Merlin Sheldrake

25:19And fungi tend to be networks. Yeah, fungi tend to be networks. I mean, about 10 % of fungal wildeists, and these don't form the same kind of network, they behave a little bit more akin to bacteria in the sense that they divide by budding into. Are there different kinds of yeast? Lots of different kinds of yeast. Yeah, so the yeast that you'd get in a commercial bear, or wine, or a commercial, baker's yeast, will be a handful of different strains of bruise or baker's yeast, but there are lots and lots of different strains of this yeast around and there are lots of different yeast that people have used for a very long time to ferment.

25:56So when you make a sourdough bread, for example, you leave the flour in the water out in the air, all sorts of yeast are going to come and land in there. It's not just going to be one kind of yeast and that can often explain why you get these more complex flavours because it's just more, it's the work of a greater number, a greater diversity of East. East just means single self -fungus.

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27:49So if you were to use the same recipe and make sourdough bread in different places in the world, you would get very different results just based on what's in the air. In principle, yeah, so if you harvest the yeast in the air in different parts of the world using the same flower, then you'll have a different culture and that culture will produce a different bread. Me and my brother tried an experiment with this once, actually, we were, he'd gotten a very old, a sourdough starter, he'd be given to him by a friend who'd got it from an Italian friend who comes from a long line of bakers. So he was very proud of this, my brother was very proud of this.

28:24Starter and would make delicious bread with it. And one year we went around as we do in the summers to the west coast of Canada, and we were then traveling down through California. But before we left, Cosmo divided this starter. He left half of it at home in a jar, and we took half of it at the jar with us on the trip. In case he wanted to make sourdough on the trip. We didn't actually end up making any sourdough on the trip, but we carried it around. And whenever we went, we'd have to feed it. So we were knocking on the door of the bankers and came some flour to feed our sourdough starter. And by the time he got home, it had been fed different water and different flour and had been exposed to different microbes.

28:57So then we baked two loaves of bread, one with the start of the head on the trip. And one with the start of the head come with us on the trip. It took a while to make them and we drank a couple of bottles of wine while they were cooking and we couldn't actually remember which was which, although they did seem to taste different. Bit of an anticlimactic story that there's no hard finding. But I think it's an important part of thinking about fermentation is that these cultures are usually in exchange with their environments. You know, that an example of how life is always in this kind of fluid exchange with it's around it, it's just as we are.

29:29Tell me about your experiments with beer. Well, I've always loved fermenting since I was at university and I started making beers from old recipes because I became interested in all these kinds of brewing that people have done but that today are unavailable unless you make them yourself. So, grew it ails, for example, using herbs that are not hops, using bogmato or yarrow or meads with various herbal components. And the flavors are just so astonishing, there's such a wide variety of flavors and also the effects of these drinks. You know, it's not just alcohol, it effects you in different ways.

30:15So, some needs would bring on a very kind of amused hilarious state. In some of the gruey ails were kind of like wild. People would feel quite energetic and boisterous. Some of them would be more like a kind of golden heavyness, a very peaceful kind of state. So I became aware of how the realm of alcoholic drinks that we're familiar with today is just a very small part of what is possible. And indeed what humans have explored historically. If we look at like, Bach flower remedies or homeopathic remedies, they often come in a base of alcohol. And it's not about the alcohol. The alcohol is just the base that holds the herb or the tincture over time.

30:57So the idea that beer at one time was used as a way to preserve these different medicinal herbs is very interesting idea. Yeah. And one worth re -examining. For sure. So it got dumbed down in the process somehow to be about the alcohol when the sound is about. Yeah, I think that's true. It's about so much more than the alcohol. And this is something you find in, say in the ancient Greek myth, for example, I was always, whenever I'd be studying the Odyssey at school, I was always wondering how kind of smart -ass question you're asked. You're like, well, look, if wine, I've been taught in my biology class that wine can't get stronger than about 13%.

31:35So how can they give this super strong wine that will knock out at cyclops if wine can't get beyond their strengths? And the answer is that there is so much more to wine than the alcohol. There was all sorts of herbal admixtures potentially quite psychoactive and that strong wine would mean a strong mind -altering brew. Not about the alcohol. Yeah, the alcohol would be some kind of potentiating force or a preservative or would just be part of it. The Greeks didn't actually have a word for alcohol as a separate principle. It's been such a long part of human experience with brewing that alcohol has one aspect of a transformation process, which has often been thought of as divine.

32:19Before we knew about microbes in the late 19th century, it's very recent really that this transformation process was thought of as a process of the incoming spirit into matter Because this great juice turns into wine and drink the wine and you change. So the Greeks had Dionysus, but most cultures have had gods and goddesses of fermentation. But maybe that's closer to reality, maybe in the same way that looking at the alcohol piece was the dumbing down, that looking at the whole process, we're thinking of it in a small way now when there's something much greater going on. I think so. I think there's a lot of that that we can reclaim quite readily.

32:55by, you know, there's a growing community of wonderful, imaginative, brewers, working with all sorts of different plants and thinking more on these lines in the way that they brew, and the way that they serve the brewers. You know, talk about the brewers, and I have a friend called Heather Wolf, who's an amazing brewers, and she works in this way. And really, sort of, recacalyzing brewing and drinking of these brewers. do any of these brewers make them available publicly? Or are they more private? Some do, so there are interesting commercial brewers, but I think a lot happens in private as well, because selling alcohol officially requires there's a few hoops that one has to jump through.

33:37I think the best brewers probably will always be the stuff that people keep for themselves at home, even if you go to a great vineyard in France, I'm sure that the most exciting stuff is not available to buy. described to me what doing science looks like into today's world. Well, I think it depends what kind of scientist you are, you know, because we forget the sciences are a really diverse collection of practices and values, norms and techniques and specialisms and skill sets such that a professor of quantum physics might be a layperson with regard to the expert in a study of fossilized fishes.

