. Wow, what did that happen? - For listeners, some weird video effect happened.

- Key words within this that's set off, I could try it again, I suppose, and use the happiness word and then I'm so happy. No, it didn't work. - Anyway, it seems like you found a good balance or a way of navigating the sort of... - It's a work in progress, right? I mean, it's a work in progress. It's some, yeah. - See, 'cause when I think about it, you talked about looking at slides from freshwater pools or looking at things and being like finding joy and seeing beauty and I don't know, right?

Like I don't think we could properly divine so far an experiment to prove that other animals like look upon things and say, wow, that's absolutely beautiful. Look at how beautiful that is and be moved by its beauty. We know humans do.

So under the assumption based on the data that we have that presently humans are the only organisms on planet earth and expression of planet earth's larger life cycle that have the capacity for beauty as a sense perception, then it would seem to me that that itself might be, if possible, worth preserving both in the capacity and the objects upon which the capacity can flourish as in like that humanity, there's a value in the fact that humans can perceive and express beauty

and such there is a value in ensuring that our actions can start to align with preserving and maintaining a world that has beautiful things in it. Not just beautiful because I like this piece of art or this architecture, but beauty in the sense that we're preserving the natural world and caring for our fellow kin, human and non-human alike, building beautiful social structures, all of these things.

I think all of that is possible and worthwhile and believing as possible while simultaneously I do also accept the fact that it isn't looking good presently. - Right, I think there's a lot in what you say. It does edge towards sort of a quasi religious viewpoint though, which is probably beyond the scope of this. You know, I'll chat today, but you know, the idea of an objective good, is there an objective good on planet earth? You don't know, I don't know.

There's an objective bad in the sense that the experience of suffering is something that no organisms have evolved to what, enjoy. The objective bad without an objective good. That's like kind of believing in the devil, but not in Christ our savior. Maybe that's true of me though. Yeah, I see the devil everywhere. - I mean, it's interesting to be able to look upon the world and say, oh, there's evil, but then look upon the world and be like, well, can we prove that there's good? Who knows?

There might be a-- - It puts the people with religious faith, true believers that yeah, the sense of comfort that comes from that, external to me, absolutely, there's such a thing as good and evil. - Yeah, I don't think I was trying to make a proclamation about good and evil objective, at least I wasn't consciously aware of doing this.

It was more along the lines of, I can, to the degree to which I am able to be awake and aware of myself as a person of consequence, consequences good and bad, consequences known unknown. And to the best of my awareness and capacity, act in accordance with what I believe to have more positive consequence than negative consequence, as far as I can see it, that that at least as far as I'm concerned would be acting good.

But the ability to know what is good and act upon that good at all times beyond the individual self is what I believe what Socrates said was beyond the realm of the human. It's the realm of the gods or the only ones that could do this. The best that we could do is our best and know that it will always fall short of perfection.

And so when I said that, that's what I meant like, that we could choose to start increasing our capacity for acting in alignment with what is good without trying to draw any particular sort of like religious divides between good or evil and good or bad. - Yeah, I mean, do unto others is a good rule for life. - Human and non-human alike. - Absolutely, absolutely. - So now that we went into that incredibly engaging Eddie about mushrooms, right?

So what I initially had you on the show today to talk about is fungi in particular. And especially, you know, I haven't read molds, mushrooms and medicine yet anyways, but what called me to your work was a paper that you wrote around basically the consciousness of fungi, particularly hyphae.

Now I'm gonna ask you about that in a minute, but I think what would make sense for people listening, you know, they might see on the video screen, you got a fruiting body, a mushroomed fungi model in the background, I got a mushroom on my shirt. So people have a sense that mushrooms are a thing. They might be thinking about a number of different configurations biologically when they think of fungi.

But maybe start us off with a basic overview, like a quick rundown of the fungi as an organism, like the configurations of its body. Right, the fungal body. So mushroom forming fungi, a few tens of thousands of species of fungi actually form big visible fruit bodies. These are the base to the amisete fungi. Let me get too technical here, also ask amisete fungi that produce things like morels. The mushrooms are the sex organs, the reproductive organs produced by, usually by larger organisms.

The larger organism exists as a feeding colony or mycelium that's penetrating wood or soil or other kinds of, or even the tissues of animals. And then after they've generated enough biomass by feeding on those organic food sources, they can then reproduce by producing this, a mushroom for example, releasing clouds of spores. When those spores germinate, they have the potential to generate new feeding colonies.

And so that's in essence, the life cycle of those fungi that produce macroscopic fruit bodies. So we got a feeding phase and a reproductive phase. You do it with hand movements. I mean, that's the fungal life cycle you've got. So I don't know. This is the feeding phase, actually two mycelia, two colonies here, filamentous cells called hyphae penetrating their food sources, extracting out nutrients. And then what's the other thing then?

They'll produce a fruit body and then the spores are dispersed from the fruit body and move away on the breeze. So penetration, spore. - So that's a mushrooming fungi, but there are other forms of fungi. - Absolutely. The mushrooms are sort of the least part of the fungi, at least in terms of the diversity of the fungi. Most fungi exist in holy microscopic forms as also with filamentous cells that we call, filamentous fungi called, that we refer to as molds.

Or in the form of budding yeast cells. So these are microscopic. We just don't see these, unless there's a lot of them masked together in the form of like a film of yeast growing on a surface, for example. We also find molds, molds reproduce by producing spores, but they don't produce these large fruit bodies. They'll produce microscopic or tiny stalks and form spores at the tips of those stalks. And then there's this vast, really undocumented diversity of fungi.

We really know very little about them. We know they're there because we see their genetic footprints pretty much everywhere we look. And these are probably aquatic. Well, the soil organisms, but they also grow in freshwater and marine ecosystems. We wouldn't really know much about those. What's that? I got a thumb up now next to me. - I don't know why that's happening. It's my new computer though. I'm not a big fan of Skype, but anyway, that's what it's doing here. God knows what it'll do next.

It'll put a hat on me and I'll... - Well, as long as it's a funny hat, I think we can accept it. - Do we? - It's all right. None of these boring hats. - The answer to the leprechaun or something, I don't know what it's gonna do next. Mind boggling. - But anyways, you were saying there, these other forms of fungi that we don't know much about, but we see their genetic footprint in various places aquatic environments, soil environments.

But from what I understand, there's also maybe some evidence of certain forms of fungi that exist in like, above the earth as well, like in various places in the atmosphere. - Well, there are certainly fungal spores that are, I mean, millions of tons of fungal spores that are circulating in the high atmosphere. Well, actually on lower elevations too, but yeah.

So there are fungi that are airborne, but there's not any good evidence that they're really doing much in the form of growth in that form, but if they circulate and then they're deposited on a propitious food source, then they'll grow. But yeah, the fungi are everywhere. - Just waiting to attach themselves to one of our spaceships to recolonize another planet maybe. - Maybe that's it, without intent, but indeed we might carry them.