34:16So I think it's with one of the exciting things about the sciences, but also, I think, one of the illusions perhaps that is propagated as science is one monolithic thing. If you're an astronomer or a cosmologist, you spend a lot of time looking, observing it, what's happening with new telescopes and whatever other means you have, but you can't do experiments in cosmic space. You have to take what you're given. It's more observational. Whereas if you work in other parts of physics or in the biological sciences, as I do, one's able to intervene in the world and to run experiments that you can replicate where you know you do something to this and you don't do something to this and you compare the result.

34:57So that's the more experimental kind of science. In the life sciences there's also lots of kinds of observational sciences that one do too, you know, if you're going to go somewhere and document the fungi of a certain region. You're going there to observe what's going on, that you're not going there to intervene and start to move things around. So I think these are two, the observation experiment, two fundamental strands that braid through different scientific practices. But to me, a lot of the way I do working with the soil is going around collecting soil in, might be in very beautiful places, might be very challenging places, might be in the rain, might be in the sun, but scraping soil into small tubes.

35:37in the field. And then there's a lot of work, you know, then extracting DNA from those soils and then analyzing the datasets. And so basically, it depends what kind of scientist one is being. Maybe I'm asking, do you always start with the theory? Or can you just start with observation? So, one of the conventional ways that people talk about science proceeding is from hypothesis. you have some kind of conception, something you want to test about the world. And so you set up a hypothesis and then you test that with experiments. And that's indeed one way to go about things. But I think a lot of the scientists does start with observation.

36:18You're why do people want to be a scientist in the first place? It's usually because they're curious about something. And they're usually curious because they've spent time observing. So I think a lot of good science starts with observation. observation. And for me, a big part of it is you're thinking about what it's like to be that maybe an organism, maybe a whatever entity I'm interested in. It's like, what is it like to be you? I mean, what's it like to do the things you do and be affected by the things you're affected by? So I think I personally find observation to be, let's say, prior to hypothesis.

36:54But there's obviously a dance between the two. Can you walk me through an example of something specific that you studied and the process from the beginning to what was revealed? Yes. I was working in Panama for a time. I was interested in mycorrhizal fungal association. So these are fungi that live in and around plant roots and they make plant life possible in all sorts of ways. So I was studying these fungi and these soils in different experimental plots in the jungle that had been, some had been treated with fertilizers of phosphorous, for example, some with nitrogen, some had been left unpouched.

37:35And I was taking samples and I was looking at roots from these different plots. And when I was out one time, I noticed that a certain type of plant didn't occur in some of the plots. So as a type of plant, strange plant has no green and no leaves. It doesn't photosynthesize. So it doesn't eat light and carbon dioxide in the way that most plants do. So it's very charismatic, but very small, has a bright blue flower, and it lives by drawing its energy and nutrients from other green plants through a shared fungal network and into itself. And I always just, you know, I'd seen they kind of sort of wink at you from the floor, and I'd always had a soft spot for them.

38:12But I noticed they weren't any in the phosphorus plots, and that led me down a whole rabbit hole of why aren't they in the phosphorus plots and what's going on at the ground that might prevent them from making a life there, and what could their absence tell me about the biggest stories that are going on in the soil. So in that case, it started from a chance observation, which I then followed up because I just cared about these plants. Did you cover to realize why? Yes, so it was because the fungal communities that they depend on to make their life possible. the addition of these nutrients changes the exchange that happens between green plants and their fungal partners.

38:56The plants are feeding the fungi with sugars and fats and the fungi are feeding the plants with a lot of the time with phosphorus. And if they suddenly give them a lot of phosphorus, the plant changes the kind of trait that it makes with these fungi because it doesn't need the fungi in the same way that it did before. So the life of these micro -risal fungal organisms starts to change. And so the life of the creatures that are attached to this micro -risal fungal networks also starts to change. And it seemed that the trade that was being maintained between the green plants and the micro -risal fungi had shifted such that the fungi would no longer sustain the non -photosynthetic plants.

39:33So it's like a second -order effect that was an unexpected second -order effect. An unexpected, such a second -order effect that for me was interesting because I was fascinated by the way that these fungal networks can connect more than one plant together underground. So these plants could act like periscopes in a way into the micro -wizel underground. What's interesting to me about it is it's an example of a man -made intervention having the second order of effects that are unexpected and met something for us to be wary of. Totally. And of course, I describe it as this observational thing, which it was, but it was taking place within the bigger context of a long, on -running experiment where people were adding these things to the forest.

40:19So, yeah, I think it shows how, you know, we're always living within this cycle of experiment and observation and intervention and response.

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42:09I was having a conversation the other day where the person was speaking to they referred to the gut as another brain and I said like a second brain and they said no really like a first brain and the brain is really the second brain. How does that strike you as it relates to the fungi world? Well, I like to think about, you know, we have brains that we're proud of and they do a lot for us. But our brains are sort of an extra concentrated part of a larger nervous system that's distributed through our whole body. You know, a brain without a nervous system throughout a body would be useless. It would make no sense for that to evolve.

42:47So I like to think about fungal networks as distributed, communicative networks, that they are the network and the body at the same time, they're not networks within the body. Do they have the gut reaction that we think of in humans? Well, they're constantly tasting their surroundings, right? It's like the area all around the fungal network is its gut because it's digesting outside its body. They're releasing enzymes that digest their surroundings and then they absorb the products of those digestion. So rather than animals put food in their bodies on the whole, but fungi put their bodies in the food.

43:24And it means that this whole relationship between, what's the gut, where's the site of digestion is inverted? Because they're living in their food, they're burrowing into their food, and they're digesting it outside their bodies. And then absorb it. Just write that in more detail. I want to really picture that. Yeah, so say you're a wood rotting fungus, words, your food, your growing in these networks, these my studio networks. You'd find a block of wood and you'd start burrowing into that block of wood. You start producing enzymes which can break down the structure of wood into simpler chemical units and you start burrowing into the wood and branching so you can touch more of the wood because the more you can touch the more you can digest and more of that you can digest and more you can consume.

44:08So you're branching and burrowing your way all the while producing digestive enzymes which are breaking down your surroundings. And so you're living within your food but then when the food when you've exhausted parts of it then you no longer need to be there so you'd withdraw parts of yourself from that bit of the word and explore you know looking for other bits of wood but that you're always inside whatever you're eating that's That's how the fundamental relationship between them and their food plays out. And we're so different, we make these, we have bodies which are sensualised and neatly packaged up.