I mean, the furthest we've ever carried, the furthest that the fungi have ever traveled is the surface of our satellite, the moon. - As far as we know, I guess. - I guess so they may be clinging to the surface probably in a freeze dried form at this point for spacecraft that have traveled beyond the moon. But we know they've made it to the moon in the sense that the astronauts on the Apollo missions, they left jettison bags with their poop and urine in them on the surface of the moon.

And so some of the fungi that were present in their guts at that time were left there on the surface of the moon. So that's the furthest extension of the microbiome, the fungal part of life on Earth. - I will later try to remember to ask you why it is that you might consider hyphae as conscious, but mushrooms or fungi without intent, but that might be a different question for later after we get some definitions. - Absolutely. - Before we get there, can you verbally descriptively as best you can?

'Cause most people engage in the show or listening. You might get, you don't want that top hat after all, right, funny hat or the leprechaun dance or what have you. Can you explain to us a little bit around like what, you talked about the sort of larger mycelial body of the fungi. What does that look like? What's the configuration look like? - Well, you can see it with the unaided eye, at least if you could do this.

If I was with students in the woods, you could roll over a log under moist conditions and you'd find lots and lots of hyphae that are growing underneath that rotting wood and just the masses of cells that are present, you might see that in the form of this usually white sort of cottony growth. And often there, it's actually not individual hyphae that you're looking at, what it isn't really.

It's structures called cords that are made from, these are tubular structures that are formed from hundreds or thousands of hyphae that are bundled together. And those are really important in moving water from one place to another. They're these, yeah, water pipes. No, they're not. Anyway, they're called cords. There's another form called a rhizomorph that's a root-like structure that's formed from hundreds or thousands of hyphae. And those are also visible without a microscope.

But the individual hyphae, I mean, they're what? A 10th of the width of a human hair. So you need a microscope to see them. - And in a mycelial body, if you were to look at its sort of structure under a microscope, from what I understand, it looks like a three-dimensional web or a net. Like when I envision the many visualizations I've seen of what the interconnection of the human brain looks like of all these different nodes and these patterns and so on and so forth.

Like a mycelial body, if you were to see all its connections, it would look something like that, is that correct? The sort of highly complex three-dimensional interlinking web? - Absolutely. Although, and in fact, the number of filaments is not, let's think about this. I did a calculation once where I was looking at a very, very rich mycelium in a very productive grassland trying to calculate just how many hyphae might be present.

This actually wasn't my original work, but I did some of these back of the envelope calculations. And you can come up with these figures for the individual number of filaments being not dissimilar from the number of nerve cells in the human brain. I mean, we're on the order of billions of these filaments. What's different though about the brain, I mean, you mentioned that it is the mycelium, these connections, the individual hyphae, these filaments, they do indeed interconnect.

But when we think about the synaptic connections in our brains, the way that an individual nerve cell can branch into hundreds, thousands of these dendrites, they're called, then interact with other nerve cells through synaptic connections, that capacity for networking is vastly beyond anything that a mushroom mycelium can do.

But in terms of the number of cells and the density of those cells, yeah, it's not, we're dealing with a similar order of magnitude to kind of massive, massive, what elongated filamentous cells that we'll find in a brain. - Can you tell me a little bit more about hyphae and their role in the organism? I mean, in particular, like what makes them unique, say from the roots of plants? - That's a great question, because indeed, there are actually one thing is that fungal hyphae are tip growing.

The only way, predominantly, they grow, they extend at their tips and that's how they elongate. Now we're talking about growth on the order of what, a few millimeters a day. This isn't a very, very fast rate of growth. It's actually a pretty good clip for a microorganism. But there's other kinds of tip growing cells that we find like pollen tubes that are involved in sexual reproduction that deliver the sperm cells in implant reproduction.

And there's other kinds of cells that also grow at their tips. And so what makes a fungal hyphae a unique structure is the fact that it combines that tip growth with feeding. And so a pollen tube isn't really doing that. A pollen tube is growing inside a plant flower. It's delivering the male gametes, the sperm cells, to the eggs in the flower. But it's not really a feeding structure. Fungal hyphae are feeding structures. They're penetrating solid materials.

Well, they could be our own tissues and I write about a lot about that in the new book. But it could be wood. We talked about rolling over a log. Well, they're feeding on plant debris in that case. But yes, that combination of tip growth and feeding. And the feeding happens in the following way that these hyphae, these filaments, they release enzymes from the tips of the cells. Those enzymes break down macromolecules, so complex carbohydrates, but also proteins and fat molecules.

And the action of those enzymes solubilizes, releases smaller molecules from those polymers, those larger molecules. And then the fungus feeds on them. So it's feeding on sugars, for example, that fuel its metabolism. So it's doing this continuously. It's releasing enzymes, breaking down large molecules in its surroundings, absorbing low-moleculoid things like sugars and fatty acids and amino acids. And it's using these to actually fuel its metabolism.

So there are some other organisms, some of the microorganisms that work in a similar fashion. Water molds do this. There it's a kind of protest. But that really is the best shot I've got there at explaining what makes a fungal hyphae different from most other things. But it's got some, in terms of the cellular makeup of that structure, there's some very distinctive features of the structure of a hyphae. And also the things pressurized.

Many years ago now, that was one of the research areas that I explored was actually measuring the pressure inside fungal cells. It was just, for me at least, it was fantastically interesting that we can actually measure the pressure of those cells directly by puncturing them with a little, with a glass micropipette, a little tube and actually measuring the pressure inside those cells.

And they're pressurized to a few atmospheres of pressure, you know, four, five, six atmospheres of pressure, which means if a fungal hyphae is damaged while it's growing, it'll explode. Although it also possesses what I suppose a simple form of clotting mechanism that actually prevents the cell from hemorrhaging, from the whole mycelium from hemorrhaging. But yeah, it's under pressure and that's interesting. You know, the individual cells in our bodies are not under pressure.

We have blood pressure, but these pressures in fungal hyphae are much higher than those, you know, 10 times higher than human blood pressure. And so, you know, they spurt their contents if they're damaged. What else about hyphae? The other thing is that they branch highly. Pollen tubes don't do that, other tip growing cells. So as a hyphae extends, it forms branches and the branch is branched. And that's how you get this very complex, geometrically complex three-dimensional network of filaments.

And that's the feeding phase of the fungus. - And root structures of plants, although they on a macroscopic level have a similar kind of like winding networking thing, they're serving an entirely different function to the organism. From what I understand, the mycelium, that is the organism and the mushroom is the fruiting body where with trees, you know, the tree is the whole organism. The root is a part of its feeding, but it's not the whole organism. - That's a good observation.

So that actually distinguishes the fungi from plants or the following distinguishes the fungi from the plants is that fungi are absorbing food from their surroundings. Plants are making their own food, right? They use the energy, solar energy to manufacture, well, to fix carbon dioxide and manufacture manufacture sugars and other other macro molecules. So plants make their own food. Fungi steal from plants and actually other fungi and then also from us and other organisms on which they grow.