44:46Then we have a suitcase in which our brains live and we can move around quite neatly because of that. I imagine how different our lives would be if we took off our skin, took off our bones and grew our blood vessels and neurons into the world around us, stitched ourselves into into place. Coming back your book. It's called, Intangled Life, and Fungi are the main players in the book. But such is Fungi's life that you can't think, you'll talk about Fungi for long before bumping into a whole other cast of characters. So Fungi are a beautiful way into thinking about shimmering networks of interconnectivity that are living worlds.

45:29They've done a harrow way, the great thinker, talks about the relationship being the smallest unit of biological analysis. You know, we have all these organisms that live in and on us, bacteria, big bacteria can have small bacteria living within them. You know, larger viruses can have smaller viruses living within them. It's relationship all the way down. And yet, you forget this often, living our lives as centralized animals, with all sorts of stories about into biturality and autonomy and independence. At least in modern age, these narratives have a lot of power. But fungi leaders into more ecological world views of there being nothing but relationship, an interrelationship.

46:12And this is a very old view for humans. You know, for much of human history and traditional knowledge systems, this has been the way that you understand the living world is made up of intimate reciprocal dependencies. So I think fungi leaders into remembering something we might have forgotten And in the book, that's something which I try to explore, bringing together the work of all sorts of wonderful thinkers and scientists who have been working over the last decades and centuries and trying to tell a story about these remarkable organisms and and how they weave the world together. So it's really about the interconnectedness of life on the planet.

46:48Yeah, essentially and from as much as possible from a fungal point of view. It's the organizing principle of the book, but it talks to the bigger case. Yeah, tell me about LSD and creativity. So this was a study I talk about this in my book as I'm working in the department in plant sciences in Cambridge. And there was in the canteen, there was a poster on the wall and the poster said, do you have a meaningful problem that needs solving? And I was like, yes, say that, you certainly do lots. And I said, if you do then call this number. So I was like, okay, I'll call that number. I can't wait, whatever, see what happens.

47:26So I called this number. And it turned out that they were recruiting scientists to participate in a study into the effects of LSD on the problem -solving ability of scientists. And I thought it sounded like a brave study. It's a difficult thing to assess. Anyway, I signed up and they showed up in a hospital, a clinical trials unit of a hospital. They'd been quite sensitive. There were searches doing this study, They knew about Psychedelics and they knew that the hospital room is not the nicest place to be tripping. And so they'd hang hangs on the wall and they had mood lights and nice music playing.

48:04And then Narciss administered the LSD and I was at this wonderful time lying on this bed and going into these astonishing experiences. And at some point there was an assistant with me and she said, And maybe it's now time to start thinking about your work related problem. And I was like, oh, my work related problem. It all becomes quite funny because there's a lot of life can become very amusing in these psychedelic states. And the thing that was most amusing about it was when they came in with questionnaires. Because like this thing, we were talking about, it's difficult to assess objectively people's subjective experience.

48:42My imagination was essentially the subject of this experience. but the only way that they could access to my imagination was by asking me what I was imagining. And then I was observing myself, but I was also under the influence of myself. So there's all these lovely tangles. But the funniest thing is the questionnaire would say something like on the scale of one to ten, how do you rate your experience of infinity? And I just collapsed into paralytic laughter. And every time they had to answer this questionnaire several times over the course of the study and every time it just got funnier and funnier.

49:14You could feel the scientific procedure groaning and to the weight of what seemed to be an impossible path. But it was a brave and an infestinating study because it was looking into creativity and imagination and asking questions about how we can approach that scientifically. And I think it was very difficult for them to unify the people's different experiences. The experience of the mathematician next door would have been very different from my experience as a soil and fungal biologists, the kinds of problems that we were resting with, we've had different kinds of problems. How do you compare those across a big sample?

49:47So I'm not sure what the enduring take away messages were from this. Where did you take away from it? I took away a feeling that my mind was very much larger than I normally recognize that I spend time in this small part of my mind, usually comparatively small part of my mind, but they were vast, wild reaches of my mind in which I didn't normally spend so much time. And when in this state, the familiar could become unfamiliar again. Which sounds like a very productive place to be. For me, yes. I find that some of the most helpful ideas that I have are when the familiar has become unfamiliar, because you tend to see it more for what it is rather than see what you expect to find.

50:35Yes, and you're not taking the obvious for granted. Yeah, exactly. And it's taking for granted that I think locks us up imaginatively a lot at the time. So I find it very helpful to be in that state of where they're familiar, even like a light switch on the wall or a table or a chair can be quite funny, because you recognize how excited it is that we have this kind of furniture or tool in our lives. And so I find it very helpful to go into those places and very helpful for problem solving. And even if I don't solve the problem in any fixed way, just to re -enter the question with a sense of some childlike openness.

51:12Are you a different person after than you were before the experiment? I don't think I'm a different person before or after. I had had psychedelic experiences before this. So if it was the only psychedelic experience in my life, then it maybe it would be a bit more like that. But it wasn't. So it was less of a watershed than that. have you ever had a psychedelic experience and not related to any type of plant or chemical? Well, I think of dreams. Dreaming is a kind of psychedelic experience. You know, I mean, it's in a sense that, you know, psychedelic means mind manifesting. And when one dreams, one's mind is manifesting in all sorts of wild and fluid ways.

51:52So that's probably the closest I've had that has not been chemically enthused. A lot of people have very spontaneous and mystical experiences, you know, sometimes through trauma, traumatic accidents and sometimes it just happened. I don't think I've never had a kind of spontaneous just bolt -house of the blue psychedelic like experience. I had bolts as the blues a powerful experience, it's a great new monocity in meaning, but I think dreaming is the closest. The shamans who work with Ayahuasca explained that the way that the plant and the vine were put together to create the ayahuasca out of the thousands of plants available, the way that they knew to combine this two particular plants was the plants told them to do it.

52:40Have you ever had any experience with communicating with plants or fungi? Well, I've had a sense of porosity, of openness to plants and to fungi where I'm feeling affected by a monsoon deep level. I haven't had an experience where a plant or a fungus has sort of arisen in my consciousness and spoken to me in English or any other sort of human language but my feelings and my states and the kind of way my mind is exploring and imagining change for sure and have changed quite dramatically in different places with different plants or funky and I guess that's some kind of way to think about a communication going on.

53:24I'm sure that I've been altered chemically by being just surrounded by plants or being around in the soil after it's rained and the smells that come out of the soil. We were being affected all the time and sometimes we noticed, sometimes we don't. But I never had a sense that this very plant here is now talking to me in that way. It's been more subtle than that, I think. Do you ever speak to them or shall I say do you ever try to communicate with them? Well, I've actually been playing with this exercise recently with my wife is a poet Aaron Robbins song and We've been working on this exercise as a kind of game where So much of the way that we talk about the world is talking about the world and making The entities around us in the world into it's but what happens when we address the world directly?

54:14what happens when you turn the it into a U. And when you do that, you end up actually, it's happened for a very long time in all sorts of human cultures. It's usually called prayer, speaking directly to the world rather than about the world, or speaking to beings rather than about those beings. And so the exercise that we've been practicing is a kind of writing. It's a poetic exercise of just writing, addressing some kind of entity you're being around to your rock, a stone of cloud, a sun of moon, a tree, a twig, a leaf, frog, and just addressing them directly. And it's not necessarily that we're thinking that the frog will understand our human language, but it's more to try and find a way to behave as if humans aren't the only organisms worth addressing.

54:58And in doing so, to find a way into a very large body of practices that we might call the practices of prayer. Yeah, and it's recognising a greater community around us that's always around us. Yeah, beautiful. And by turning the it into a you, you're making it a center of experience. You're granting it the possibility that it has an experience, you know, and that's just seems like good manners. Absolutely.

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56:45How do you think ingesting mushrooms might change you all the different ways? Even psychedelic mushrooms? No. All the different mushrooms, all the different ways. How is eating a mushroom different than eating something else? Well, it would depend on the mushroom. If you're eating something with a very strong flavour, like a truffle, then there's a whole sensory, gastronomic experience that's going on and a strong flavour, right? Takes you into some kind of experiential world that might affect you, and it might not. You know, some people are more sensitive than others, are more open to being affected in that way.

57:22So some mushrooms might work on us through flavour. Some mushrooms might work on us through producing compounds that are medicinal for our bodies that might help us to overcome disease or to strengthen our immune systems. Some mushrooms, like the psychedelic ones, can deepen and expand our experience of the universe and they might change the way that we think and feel in imagine. Any mushroom you're eating, of course, is being digested and metabolized in is somehow part of these cycles of life that we are talking about and some of that matter will go on to become the matter that makes up your own body.

58:02And I think there's something just more subtle as well that when you come into contact with this intimate context, very intimate eating something is very intimate and that contact, that proximity is a way to be closer to this kingdom of life. I mean, a kind of nebulous way, but just a closer intimacy. When I was writing my book, I tried to eat as many mushrooms as I can, because they mushroom tea every day, different kinds of mushrooms for the fact that I'm just lunch and then it's just to maintain that contact with these organisms that I was trying so hard to understand. Do you have these ancient images of priests who had headgear that looked like mushroom -shaped headgear?

58:43Do we know anything about that? But well, there's statues of mushroom -shaped statues and Central American Guatamada in Mexico, and which are strong evidence together with the documented practices of psychogenic mushroom consumption in those parts of the world that the people have been using and venerating these psilocybin -producing mushrooms there for a long time. There are a mushroom -like imagery that, yeah, as you say, sort of beings with mushroom -shaped headdresses or mushrooms coming out of there, It looks like mushrooms coming out of their hands in other parts of the world as well. Of course, it's very difficult to know whether they are mushrooms or not, and if they were mushrooms, what that might mean.

59:26But humans have been interacting with psychedelic, psychoactive compounds for an unknowably long time, and on the whole where that happens, these compounds are folded into the spiritual worlds of those humans and cultures. So it may well be that this imagery is evidence of some kind of veneration of mushrooms, whether psychedelic or otherwise. And it might be that they just happen to look like mushrooms. Tell me about the difference between hallucinogenic mushrooms and chemical hallucinogens. So hallucinogenic mushrooms produce use a suite of chemicals, some of which are hallucinogenic and some of which also modulate your experience but in less dramatically hallucinogenic ways.

1:00:12The psilocybin is the main one in psychedelic mushrooms but you can synthesize psilocybin chemically, produce it chemically in a lab with nothing to do with a mushroom and it can elicit an analogous experience. But it would probably feel different to you because your experience is being listed by a single chemical rather than a cocktail. That chemical is acting on its own rather than being surrounded by its chemical arts and uncles and fathers and sisters. Which may have some balancing or some purpose. Quite so. It may not, may not understand. Quite so. Yeah. How does algae relate to fungus? So algae are photosynthetic organisms, plants, land plants descend from algae, seabed to algae, on the whole algae of photosynthetic organisms that live in water or in very wet places.

1:01:01And fungi and algae have a very long tangled relationship together. Actually, the relationship is responsible for some of the biggest transformations in the history of life. And one being the movement of the ancestors of plants from water onto the land. about 500 million years ago or so, as algae were photosynthesizing and doing their thing in fresh waters, in lakes and rivers and swamps. And they started to wash up onto the soggy shores of these bodies of water, and over time started to make a life in the air on the land. The land presents all sorts of challenges for the land at this time was a pretty barren place, extreme place.

1:01:44And it seems that they were only able to move on to the land because they partnered with with fungi and these fungi could definitely explore the soil and are metabolically ingenious and can scavenge for nutrients in the ways that these algae couldn't. But the algae can do the eating of the light and carbon dioxide that the fungus can't. So together they could form a new kind of organism that could that could live in this radically new place, often very inhospitable place. And this is the basis of plant life on land, which went on to transform biological possibility. And the fungi behaved as plants roots, plant for tens of millions of years before plants could evolve their own roots.