The root system of plants is absorbing water and minerals, but it's not, I wouldn't, you know, if we're using feeding in terms of actually a carbon source, something we can burn, that comes from the leaves and the photosynthetic activity of the plant. Whereas the fungi have to absorb all of their food through there. You know, I mean, we refer to it sometimes as or people have referred to it sometimes as a fungal equivalent of a root system. Well, not so much.

It is in terms, as you said, of its sort of some of its three dimensional structure that through forming very fine filaments, it's able to explore a very large volume. That's exactly what fungi are doing when they penetrate wood, for example. - And so this is one of the ways from what I understand that the fungi kingdom is closer to the animal kingdom than the animal kingdom is to the plant kingdom. Is that correct?

Like for example, plants make their own food, animals and fungi consume food from their environment. And there's other similarities between animals and fungi compared to animals and plants too, is that right? - Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of them, but one of them, the one that interests me a lot is some was actually identified sort of in the pre-molecular age of biology because now we can compare the genomes of fungi and animals and plants and everything else.

And we can actually calculate their degree of similarity and evolutionary relatedness. But I think this was really interesting observation that was made first in the 1980s, was that the only organisms that produce a cell with a flagellum, a cellular tail that I'm doing all these hand movements in this, this interview today, but there aren't many things you can do as a fungus. Anyway, a tail that undulates, that vibrates and actually pushes the cell through fluid.

So animal sperm cells do this, but also the cells of aquatic fungi called chytrids. And there's actually other kinds of fungi that live in aquatic environments. They produce swimming cells too, that swim in exactly the same way with a tail that pushes the cell through the water. There's nothing else like that in nature. So me with my obsession with pond water, I see cells that are swimming around all the time using cilia or flagella. These are the terms that we use.

Then they're arranged in a fundamentally different fashion where they're not acting as an outboard motor that pushes the cell through the water. They may be pulling the cell through water. They're working in different ways, but that particular arrangement of the single flagellum on a swimming cell is something that we only find in animals and fungi. So that in itself is a structural characteristic that unites these organisms.

On this very smart, although tremendously annoying scientist pointed this out in the 1980s, he just recognized that. I thought that was a really brilliant insight. Before we'd done the genetic analysis that showed the similarity between fungi and animals. Yeah, so fungi and animals exist in what we call a supergroup. It's something larger than a kingdom. So we might regard the animals as a kingdom, kingdom animalia and the fungi as their own kingdom.

But they exist in this super grouping where they're united and separated from many other forms of life. - So that if we go back evolutionarily, there was a common progenitor between fungi and animals. - There must have been, yeah. I mean, that's evident from the structure that I mentioned, other kinds of cellular structures that are in common between fungi and animals, and also this profound genetic similarity.

I mean, it's profound, and yet, we're talking about separation that occurred a billion years ago. So there's a lot of evolutionary history through which we've been separated, but nevertheless our base, there we are with far more like fungi than we're like brown algae kelps, for example, or plants or diatoms or dinoflagellates, all of these other beautiful forms of eukaryote life. Yeah, we're united with the fungi, which is interesting. - Interesting. - It's inspiring.

- I have a less scientific reason to state the same in my own life, but we can leave that aside. - Well, we can go to that. The other thing is though too, is that this has been discussed for years, is that when we develop very serious fungal infections, they're very difficult to treat. So the most serious fungal infections, usually we develop those because our immune systems are compromised for one reason or another, and we could discuss that.

But it's because of the profound similarities between the biochemistry of the fungi and us, it's difficult to develop a drug that kills these fungi without damaging our tissues. And that's the reason why most of the most powerful antifungal agents are very toxic. We have to take them in quite high doses to deal with a fungal infection, and they lead to kidney and liver damage and so forth. So even there, we're seeing traces of our evolutionary heritage and what? Close affinity to the fungi.

- I didn't have this question in mind, but I'm gonna ask it now. I mean, medicine is in the title of your new book. From what I understand, I'm hearing you talk about the similarity between animal cells and fungi cells and this complexity with treating invasive or damaging fungal infections. And there's also, from what I understand, historically traditionally has been used, but increasingly more science around the consumption of particular fungi for health benefits.

What the industry is calling so-called functional mushrooms, where the consumption of beta-glucans and other acids and other components of different fungi have these incredible effects on our immune system. What's your read on that? Is there something around the similarities between the fungi organism and the animal organism that enables this kind of sharing of, yeah, I'll let you take from there.

- I don't know whether we, so you've actually hit upon one of my areas, probably my main claim to infamy and hate mail is that I've written a good deal actually about medicinal mushrooms. And often when I'm interviewed actually, this is the primary topic of discussion, but I'm very skeptical about the health claims that are made for the majority of medicinal mushroom products.

We might talk about psilocybin, I think that's in a different category of potentially very, very useful compounds within that category. But a lot of the claims that are made indeed for beta-glucans and so forth, I believe have been hyped into absurdity. I talk about this in the book, but if anybody cares to search, search up a little, look around on the internet, you'll find articles and papers that I've written on this topic.

I'm actually optimistic about the future of fungal medicine, but I'm requiring a lot higher level of proof before. I think I would recommend most medicinal mushroom products. There's a great deal of wishful thinking that goes on. - Unfortunately, there's also a great deal of sort of deceptive marketing that goes on as well. I mean, that's implicated in anything that poses any benefit to anyone ever. Deceptive marketing will come in to try to profit off at that. - That's true. That's true.

- I see it explicitly quite often with mushroom-based products. - Yeah, yeah. And so as a scientist, I want to see the evidence and these are unregulated products. Buying these products, you don't really know what you're consuming. The consumer has few, if any, rights in this area of alternative medicine. And any attorneys that are interested in hiring me as an expert witness, I'd be delighted to engage in, delighted to consult with you on some of the avenues for litigation within this industry.

- Again, that's another topic. - And a hot topic in Canada, but let's leave that aside. It is fully far beyond the scope of what I did have you on here for, but I do appreciate hearing that sort of like vignette into your perspective. So in the paper that got me excited about having you on the show, you proposed that fungi may have consciousness and hyphae in particular may themselves be conscious if I read that right.

And I want to get your perspective on how and why, but first maybe we can, I could get some working definitions for conscious and consciousness because I could say that and I could say that word and some people could be thinking about like, oh yeah, the awareness that emerges as a consequence of brain functioning as a random happenstance of material evolution and other people could hear that and think like, oh yeah, the divine force of creativity that moves through our life

and manifest in human awareness, same word, right? So maybe you could give us the definitions you're working with when you use terms like conscious and consciousness. - Everything hinges on language in this discussion.

Rather than defining consciousness, I think what I point to or I do point to the fact that it's almost impossible to define consciousness in a way that it becomes a privileged characteristic of organisms like ourselves that nobody would, we know we're cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.