1:02:24These fungal associations are a more fundamental part of planthood than many things that we think of as very planty like leaves or fruit or flowers or wood. So fungi and algae have, they keep bumping into each other over the history of life in interesting new ways. Likens are another example. Likens are organisms that arise from the coming together of bacteria, algae, fungi and various different combinations. And they're very important organisms ecologically because they can live in hospitable places like bare rock, you know, on the scorched surface of death, and there is another example of this coming together of these organisms, and which illustrates a more general theme about the history of life, which is that organisms come together when together they can achieve something they couldn't achieve by themselves.

1:03:16And collaboration is just so fundamental to life and how life proceeds and in opening up new biological possibilities. And when a stranger to this idea is human, right, collaboration is also not some utopian concept. It's collaborations always some kind of alloy of cooperation, conflict. It can look very different, but it can be very fluid combination of those dynamics. When you use the example of the mushroom being a fruit on the plant, does that imply that the net work is the plant and is the net work a singular plant? So, yeah, so in that analogy, so say the apple and the apple tree. The apple tree is analogous to the mycelial network and the apple is analogous to the mushroom.

1:04:05But what is an individual network? Is it kind of difficult question to... Is it the apple tree or the apple orchard? Oh yeah, oh yeah, I see. Well, it could be either actually. So you could have, say we grew at fungus, we got a fungus, we inoculated into some thing like to eat like grain. The fungus grows through the grain and produces and mushrooms. That fungal network growing in the grain is one big connected network and that would be like the apple tree. But if we then chopped that in half and chopped it into lots of different pieces and had it growing in these different shrubs, each producing mushrooms, then we'd have lots of apple trees.

1:04:46But if we put those in a place where they could grow together, they could reform their connection. So they knew to have the different trees in an orchard becoming connected somehow into one larger tree. Would you still think of it once they reconnected? Would you think of them as one larger thing? Or would you think of them as their individuals? This is a very good question. So say you get a fungal network growing on a dish and so you cut that network in half. Yes. Then we let those two halves live their lives for, you know, some time. Yes. We bring them back together. They refuse. Yes. to now their one continuous network again.

1:05:23So I think we probably think, well, that's now the... That's not one. Yeah, but they were to another one. But we could cut that into 5 ,000 pieces and then do the same. And we might not even put those 5 ,000 pieces back together again, in which case we might think of it as 5 ,000 different fungal individuals, but they could also become ones. So fungal play games with individuality and a very confusing way for us, Namos. Is there any difference if you have one and he split it into two, would there be any difference in what happens if there were two versus one? It depends. I mean, you could do a bit like what me and Cosmic Dib would just sourdough starters.

1:06:01You could take one and you could put it in a different place and give it different types of food to eat and expose it to radically different environmental circumstances and other time it would adapt to the circumstances and change and express itself quite differently. And then if you brought them back together again, you probably made quite a big difference between how they were expressing themselves. But could they could probably very well fuse again and come back together into one network? So yeah again, it's just The individuality it doesn't doesn't really work so well as a comment. It's not a neat concept for fun I don't think it's a neat concept for us either but we like to think it is

1:06:39How often are you surprised by what you find out in your work? Oh a lot. It was just why I keep doing it If it wasn't surprising, I don't think I'd stay interested. I tend to be interested in what I find surprising. But I think we can find surprise in so many. It's surprise ability feels almost like a state of mind, like a mood. If I'm feeling grouchy, if I've lost my sense of humour, it might be more difficult to surprise me, you know. In your exploration, where do you feel like you are on your path? Are you at the very beginning? Are you somewhere in the middle? Are you towards the end? And I don't know if the path is like a straight path, I think a bit more like some big branching structure.

1:07:19And so I'm really not sure how far along I would think of myself as being. I have a general sense that like the adventures are only just beginning. Yes. When I like that feeling. So maybe I'm sort of beginning. But I would hope the adventures would always feel like they're only just beginning. So absolutely. I love to ask you a bit about, and that sound and vibration and imagination and how you see these things working together, because as someone who's fascinated by sound, then I love music and I play music, and it's a part of my life. And one of the reasons why music's so powerful on it to me is because it's a process in time.

1:07:57You can't have music at a single instant. And the living world and the universe is also a process in time. We sometimes like to think of it as being made up of stuff, But that stuff is really just matter in process. And the matter itself, when you boil it down, it's just energy bound within the fields. There's no sort of hard, billiard ball stuff. Anyway, everything is a process in time. The stuff that makes you up today is different from the stuff that made you up a few years ago. So the life in the university processes. And so music feels like it illustrates something very fundamental about how the existence proceeds.

1:08:32And I wonder how you relate to music on this level of experiencing as a process in time. I definitely feel like it happens in an instant and when you capture it and then you can experience it again, it's exciting because if you don't capture it, even if you've noted it, it seems to never be the same. every time you play the same piece, it's not the same piece. There's so much micro -rhythmic changes that really change what it is. The subtleties are unbelievable, and I've been finding more and more that when we record things, if you do anything to improve them, it's like a house of cards. It's very, very delicate and very dangerous.

1:09:24As soon as there's this moment that feels a certain way, which we don't know why, we don't know how it works. But when you recognize it, the whole mission becomes preserving that. And whatever we do around it, we want to protect this moment that seems like we'll never get back again. If a group of musicians are playing together and it starts really coming together in magical way, there's always this anxiety of I hope I can make it to the end of the piece, because you can't get back. It's also a femoral. I mean, I think about this a lot with the jazz for me as a very fundamental metaphor, I think about the living world as in terms of jazz and improvisation and all organisms that improvise their way through time, you know, and have always done.

1:10:12And that all that means is that within the constraints that you're bounded within and between the possibility available to one and whatever creature one happens to be, one is improvising and improvising together with other organisms that are going about their life in this way. Sometimes that flourishes and generates some wild creation that only exists then. Absolutely. Improvisation is always based on what everyone else is doing. Improvisation is not about your part. It's about where you fit into this bigger movement that's happening in real time and you don't really know where it's going. So it's dangerous to participate.