It's impossible to when we look at consciousness in nature to actually find any sharp dividing line between organisms like ourselves that we would regard as conscious on those that we regard as unconscious or lacking consciousness. So if you go back to, if we go back in our time machine to the 17th century, we were regarded, the philosophers including Descartes, we were regarded as the only conscious organisms.

Other organisms, well in his view other organisms were almost beneath contempt when it came to their sensitivity and their capacity for suffering, going back to that earlier theme. But we have a much more sophisticated view, animal behaviorists, ethologists have a much more sophisticated view of animal behavior now. And we see versions of consciousness as we look, I'm sort of going back here, not looking at organisms that maybe most people would regard as simpler.

So we indeed, many ethologists would say that all brained animals are consciousness. I think that I'm part of a movement and there's many other philosophers and psychologists and some biologists that have looked at this issue of consciousness and said that, hey, I got a thumb up again. Maybe it's my, I'm doing a Trump there, aren't I? I got to know that anti-diluvian thumbs up, right? Nobody's thumbs up, come on, 21st century. Now I'm getting distracted.

Somebody on the internet is agreeing with me or the internet. - Okay, fun, tunnel vision, tunnel vision. - Being with me, thank you. - Thank you so much. If we look back in, if we look at cells, for example, individual cells, we find perhaps versions of consciousness there. We can certainly find, what? Versions of consciousness in non-brained animals. So we could talk about that.

And I'm taking it back and looking at individual, the individual cells of fungi and saying, based upon this more liberal definition of consciousness, which really is difficult to separate from what? Sensitivity, sensitivity to one's surroundings, responsiveness to one's surroundings. We see this throughout nature.

And Arthur Reber is the psychologist that's responsible for the original idea here, which is that consciousness was really birthed with the origin of life, with the origin of the first cells. Because we see sensitivity there. There's a good reason for this, because a lack of sensitivity is, you know, you're not gonna survive without being sensitive to your surroundings. But it's rather than trying to define consciousness.

It's recognizing that it's very, very difficult to sort of set sort of a threshold for consciousness in nature. I've become really interested in, well, I should get a model of that too, I could bring it over. Become very interested in Hydra or Hydras. These are very simple animals that are related to jellyfish and they live in freshwater ponds all over the globe.

They're actually, I find them surprisingly difficult to collect, but that's one of the reasons I spend so much of my time splashing around in ponds. But they're absolutely beautiful organisms. They're like jellyfish with the hand movement. Again, they've got tentacles that spring up or that they extend from their tubular bodies. They're about a millimeter or so in length. They don't have brains, but they got a nervous system.

They're extremely responsive to their environment, you know, hot and cold temperatures, the presence of other organisms. There's even, there have even been reports that they suffer from depression, which is just mind boggling. I found this absolutely fascinating.

When you take Hydras, sometimes when they're taken from a natural setting, a pond, and they're put in the lab in a glass container, there's a phenomenon that was described in the 1970s or '80s, I think, first by a couple of Indian scientists where the Hydras actually retract their tentacles. They quit feeding. And in some cases, they'll even starve themselves to death.

If you transport them, if you transfer them to a container that has other Hydras that are already habituated to life in the lab, they almost immediately extend their tentacles and start feeding. I mean, when I read these papers, I was so struck by the similarities there between the behavior of these non-brained animals and what happens to, I don't know whether you've ever seen the movie "Blackfish," but about killer whales that are brought into captivity in marine parks.

And they have to be force-fed when they're collected from when they're taken from the wild and put in essentially fish tanks. They have to be force-fed. They'll starve themselves to death. They're depressed. They've got huge brains. Probably they're much smarter than us. Hydras don't have brains and they do the same thing. So there's a very long-winded explanation here of how I think we find evidence of consciousness right through nature, including the fungi.

And that's what this essay that was published in the journal "Fungal Biology," that was its claim then, that we find perhaps simple versions of what? Even a mind in the fungi. And that doesn't mean that they're thinking and feeling like us, but I see this throughout nature and the fungi are part of this too. So I'm sorry for that very long-winded explanation. - No, no, no, it was good. - It doesn't provide a definition of consciousness.

You know, we might swear consciousness, you've got to be able to look at a sense, sense and smile. So a hydra and a fungus aren't going to do that. - Well, we can't send a fungus to the Turing test. - The hydra will respond to the sunrise though. I mean, absolutely, they'll move position in there. If you keep them in a little aquarium, they'll move towards the light. I mean, they're responsive.

I mean, they're whole- - So if I get this right, you're saying that we can see something's consciousness being expressed, not trying to define what it is, but we can see it being expressed through its sensitivity and responsiveness to its environment. Is that right? Or what did I get wrong there? - I think that's, yes, that's, I would agree with that statement that it is evident in that response.

I mean, if you, I mentioned, didn't I, measuring pressure from fungal hyphae from these individual cells, putting a needle into the cell, the cell doesn't react to that passively. It actually responds to that in a very negative fashion by actually trying to seal the, I mean, it's being punctured.

And there's a response on, you can see this actually under the microscope, that the cell is actually responding by sending down these little membrane-bound, we call them vesicles, membrane-bound structures to the site of injury. You see this in individual cells. If you take an individual cell, like take a blood sample and actually look at some of the white blood cells that actually crawl around in an amoeboid fashion, you'll see that same kind of sensitivity in those cells.

If you start poking them with a needle or expose them to some noxious chemicals. And so I think we see the origins of sensitivity and consciousness in the simplest unit of biology, which is indeed a single cell. The syncs, yeah, right. So organisms of cells, one or more cells. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listeners via patreon.com/jameswjesso.

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I just felt like that was kind of a shitty move on their end. So I don't recommend they deserve your 30% every month on whatever pledge you offer. And that's it, thank you. And now back to the interview. You said you're a part of, I think you said something around the phrase, something like a wave or a movement of scientists embracing this sort of different view on unconsciousness.

Are there by your observation, any implicit biases in, well, to say science writ large, but whatever domain of science you're most familiar with as a member of the community of scientists, any of these implicit biases that you feel being about consciousness or intelligence that obscure our ability to recognize these things in non-human or non-animal organisms? - Great question.

So you absolutely among other scientists, this is, but politically too, I mean, that actually does go back in full circle. We're brilliant, too brilliant on your part. If you stimulated these questions, we were talking about, I mentioned sort of industrial agriculture, didn't I? When we started chatting on animal suffering, yeah, there's a huge investment and among scientists in terms of vivisection, animal experimentation.

We have a huge investment in actually not regarding other animals as what, as sentient. That because we do this for commercial and for medical purposes, we're torturing animals and then producing meat on an industrial scale. Yeah, if we recognized how smart the rest of nature really is, nothing like as smart as us, of course. We're clearly the pinnacle of evolution. We're God's singular creation.

So the other religious viewpoint here too, again, positioning ourselves as separate from the rest of nature. And it does go back to sort of what you were saying about your more optimistic view of the future, our future, is the crucial part of recognizing that we're not above the rest of nature, that we're part of it. Such a simple message.

It was something that, I mean, it never even occurred to me that we were really particularly brilliant when I was a child, but obviously others are much smarter than me and they saw this, but yeah, what? I've forgotten what the question is.

I'm just, I'm thinking back, I'm British in origin and I went to a church of England school as a kid through, you know, before I went to college and yeah, I never took any of the religious messages or the messages about the superiority of humans that we want, certainly the superiority of the English, in particular, white Anglo-Saxon males. I mean, I always, you know, these were maybe strange metaphors, but I never took them seriously as truths.

Yeah, I've always- - Certainly they were, ended up being deadly serious with respect to impact. Yeah. - Absolutely. And that's what we've done. I mean, I live close to Cincinnati and we've got a fantastic zoo, the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens. And I get very frustrated that when I see parents and they have some captive primates there, including great apes and the way that, I mean, I see children sort of making your parents, making mirth of the activities of these primates.

And I'm thinking, well, does it, is it really not much of a leap of imagination to see ourselves when you look into the eyes of some, you know, poor captive animal? - If anything, I say it requires quite a great, quite a great leap of assumption and arrogance to not see ourselves in the eyes of these animals. - Absolutely. I agree with that completely. Arrogance is a great word. Yeah. Solipsism, egotism, narcissism. Yeah, absolutely.

- I mean, not necessarily intentional on behalf of most of us that do it. Of course, you know, we're brought up to believe that as much as we, you know, might otherwise intend or desire to be different. We don't always know that there's another way of looking at the world because the confinement of the paradigms that we have been brought up in. - No, I find that really, I find it surprising. I'm, I think about, turn off my, excuse me, turn the ringer off my phone there.

You know, I think about what Shakespearean, Shakespearean England and the way that bear baiting and badger baiting and other kinds of, you know, ritualistic maltreatment killings of smart animals. You know, this was entertainment. Of course, you go back to Rome. Or I just don't know why it's taken us so long to begin to recognize this. Why were we ever in such denial?

- From an evolutionary standpoint, you know, the whatever 10,000 years, you know, you just mentioned Rome, that was only what, 2,000 years ago? It's 3,000, something to this effect? - Yeah, higher, yeah. - So like, I mean, from a geological evolutionary timeframe, I mean, it hasn't taken us that long. - You're right. You're right. We got there and that's the great irony. We finally figure things out as we exit, we bring things out.

I think a lot about, I'm not gonna solve this, but nobody else has. They're thinking about the origin of life, but there's some really interesting science going on in studies on life's origins. And when I read these papers, I think, well, could they be edging closer to the truth? And there is the irony of finally understanding what happened on this 4.6 billion year old planet? How did life get a start here?

You know, just as we're actually destroying the human form of life that gets to actually figure this out. Anyway. - Well, if Dr. Bruce Dahmer's theories are similar, had to do with the emergence of these multicellular organisms out of the drying, hydrating, and redrying over and over again of like small ponds or like bodies of water.

I mean, maybe we're coming into a knowledge about the beginning as we start to cycle back as a larger organism of planet earth to a drying out of the flourishing of life before the next rehydrating to the next iteration of life on this planet.

I mean, again, I personally, you know, I would like to see some incredibly positive changes in humanity's relationship to the living world such that we could make a, we could turn this bus, you know, like we could take a wider angle towards the cliff than the 90 degree, like the straight ahead one that we got now. So I would like to see that. And also, I mean, even if we don't, life continues, will continue. - Yeah. - So let's get back to Fonjay. - Yeah, get back to Fonjay.

So you've given us a sense of, you know, consciousness is in every living creature, cellular, all the way up to multicellular and so forth, some expression of some kind of consciousness. And in, and it has to do with sensitivity and responsiveness to environment, expressed through various means of behavior, which my sort of inter injection here so that it requires some form of perception. And you present in this paper, that I don't remember the name of now, what was the name?

Oh, Hypho and mycelial consciousness. I think that's what it was called. You propose Fonjay Hyphae in particular as being conscious. Can you give us some examples of what it is about Hyphae, I hope I'm saying that right, behavior that you observe as being sort of expressions of consciousness behaviors? - Yeah, sure.

I mean, because they're, I mean, they're not mobile cells in the sense that they move from one place to another like an amoeba, but they, as we discussed a few minutes ago, they extended their tips and they produced these larger colonies or mycelia, they extended their tips and branch.

But as they're doing that, they're acting in an exquisitely sensitive fashion to their surroundings, such that if the tip of a Hyphae, if the tip of one of these cells actually touches a solid, it will make a decision about whether to grow above it or around it or to keep pushing and try and actually penetrate that structure. But you can see this cellular sensitivity in the responsiveness of those individual Hyphae tips as they're exploring their environment.

They're also, their sensitivity is also expressed at the biochemical level in terms of the changes in the material, the enzymes that they're releasing as they're growing on different food sources, different materials. And so it really is this, and also the way then the three dimensional structure of the mycelium emerges.

And each time this is a totally unique structure because of the decision making that's actually gone on at those Hyphae tips and about the determination of the timing when they branch. And then when those branches form other branches. And so that's the, its consciousness in those terms, in terms of the sensitivity of the cell to its surroundings and its interactions with its surroundings.

And we see this in all cells, but in the paper that I wrote then, I was looking at the, what, the fungal manifestation of this kind of sensitivity. There are also examples of learning within mycelia. For example, experiments in which fungi given different food sources treated in different ways. And we see some evidence of sort of these conditioned responses to their environment. So again, they're not growing in a, they are growing in a mindless fashion.

They don't have a mind in the form of a brain as fabulous as ours. But nevertheless, they're engaging in individual behavior. They're responding to their environment with this exquisite level of sensitivity that we can observe in the lab. That's the basic argument.

- So what I hear you describing is these individual Hyphae, they have, as a part of this larger organism, they have the ability to perceive something, make a decision around sort of like making a decision to change and alter its behavior. And even in the midst that is the possibility of learning and any kind of learning would suggest that there's a kind of memory that's unfolding.

And yet earlier you described, if the spores did find their way onto the space shuttle out, freeze dried and off riding with Cassini or whatever it is, offwards beyond the soul system, but you described it as not being with intent. So what is it like if these creatures, this organism has a kind of consciousness that includes perception and decisive response that alters behavior in a context of learning and even memory, why is it that intent can't be a part of that equation?

- I suppose that gets to the problem with intent in that do we even have intent? So decision-making appears, there are experiments that shows this with us, that we actually, our brain is simplifying it, that we're making decisions long before we're conscious of doing so. That if you're, I don't know, you're running through the woods and the water in the creek has risen a bit and you can see some rocks that you can jump on.

Subconsciously, you're actually working out where you, which rock you're gonna jump on first and second before you're conscious of saying, yeah, I'm gonna go to that big one there and then this little one and then I'm gonna see if I can get to that log. That I suppose it gets to the idea that, we don't have free will either, it's just that we've got a very complicated nervous systems that give us the impression of free will. Now we've gone to free will, where do we start with this?