1:10:58It's very interesting with really great musicians. They can't play a piece more than a couple of times because as soon as it goes from that delicate terrifying improvisation of moving into spaces that you don't want to step on anyone else, you can't really see them as soon as it becomes rote and you know your part. It's much less interesting. For the audience to hear when all the musicians are listening to each other, really paying attention to see if there's a place that they can participate. It's like potential. I think we're hearing the potential before there's a sound, there's a feeling. I know that with certain recordings I can put on a recording and just hearing the first note of recording, I can know, oh, I'm going to like this.

1:11:44Or not, the intention in the first note can determine the whole feeling of the piece. Virginia Woolf has a great line which she talks about a wave in the mind, which arises long before there are words to fit it. Beautiful. And I feel like that applies to so much more than just writing. It sounds like what you were, what you were saying, this listening to the space and then enjoying it as it happens. But one of my favorite albums is Ningers, improvising by himself on the piano. That's the album. And in that space, he is. I know he's so low there in some way. Maybe it's him in the piano. Maybe it's his right hand, it's left hand.

1:12:21But he's not in the group there. So the way that he's listening is perhaps different from what you were describing in that more group oriented improvisation. He's just improvising with time and everything he's ever heard. whatever's happening with him that day, and if you'd play the same types of pieces on another day, they would probably sound really different. Yeah. I think the right improvisation, it feels like it's too often it gets locked up within just a musical sphere. Of course, we're improvising right now, and people say, well, you know, I can't improvise. And it's, well, you're improvising every day.

1:13:01Like, we all are. And which is one of the reasons why I find musical could a powerful metaphor to think about how we live. But in your work in producing, do you feel that an improvisational spirit in your practice? Always. I always come in, basically, as a blank slate, and definitely produces anxiety, always at the beginning of every project, because I have no idea it could be anything. And until it shows itself for what it wants to be or what its potential is, it's scary. Once we can see what it can be, then it's less scary because we at least have a potential root, and that's fine, and it may end up being that root or take a different root, and that's okay too, but when it's the blank page, it's much more terrifying.

1:13:52Yeah, there's a lot. Also because there's an expectation that's gonna be good. I have the expectation myself, but as long as I know that it's not done until it's good, and I'm patient. At some point it'll be good. Don't really read your story. Yeah. I find that, yeah, I find that terror with a blank page when writing. And one of the ways I get over it is free writing. Just keep writing. If you're writing with a pen, you just don't take your pen off the paper if you're doing a computer. Don't stop writing. It doesn't have to make sense. You're making a mess. And out of this, you know, you put on a timer, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour.

1:14:21And then you have this kind of, this kind of unformed material from which, a kind of compost, you know, from which so much can grow. So it feels like such a good ant to that. So that's it. We do it all the time with singers who don't yet have a song or lyrics to listen to music and sing along, but with nonsense words. Just any words that come to your mind fill it up with words. Then we listen back and usually they're just like phrases here and there like a puzzle and you can see, oh, this sentence sounds good in this spot and that's going to stay and this other one's going to stay and this other one's going to stay.

1:14:55Now, so it's really writing from the unconscious instead of from the conscious mind. It's like the unconscious starts the process and then the conscious mind finishes the puzzle, but often doesn't understand what the puzzle is. It's just based on if this and this and this, then these are the pieces that fit together with it. But I don't know what it means, so we don't have to know what it means. Yeah, I find that too at the writing when I was I was starting on my book. I had this conscious mind. I called it my inner editor. And it made it very difficult to write anything because they'd spend a whole day wrestling with a paragraph.

1:15:33The end of the day I decided I didn't want the paragraph after all. And it was just so demoralizing day after day. And the end I was like, I got to get rid of my inner editor. I'm going to send my inner editor. Go ahead like a lot. And I need, in my life, I'm going to send them on holiday. For a year. Yes. And so I just wrote very quickly in messity for a whole year. Would you show it to anybody? Beautiful. And then brought my editor back when there was something to edit. And I just learnt a lot in that process. How did you know to do that? Works, I spent so many days being demoralized. It was a crisis.

1:16:04It was like, I've got to change what I'm doing because this is not working. You know, the amount of work that I'm producing that I think is meaningful is so small compared to the amount of time I'm spending banging my head against this wall. So yeah, it was prompted by a crisis, but I had to go through these processes to need to find a way out. But I'm also interested in when you work because you work with sound and the sound well so much. What is it about sounds that lead you to work with sound rather than like visual or text jewel or any other kind of medium? And maybe you probably do work with those other meteors.

1:16:37I do, but I like closing my eyes and I've always had this emotional connection. Also, when I read, I spend more time listening to audiobooks than reading. I just tend to be an audio -centric character, but I like to close my eyes and listen, and I've always had this connection to music that hasn't always made sense. It feels like it touches me in an emotional way that other things don't. And it seems like the most poetic form in that it's so open to interpretation. There's so much like the difference if you read a book, it tells you certain amount of information, and if you watch a movie, it feels then even more of the gaps.

1:17:17So your imagination gets to dissipate in a book more than it does in a movie. And it seems like in music, the listener gets to be the most involved in the interpretation. Because it tells us so little. It's queuing us, but all of our experiences are very individual. Whereas if we look at a picture, we may notice different things, but the picture tells us much more. We participate less in the interpretation. We still have the face value. And at the same time, that's, but that is a great thinker and poet, I love Gorgonodonohi, I don't know if you've heard of him Irish. I love him. Yeah, and he has this line, you've probably heard it there, and he says, well, you know, I always say that music is what language would do if it could, you know.

1:18:02Wow, that's great. So I love the idea that from what you were saying, that the language is trying to specify if I last but in doing so, leave more, open, leave more. Yeah. And I always feel like language doesn't have the specificity to really explain what's going on. It never feels like it's enough. And the music maybe can convey an emotion in a way that we can feel it more, but it's also still a personal experience. I feel like we all have our own experience and the best we can do is like smoke signals to try to explain what's going on within us, but it's really far away. Which is why a song's like bringing together a language in music can be.