- Well, I mean, I guess like I, when I hear intent, I don't think free will. They're closely related, but intent infers that there's a conscious sort of inclination in what I'm gonna do. So like my perception and decisive response is led by some sort of particular direction or goal or desire. Like I have intent towards that thing. Now, whether or not my intent, that desire, those goals, its outcome and all of that is led by free will, to me, that's a separate discussion. - Right, right, right.

So take me back to the question that we're-- - So the question was, if these fungi, the hyphae have this ability for perception, decisive response, learning memory, altering behavior based on environmental context, et cetera, why is it that you would perceive as though they don't have intent? Now, maybe a remapping of what intent means changes, you know, I would say there, but yeah, do you still feel like they don't have capacity for intent with this new definition?

- No, I think, well, I would suggest that it's a matter of scale, you know, that we've got our information processing system is a lot more complicated than a mycelium, but nevertheless, we're, what? Do we have intent any more than a fungal mycelium? Perhaps not. When we make decisions, I mean fungal hyphae and fungal mycelium, lots of branch hyphae, they go through a decision-making process.

We'll do that too, and we would have poured ourselves, you know, greater intelligence than a fungal mycelium when we decide what to eat for dinner or what to pick out in a grocery store, but in the end, it's all the same stuff. Just lots more of it. I'm not sure that's a good answer, 'cause I'm not sure what question I'm opposing myself. - No, this is good.

I always appreciate when the interviews get to the edge of what is knowable, like when we get to a place where the sort of delta of what's possible starts to-- - But fundamentally, fundamentally, everything has to come down to the cellular activity in our brains, and those mechanisms are very, very similar. They're the same as those, really, on a basic level.

They're the same as those on a biochemical level to what we see in a fungal mycelium, in lots of fungal hyphae, taking in information from our surroundings, and that decision-making is there, and we could regard the fungal mycelium as more robotic, but I think we are at base. It's just that we're drawing on a lot of information and biases and a much greater capacity for memory than a fungal mycelium, but at base, at a cellular level, the difference is probably not, or definitely not.

I mean, otherwise you've gotta posit some kind of quasi off-board memory. Anyway, that's starting to sound a bit star-trucky for me, but yeah, yeah. - And you can't see it, but I literally have 25 Star Trek books on my bookshelf right here, so the listeners of the show might almost roll their eyes at how often Star Trek comes up, so you-- - Yeah, no, I've got a great love for the original William Shatner Star Trek, which was a huge part of my childhood growing up in Britain.

- Also an incredible work of social commentary at the time. Anyone who's like, "Star Trek is too woke," right now, they're like, "Well, obviously you weren't alive when it came out because it was pretty, pardon me, but pretty fucking woke back then too." But let's leave that aside. - We got into consciousness in one episode, didn't we, with something about a giant amoeba or something. Anyway, one of the original Star Trek episodes.

- Is this the one where it was like the silicone-based life form that was killing miners, and then they found out that the reason it was doing that is because of what they thought was a crystal they were mining was actually the eggs of this organism, and they had to reconsider the whole mining operation because they were basically murdering this other life form that was conscious. Anyways, Spock mind-mells with it. - It was a lot to that original.

There was a lot that went in there, a lot of philosophical work that went into the original Star Trek, absolutely. And I mean, considering the conundrum of how our beliefs or assumptions about another organism's level of awareness, consciousness, sentience influences our behavior or treatment of that organism and/or its environment, that's obviously incredibly relevant to the conversation we're having here.

But I wanna shift again back on track with the hyphae, and for hyphae, what I understand from what you're saying here is that it's as though every individual piece, every individual hyphae is on its own accord making decisions, it's perceiving and making decisions about what it's going to do.

And I assume that's what informs the quote I'm about to read from your paper, Hyphae and Mycelial Consciousness, where you ask, quote, "If individual hyphae are conscious, "what happens when an interconnected colony or mycelium "of thousands of these cells form in the soil? "Is a mycelium more than a sum of its parts? "Can it be regarded as an integrated conscious entity?" End quote.

So I bring that up 'cause I wanna ask you, where is your thinking presently on these questions you pose in the paper? Like, do you have any answers for those questions at this time?

- So certainly if what I was doing there, looking at and saying there in that quote, then looking at the sensitivity of individual cells, and then when we begin to think about a larger mycelium, when we've talked about an interconnected mycelium, maybe with as many individual threads as a human brain, the decision-making that's occurring at the individual hyphal tips at some point is actually influenced by what's going on elsewhere in the colony.

So perhaps another part of the colony is running out of food. And indeed we see examples of this where the mycelium decides to actually shuttle resources for that area of itself, of the larger organism that's actually starving. And then in other cases, actually just shutting down parts of the mycelium. So I think these are all, what? I mean, they're really, most of them are philosophical rather than scientific questions, frankly. The devil is in the details of our use of language.

But I think given that it's exceedingly difficult to actually come up with the definition of consciousness that separates brain animals from other organisms, I'm just asking for fungi to be a part of this inquiry, this area of research, that just when we do experiments on fungi to actually look at their decision-making activities and there's a, why do we treat them as more robotic, for example, than a brain animal? I don't think there's any philosophical reason for doing so.

- I mean, one thing I often think about is that, what animals do we find ourselves most aligned with? There are animals that we tend to look at and we are more likely to care about that animal's welfare. Those are ones that, especially mammals in particular, but there are ones that seem to be able to trigger our sort of like social connection, social engagement system.

So dogs, they literally evolve, we co-evolved with dogs in order for them to like, co-evolve slash selectively bred, et cetera, for them to be more expressive of their feelings such that we can empathize with them better. We can see on their face, we can relate with their feelings, same with higher primates.

And I mean, there's all sorts of things that happen with other animals, but then when we look at sort of feedstock animals, there's a sort of extra leap required to recognize them as animals with feelings and so forth. And I think sometimes pigs actually trigger us and we're less likely to care about them because we see too much of ourselves in their behavior.

But the point is, is like the further we get away from mammals and particularly mammals that express their limbic expressions, manifest as facial expressions that we can look at and be sort of have a mirror neurons, social engagement system triggered, the more of a sort of, the more of a leap it takes for us to recognize that being as having a legitimate interior world that requires our empathy, that warrants our empathy, our sympathy, our compassion, et cetera.

So once we get out of the realm of animals, we get into the realm of plants and the realm of fungi, we're so many steps away that, they just fall into the category of, like it's an objects that serve my needs and desires or impede them rather than as living entities that require as much consideration as I would a dog. Yeah. - Right. No, I agree with that. I mean, I even, I spent too much time perhaps looking at samples of pond water.

For example, I'm involved in a new project and looking at the amazing sensitivity of amoebas and ciliates and so forth and pond water and the, I don't know, entering the arena of the psychically unwell, I start to see the sensitivity of these single celled organisms and the way that they're trying to escape from the, the water's beginning to dry under the cover slip and the way that they're trying to escape from this and think that every part of their being,

their make of their biology is structured toward survival. And is there, there's a growing sense of guilt when I flush them down the sink, these are not brained anything, but it's what, it's just so beautiful. I'm sounding, I'm gonna go into some religious arena in later life that I would have avoided when I was young.

- You would be joining once again, a movement of scientists that historically have gone so deep into science, so deep into their observations that they eventually found God in the amoeba or the mathematical equation or the fungi, right? - That's right, that's right, I've met, yeah, yeah. I have discussions with an older scientist that works on the origin of life and is a great thinker and he's, he struggles with understanding obviously 'cause we don't know how life evolved.

He struggles sort of against going into a more religious viewpoint that there are unknown things in this area of it that would solve some of the questions that he poses in this area of inquiry, but it's not really scientific anymore and so he struggles with that and hey, maybe that's my fight too, yeah.

- Well, I suppose once, maybe once the requirements for funding, once the requirements for funding are no longer relevant, it's time to start stepping into the religious realm in your outgoing work as a scientist or something or like just gets, I don't know, so tenured that you could basically say almost anything you want. So all right, now that we're on the sort of the hyphy tip of the hyphy tip is now pushing up against the solid mass that is the potential of religion.

Do we push through or do we reallocate our resources elsewhere? I'm gonna ask you this following question and I'm gonna read it right off as I wrote it 'cause I feel like it's a bigger question so it might be hard for me to hold together. Might be hard to hear now that if I read it out loud for the first time, so I'll have to forgive me for that too. - All right, good for 'em.

So this is a podcast that explores topics that at least loosely are connected to psychedelic medicine culture or research.

And given the growing body of both empirical and anecdotal evidence for profound, even so-called mystical type experiences under the influence of psilocybin, which is a fungi metabolite, beyond the material alone, as so as beyond sort of what's happening in the brain, can you speculate on what, if any, involvement a so-called fungal mind might play in what we humans encounter under the effects of psilocybin? - I don't, I think you'd need to explain that a little more fully.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking there. Yeah, I mean, great, slightly disorienting was a bit of the goal, but I'll bring it in slightly. 'Cause the reason I'm asking is because, so we'll say fungi have some kind of mind, okay? - Okay. - And this fungi has some kind of mind, and part of what any organism does is it is a response to its environment, to its survival needs and so on and so forth.

And so any particular metabolite, an ant creature has from particular fungi, I assume is not accidental. It plays some sort of role in the mind of this fungi. I'm not saying that psilocybin facilitates its consciousness or anything. I just mean as a metabolite of fungi, it is an expression of this organism that is fungi, this mushroom species, right? I know it's in a cicada fungi and some other stuff, but simplifying it down to just mushrooms.

So my question is, we consume this metabolite, this fungi metabolite, and we have these kinds of experiences. And there's a very material way to describe this, which is, well, it just so happens that this metabolite is close enough to this brain chemical that we have, such that it creates these changes in the neural firing function that creates these changes in our subjective experience. Check mark, done.

But beyond that expression, that sort of description alone, do you feel like there's any involvement there between any relationship between this fungal mind of this organism that produced this metabolite and what humans encounter when they're under the effects, the subjective effects of this metabolite?

- I guess if I understand your question, that my answer would be no, in the sense that fungi really don't have any, the only relationship that fungi have formed with us as a species comes through one way or another. It comes through what comes through the intimate interactions between fungi that live on the human body, on our skin. And this is a lot of what I write about in the new book, the fungi that grow in our guts, the fungi that grow throughout the body.

Fungi play a far more profound role in human health than we've recognized until quite recently, and that's because of scientific advances. We can really look at the fungi. We can look at fungal genetics in a way that we couldn't, the genetics of these organisms in a way that we couldn't previously. But having said that, compounds like psilocybin, or the pathways that produce these compounds evolved long, long before humans were around.

And so I regard interactions between our, not that I've had them personally, we can talk about that, but our profound interactions that we experience is that we have after consuming psilocybin, converted into silosine, and then interacts with our serotonin receptors, some of them. I think it's just part of the noise of nature. However, those compounds did evolve, I would hazard a guess.

They evolved with, I'm being very anthropomorphic here, the specific intent to interact with animal nervous systems, because we share, and our nervous systems share commonalities that we see with, commonalities with nervous systems throughout the animal kingdom. And so if psilocybin, or the production of psilocybin evolved, for example, as an anti-feedent, I'm not putting forth that idea now, something that changed the behavior of animals that were damaging these fruit bodies.

The fact that they have a profound effect upon our experience, our cognitive experience, I think is, my guess is, my feeling is this is just part of the noise of nature. We've arrived too recently to have affected the biochemical evolution of these fungi, of the mushroom-forming fungi, and then also you mentioned these psychoactive compounds produced in the fungi that infect cicadas and so forth.

So I think actually we see a lot of this in terms of the, also the poisons that fungi produce, that they evolved for their effect upon, anti-feedent effects upon invertebrates, principally insects. I think that that's probably why pathways for the production of psilocybin and other compounds that are actually a psychoactive when they're introduced into our nervous systems. Yeah, they were there for the insects, not for us.

And that's not obviously a universally held opinion, but that's my gut instinct, is that we're actually being too narcissistic if we think that these ancient pathways evolved in a fashion to, in any sense, deliberately affect human behavior. I think they're made for insects. That's my guess. But there are other, you'll find other professional mycologists that will disagree with that point of view and think that they really did evolve for some other purpose. But that's kind of where I'm at.

- I suppose like. - Incidentally, where I'm sitting now, I could have gotten fired years ago. The desk drawer over here, I had a student that I loved, a young man. And when he graduated, he said, "I've got a gift for you, Professor Muddy." And he brought me a baggie of Cubensis, I suppose. He said, "We could take these together with these woods behind the building where I work." We got on very well, but that was a bridge too far.

And I kept them in that drawer for a very long time before I woke up one night and thought, oh crap, in this conservative environment that covers my salary and benefits, I better lose those before they find them. There was actually a professor that got into a lot of trouble that had other psychoactive materials that were part of his research actually. But in any case, so where am I going? So I've actually never had that experience.

And part of the reason for that is at least, especially when I was younger, my dreams were so rich and hallucinatory and lucid that I always thought if I introduced any further stimulant to that, that I'd be entering the arena of the unwell. So I've never done it. - Well, I'll tell you why. - But honestly, my dreams have been so crazy, especially when I was younger, less so now. - Well, I'll tell you. - So my experience is limited, that's my short answer. - So I'm gonna say a couple of things.

One, obviously you may have noticed a lack of letters at the end of my name. So my level of authority here is minimal. With respect to the sort of the things I'm about to say, which is that, well, can you hear that over the? - Yes, it's like a. - Oh yeah, it just hit big out there, okay. - Yeah, I heard that. - Anyway, so. - The gods are telling us something here. I don't know why, but. - Time to pay attention.