1:18:48So powerful, and so powerful to listen to songs in a language you don't know how to speak. Right? Where that language is still a meaningful human language, if one could understand the words, and it becomes meaningful in a different way when it's sung and becomes a sound and rhythmic melodic form. It also depends on the way the singer sings or some singers who have really beautiful voices and I find that I listen to their voices more than the words and there are other singers where the words are what really come through. What instrument do you play? The piano and the accordion. The accordion is a beautiful instrument for who I was very happy to start playing that after some years of playing the piano because the piano feels, it wants to feel frontal attention.

1:19:31You're there. It's more like a jealous dance partner or another. But the accordion is on your chest, it's breathing on your chest. You can't actually see even if you tried what your hands are doing. So your face is free, looking out. It's much more sociable, I find, as an instrument. I think also the nature of the bellows and the wind has to be different. Yeah, I mean it's breathing. It's breathing on top of your breathing. And there's an intimacy there. Do you use the bellows as a rhythmic tool or is it more just keeping enough air in the bellows to prep out the song? Well the bellows are the tool to phrase it so now they're a softer or the shape of your phrase that's all shaped by the bellows but then it's also fun to use them rhythmically too so you can do various bellow patterns to create a kind of a shimmer or a kind of a different kind of feel a bit like a strumming pattern on a guitar string instrument.

1:20:24And they're not left or right -handed version, they're always the same. I think you probably could get a left -handed version. I've never seen one. I've never seen one. I don't know. But I guess on a piano, the right hand is usually doing the melody and the left hand is usually doing the bass. And that's how it is. The left hand is doing the chords. Yeah. The left hand is playing the buttons, which I usually use these, of course. Of course, this is a piano. We're talking about a piano accordion, but there are all these different other kinds of, you know, squeeze boxes that have buttons, where you have a different note on a push in the pool, Monika, harmonika, say.

1:20:56So yeah, I've never seen one with the piano keyboard on the left hand and and the buttons on the right. That would be an interesting exercise to play one of those. Would Keystone both sides would be interesting to you? Yeah. Tell me the story of your dad's position and how his material has been received. He was working at Cambridge as a research scientist and then went on to do crop research at a crop research institute in India. And then he, over time, he felt like there were a number of unexplained problems within modern biology that at the time, current approaches were not making any headway in solving and perhaps couldn't make any headway in solving.

1:21:38So he wrote a book called The New Science of Life in which he talked about a kind of field theory for biology and a way that these fields might give rise to a memory in nature that he called Morphic Resonance. And it was very controversial when it came out and there was an editorial in the journal Nature, which is one of the biggest science journals in the world written by the then editor, John Maddox, called a book for burning. And this caused an outcry. John was later interviewed and he said that shallows should be condemned in the same language which the Pope used to call them Galileo and for the same reasons, it's heresy.

1:22:20He kind of scored a bit of an own goal here because - Wasn't Galileo right? Oh, exactly. So it scores a bit of a, even more of an outcry, but it was very revealing because it did show very clearly that there are structures of quite strict dogma within the scientific community. As there are, of course, within other human communities, but perhaps an unfortunate comparison. It's really interesting because he wasn't saying that it's wrong. He's saying, Heresy is different than being wrong. Exactly. It's not sanctioned. That's the difference. Yeah. He's doing work that's not sanctioned. Yeah. How many books has your dad written?

1:23:03I'm not actually sure. Maybe nine or ten. Are they all offshoots of morphic resonance, would you say? I would say that's the kind of water. So he swims in, but there are very different subjects. Summer on the unexplained powers of animals, like dogs that know when they're in his coming home, summer about unexplained powers of humans, like the sense of being stared at. They're people being able to tell when they're being looked at from behind. Summer about science and spiritual practices. So there's actually quite a wide range. It sounds like they're all related to the original idea that there's some either collective conscience or memory.

1:23:40Is that correct? Yeah, they relate to that. I think they will spring from the idea that the universe is not just the matter and energy that we commonly think of it. So he often going against materialist or what sometimes called physicalist views of the world and of the universe, which says that everything is nothing but the matter and energy. So he's saying there's something else? Well he's saying basically that there are forms of causation that we might not have taken into account within the modern science. It's in some classical views and in lots of traditional world views, these ideas might not seem so strange.

1:24:22Yes, I remember one of his experiments was about the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle, which is considered to be one of the harder crossword puzzles, and that speaking to people who do the puzzle, It's reported that the earlier they do it in the morning, the more difficult the puzzle is and Later in the day it gets easier and easier and it's not because the puzzle changes and it's not because they speak to anyone else But because the puzzle has already been solved the more people who solve it the easier it is for others to solve it even if they don't know the solution Yeah, so that illustrates this his hypothesis of morphic resonance and as you when I was at school we had exams and it standardised exams, I mean we were 16 and everyone in the country does the same exam at the same time.

1:25:06So I I'd answer the last question first. By the time I got to the first question, everyone would have answered it. Of course I couldn't tell. I didn't it wasn't an experiment in how anything to compare it to so I couldn't tell whether it works. But it's a great idea in general though. Yeah. What is the wood wide web? The wood wide web sir, it means lots of different things to different people. But it's most commonly used to describe situations where one micro -risal fungal network can connect more than one plant together. Micro -risal fungal networks are promiscuous. They can connect to more than one plant and plants are also promiscuous and can connect to more than one micro -risal fungus.

1:25:44So what you end up with is shared overlapping networks of plants and fungi. The wood -wide web is used frequently to describe situations where This is taking place and often it's used to describe situations where material substances might move between plants through these networks. So this plant I talked about that I studied the ones that don't photosynthesize. These are plants that have to make a living by drawing nutrients from other plants through these fungal networks, which rather changes the way that we think about how plants live, normally think about plants living as kind of adjacent individuals, but in this case, the plants are connected through fungi.

1:26:26So then there's a lot of talk about how this works in ecosystems. There's a lot we don't know about these shared networks. There's a lot of claims that people make about trees feeding each other and nourishing each other, and maybe in some situations like the ones I describe that are taking place, but it's not so much that the, I think if it less like the plants are feeding each other and more like the fungus is able to better balance its own needs by being connected to more than one plant. If it needs plants to make a living, then better be connected to more than one in case anything happens.