That past mid 30s or so, if one has a propensity towards having a psychotic episode as triggered by the consumption of a substance, if you make it out of your 30s without that, the likelihood of it being triggered in later life is quite minimal. - Yeah. - Not zero, but quite minimal. So something to hang on.

And the other thing is, from the perspective of the waters and how turbulent they can or cannot be in certain domains of science, leaning into the sort of insecticide perspective is definitely much less turbulent because it doesn't require the sort of like, I heard you not wanting to put on the pedestal humans, but for myself, I'm reluctant to take humans out of the equation as being worthy of consideration. And so when I think to myself, is it possible to experience the mind of a fungi?

And my sense is that the consumption of psilocybin is about as close probably as we will get directly anyways, outside of maybe other possible circumstances that I couldn't really speak to and don't really know, because there's something to me, there's something to that. If we consider, if we don't eliminate, don't put humans on a pedestal, but don't eliminate humans from the equation.

If humans say are the planets sense organs for beauty, maybe they're also the planets sense organs for suffering. I think it was, oh, Tic Nhat Hanh, who said something like, encouraging us to learn how to hear the cry of the earth within us, like to hear the pain of the earth as it cries through us, maybe we could be sense organs for its pain.

And when I think about outside of what I assume to be the consequence of horizontal gene transfer that got psilocybin into this cicada infecting fungi, we look at where these mushrooms generally were, while they were most flush in areas where significant ecological destruction just took place, even still in Mexico, it's like in the cracks of the mudslides and so on and so forth. And even now, where do we see them?

We see them on the edges of grasslands where the ground's been all churned up, the grass-loving fungi, or in the growing in the dung of cows that are consuming the grass, cows obviously at this point being the consequence of agriculture and the discretion wrought onto the earth to forward our sort of animal agriculture, animal husbandry.

And on the edges of settlements where the wild sort of intersects with humanity, where the churning up and the damage is there, but it hasn't been completely tamped out, then we see the budding of the settlement ciada and the cyanescence and the rest.

And it makes me wonder, if we think about the larger ecology of the world as having its own kind of mind and everything playing its kind of part, is there something about why the effects of psilocybin seem to directly impact the only creatures that we know of capable of perceiving beauty and to position ourselves as though we could experience the pain of the larger organism that is the planet?

Could there be some sort of evolutionary role that they're playing in trying to help the, as Dennis McKenna says, like help wake up the monkeys or something to this effect? I know I'm going way out there. I don't expect you to get on board with me here, but I think about this quite a lot. I don't wanna go, I try to wager on ambivalence, but yeah. - I think you raised some really provocative ideas.

I think that for, I think perhaps I've gained a great sense of peace from the idea that we're not what it's all about. That we're late comers to the show. We've created immense damage to the biosphere, obviously. I don't know, I get some sense of, it sounds like a masochism, doesn't it? Some sense of elevation from sort of just recognizing our limitations and this brief candle, what was that? It was Shakespeare, but Dawkins used that, didn't he? We're here for a while, we flicker.

It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. What's that? Yeah. So, yeah. - Yeah, I can appreciate that. - He's on. - See, the piece for me is, here's the metaphor, anthropomorphic. I grew up in a family. At some point I decided to be a man and I grew up in a family, at some point I decided I was better than that family. And I move away and I do a bunch of terribly selfish, horrible things and I hurt a lot of people.

And some were along, including my family, and some were along the way I grew up and I realized, oh my God, what the fuck was I thinking? Like, I'm not better than anyone. Why did I make myself so alone? Why did I hurt all these beings that are my family? And then I turned back towards that family and the family says, you're still family. Come on back. That's the piece for me, is that that could still be possible.

- Yeah. I didn't have a falling out with my family like that, but I have perhaps an equally profound experience at the age of, I'm 62 now, so 60 years old, close to my 60th birthday. I got an email from a guy in Scotland and he said, I hope this email doesn't upset you. I'm almost certain that I'm your full blood biological brother. - Whoa. - I had no idea at all. And so over the last two years, I just met him and his wife in Scotland for the third time we've met in three years.

And we're discovering a whole side to our lives that we never knew existed. So I've got a new family now in the UK, to which I'm related genetically. I was adopted as was he. And we managed to get through 60 years without ever encountering each other. - So that is so cool. It's so wild. - For this, it's really wild. And our biological parents have both passed away a long time ago, but their story is pretty amazing. That doesn't relate to anything you were saying, does it?

But there you go, I'm getting it off. You get to talk about your experience of finding your way back to your family. I suppose I'm still in that. I'm in that process now in a way that I didn't imagine possible a few years ago. So there you go. - I mean, I described it more like a metaphor for humanity's departure from the sort of like the family of life on the planet. And also when I turned about 20, I was like, fuck y'all, I'm out travel. I do what I want. I'm my own person.

I know better than everyone. And then at some point somewhere along the lines, I was like, oh, actually, that might've been a little youthful hubrants. And I mean, the hurting people, we all end up hurting people. I was trying to directly relate it to sort of as a metaphor for humanity and our relationship with the living world. But it's still a thing that I share because it feels personally relevant. And that's cool that you shared what you did there.

But let's bring it all to a final close here. - Yeah. - And the final close is effectively, this has been great, thank you. For people who are listening, how do they maybe hold up your book again there, "Mushrooms, Mold and Medicine." Tell them how they can get more information about it, where they could buy it, as well as where they might follow your work if you have social media, anything like that. - Yeah, if you look, I have a website. So it's themycologist.com, one word.

You'll find a lot of stuff there and what? Googling my full name, you'll find presentations and so forth. But I'm anti-diluvian in my lack of engagement with social media. I don't engage in anything, Facebook, Instagram, and so forth. Much to my detriment, I'm sure, but that's partly how I maintain my psychic peace. - Your sanity maybe. - My sanity, yeah. Yeah, such as it is, yeah. - Well, I will be sure to include links to all of that in the show notes to this episode at jameswbuJesso.com.

Dr. Nicholas Money, thank you again so much for coming on the show today. - Thank you for an totally absorbing conversation. I'm looking at the time now, we've been talking for three days or something like that. (laughing) It's fantastic. - 100 years last night. - Anyway, have a good rest of your week. Thank you for inviting me. - And cut. Okay, so that's all for this episode. Thank you for tuning in. If you liked Nicholas, please do check out his work. Check out Mushrooms, Molds, and Medicine.

Check out the Mycologist, his blog, and check out his paper, Hyphal and Mycelial Consciousness, The Concept of the Fungal Mine. I've made sure to put links to all of that in the show notes to this episode at jameswJesso.com. And if you like what I do, if you're interested in what I do, if you're not already subscribed to the podcast, please do so, be it on your favorite podcatcher or on YouTube.

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And until the next episode, take care, stay curious.