1:26:59So it's a mutually beneficial system? It seems to be a mutually beneficial system. If you look at it from the plants perspective, why would the plant want to support one of its neighboring plants? It's possible that that's something you might want to do, you know, if those plants are related and I think it makes more sense fitting about it from the fungal point of view where the fungus wants to nourish all these plants in order to keep itself in good connection to its sources of nutrients. But on the whole these relationships are thought of as mutually beneficial because the plants and the fungus over time do tend to give more or less as much as they get.

1:27:35Tell me about the talk that you just gave. I was in Vienna, I was talking at a fungus festival, which was really fun because there are various fungal nerds, you know, from what around, and I'm a fungal nerd, and I love talking with fungal nerds. So afterwards, we had a lovely time, you know. Talking about all sorts of things from, and one of the big problems with fungal researchers is it's so hard to work out what they're doing outside and busy bustling ecosystems. I want you to take a pinch of soil, you know, you've interrupted the networks you have to study. So we were talking about different ways we might be able to adapt techniques to better see what's going on outside and busy ecosystems and are we were talking about strange cultivation techniques, new cultivation techniques that people have worked out, it's kind of thing.

1:28:24Do you want to talk more about underground networks? Yeah, so I think one of the things that's really important with these these fungal networks is to think of them as holding ecosystems together, You know, you can have situations where they behave like highways in the soil for bacteria to move around And these networks hold soil together and stuff it washing away. They give soil its structure. Does it look like a room? It depends on how closely you look at it But it might often look like a kind of a spider's web maybe if you see them growing on the surface of soil If you lift up a leaflet of air then they look like kind of like spider webs cobwebs So much finer than roots, and they fuse as well as branch.

1:29:05So roots branch and branch and branch and branch. But these form more of a kind of met, be -dimensional met. And they don't have a head. So if you were to separate them, both parts would live. Yes. Yeah, it's really a kind of a medium of ecological connectivity. And I work with an organization called The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or spun, and we're trying to map the micro -vizal networks of the planet, because so many people know these organisms are important, but it's very hard for decision makers to take into account the life in the soil, because we don't know who's living where.

1:29:42You know, anyone might any one time. There's been very few projects that have brought together diverse data sets and created very big global models and maps of who's living where. We have these maps for ocean currents, you know, for climatic systems, for vegetation cover, but I'm not for fungal networks. So we're working on this as a way to draw attention to underground life and to advocate for the protection of underground ecosystems and also provide tools to make that possible. It is the technology to sense them without disrupting the soil. We do have to disrupt the soil. We take samples of soil in different places, and then we sequence the DNA to look out who's living there.

1:30:20So at the moment there's no way to do this without disrupting the soil. We just try to disrupt as little of us as soil as we can. That seemed interesting to find a technology like an X -ray type technology would glow. Yeah, there are ways we are working actually in the lab using X -rays in kind of transparent soils. And people do use ground penetrating radar and this kind of technique to look at root systems. but fungal cells are so fine that right now this technology is not very good at resolving them. But if that could be developed on a sure one day, it will, it would completely transform our understanding.

1:30:57What color are they? It depends on the fungus. As you think about bread mould, some of the puffles and some of blues and greens and reds. But many of the fungi that live in the soil will be kind of whiteish, sometimes yellowish, brownish. Then they change colour depending on whether growing, if they're exposed to light, they might grow into a different colour. Or they might tone yellow as they age. Is the variety of the network related to the variety of mushrooms? Absolutely, yeah. So, and we often talk about fungal networks in this very general time. It's a bit like saying tree. It describes a manner of growth, like tree does.

1:31:30But think of all the kinds of tree there are. And you wouldn't expect to find a plum on an apple tree. Yes. Some support multiple mushrooms. Is that correct or no? No, so one... They're all... They're all particular. Yeah, yeah, like just like Streets are, right? So we have fur trees and beach trees and redwoods and they all have different ways of growing and different habits and tendencies and they can all live in similar areas together and like a mixed forest. But each one of those would be a different species of tree. Do you know anything about the way Redwoods communicate because I understand they have some sort of a network?

1:32:05Well, Redwoods can copy us so you can have Redwoods coming up from a shared underground network of roots essentially. You can see several redwoods growing together and they might look like several redwoods, but they're actually all connected underground. I'm not so pleased to do this, not through fungal connections, but they would just actually be connected. It's almost like each of the trees are actually branches of the same system. The way that we think about organisms relating is often in terms of say there's one organism here, say a plant, one organism here, say a fungus, and they relate to each other.

1:32:42So we think about them as relating, we almost draw a dotted line between them in our minds. Two entities connected. But in lots of cases, in most cases, it's less that they're connected in that kind of way. And it's more like they are making each other. They're making the conditions for each other to exist. It's more like a relational field of relation in which they are co -creating each other. It's a bit like I don't know if you've seen that drawing by MC Escher with the hand, drawing the hand, drawing the hand. I think that's a really beautiful way to think about these symbiotic associations because these organisms are creating the conditions for the other to exist and they are in many ways creating the conditions for the others to evolve in the way that they are doing.

1:33:28So when we see two species that have two different organisms, they're fungus and a plant that have a close association, we're just looking at the current state of affairs. But imagine through evolutionary time, these species entwining with each other in a kind of braid, making each other, making the conditions for each other to continue to be. From our microbiomes perspective, the body is just the thing that holds together the microbiome world, you know, from its perspective. It's like from our perspective, it's in there doing work for us. But from its perspective, we're just the vessel that it lives in, we're the house.

1:34:03and one's not right or wrong, and we tend to look at things from the individual perspective instead of the collective. Yeah, I mean, anything that's one of the simplest moves one can do to deepen and expand one's relationship with a living world is just to try and change perspective. It's not that we could become a plant in a straightforward way, take on a plant perspective or a fungal perspective. But just as we do in human relations, new to be a good human to the other humans we live with, it's so important to try and see things from different people's perspectives. It's the root of empathic connection.

1:34:36And I think we can do that in the living world as well. Just a question that we might not be able to answer, but then what must it be like from your perspective? How would this look if we just took on that perspective? It's just a moment. So I find that a very helpful tool in a way to try and enter in, or at least to step out of my daily assumptions.