Magic Mushrooms, Fungi, and The Mysterious Kingdom with Merlin Sheldrake - Cosmic Queries

[Music] this is star talk neil degrasse tyson here your personal astrophysicist this is going to be a cosmic queries edition on the subject of mushrooms we're going to find out where they come from what they're doing and why and especially what is their relationship to humans and i got matt kirsten as my co-host matt how you doing man i'm very good neil how's it going it's been too long dude yeah it's nice to be back i miss you and and your host of did i get it right probably science that is exactly it ah it's getting great this time excellent i'm a one-time guest on your show um emphasis on one time we would have you back in a heartbeat i i i never want to abuse my connections your access privileges yeah okay but i love it when you're out there just bringing science to the public in a whole other way and you're an important sort of cog in a wheel that we're all trying to keep turning here i appreciate that we definitely are doing it in another way to uh the people who really know their stuff and even if it's only probably science i'm still good with that well i think neither you or i or our mushroom expert although i've eaten a few in my day that's very true we combed the world to find one of the world's experts maybe the world's experts on this subject and it's merlin sheldrake merlin welcome to star talk thanks for having me neil it's good to be here yeah so that accent that places you right in london right now is that where you're coming from that's right so you're an ecologist like a mushroom ecologist you're also author uh your book just came out in paperback i think the hardcover came out last year but often paperbacks do much better than the hardback so this will be anyone's chance to pick this up and and you can't miss it if you you want this book if you if you love mushrooms even if you don't love mushrooms but wonder what the hell are those things coming out of the ground entangled life how fungi make our worlds change our minds and shape our futures that is ambitious dude uh so before we get to our our q a with our uh fan base i just want to sort of lay some groundwork here so if you can tell us oh but just sorry let me finish your pedigree here you've got a phd in tropical ecology from the university of cambridge right and you specialized in the underground fungal networks in the tropical forests of panama this is just so exotic and like so fun maybe i'd do this if i weren't an astrophysicist so can you just answer the question what the hell is a mushroom because it does it doesn't have leaves it doesn't you know it doesn't have photosynthesis i think most people don't know what they are so please illuminate us so mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi and fungi are a kingdom of life so that's the broader category as animals or plants so fungi are a much bigger world than just mushrooms only a few fungal species a few tens of thousands produce mushrooms but most live their lives as branching fusing networks of tubular cells known as mycelium wow so so when did you know when i grew up there was there was no mushroom kingdom all right that's how old i am so when did mushrooms decide when did that happen please they um well they won their independence taxonomically speaking in the late 60s wow so that's not quite in the textbooks that i would have had because that's how old i am interesting and so what were they considered before they were their own kingdom just plants yeah so unglamorous lower plants lower cp back then everyone was putting higher and lower they always got to rank things that way that's just that's that's not that's not right they did that um and so but but it's nonetheless a plant i mean it grows out of the ground so when i think of the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom you're saying now the word plant does not include these spores that rise up out of the ground that we call mushrooms that's right so fungi are more closely related to animals than plants and they also behave more like animals in their nutritional strategies they don't plants photosynthesize they they build the energy that they need from sun and carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis but animals have to find food ready-made in the world which they then digest and fungi have to do that too so they're what's known as heterotrophs wow now i think i knew that about their relationship but i knew it only sort of indirectly when i looked at the tree of life what i learned was that the common ancestor between mushrooms and all animal life split later than that common ancestor split from green plants and that blew my mind because i think that allows me to say what you just said that mushrooms and animals are more closely related that either of them are to green plants that am i allowed to say that upon knowing this about the tree of life yes damn okay so now so this is so they grow and and but they also uh and we can eat them just as food or we can ingest them who's who did the experiments to find out that mushrooms can affect us psychologically is someone just going there how does that work in practice well it's a good question so the until the um early part of the 20th century that only a few pockets of humans on the planet knew that some species of mushroom produced psychoactive compounds and would eat these mushrooms as part of their ritual and spiritual practices that knowledge then spread to the west um and after that point this handful of tropical species from mexico were known to produce psilocybin mushrooms but but once that became common knowledge then people started to look all around the world and now over 200 species of fungi are known to produce psilocybin and it's very interesting that process because you know how how do you know um people test them psilocybin bruises blue when you um when you crush the the mushroom and so you can sometimes have a clue from the color you can have a clue from which species are closely related to each other or not and which ones you might reasonably expect to be trippy um but there are always some surprises so this this chemical silicibin psilocybin so has that been has that been isolated so that now you don't actually have to grow the mushroom you just get it out of somebody's laboratory that's right it was actually first isolated and named by albert hoffman the guy who discovered lsd but now in many of the studies they're being carried out they use pure crystalline psilocybin produced in a lab so he discovered it not while he was under the influence of lsd presumably because that completely messes with your capacity to think well and interpret reality i i haven't heard that he was on lsd while he was taking it but you never know so how complicated is it to synthesize is it yeah can we just do that now again like in my kitchen what do i need well you need to i would have thought that the easier way to get solace ivan in your kitchen would be to find a mushroom that has it rather than setting up the lab but maybe i'm wrong i have a big chemistry kitchen you don't know you don't know that's very true i'm talking about the average person's kitchen yeah no i mean it's definitely true it's easier to grow them grow the mushrooms than it would be to set up a lab and go through all the analytic procedures required to isolate uh synthesize and isolate the molecule so tell me about this and then we'll go straight to questions after this because i'm just so i just want to lay some groundwork here this uh mycelium so i hosted this series on cosmos and we spent an entire episode most of an episode talking about the mycelium but at the time i didn't uniquely associate it with mushrooms themselves i thought of it as just sort of this plant network where all the plants are sort of communicating but are you saying mushrooms have their own mycelium or they participate in a larger mycelium of the plant kingdom as well so mycelium is a fungal talent and not a plant palette and so fungi make mycelium some of those fungal species produce mushrooms that we see many of them don't produce mushrooms these different fungal species whether they produce mushrooms or not um some of them will relate to have relationships intimate trading relationships with plants and so plug into plants and they exchange nutrients and some of those fungal networks can plug into multiple plants at the same time and those plants are also promiscuous and plug into multiple fungal networks and the result is shared overlapping networks of plants and fungi and that's what's referred to and by the wood wide web how do you think what you meant the wood wise the wood wide web so i i think that's what it was yeah i'm curious about something just um i i have we have this impression that uh fungi just sort of spontaneously appear uh because you know if if you leave food in the fridge for too long it gets moldy um i once lived in a pretty grotty shared house where we broke the toilet at a party and then a week later because no one fixed it there were mushrooms growing out of the carpet so that kind of thing can happen uh how many spores of fungi are just generally in the air all the time because there must be the spores originally for them to then land on something and then start to grow lots um in fact fungal spores exactly how many lots yeah well i mean so i got a number if you want that um 50 million tons of fungal spores are produced and released into the air every year which is the weight of 500 000 blue whales and these spores are such a large presence in in the atmosphere that they can um they can precipitate the water droplets that go on to form clouds and rain so they can change the weather wow okay just in case people don't know you can more readily formula uh generate a raindrop if there's something to nucleate the condensation on and that it greatly enhances that process so yeah so i didn't know so it's raining mushrooms is what you're telling us i'm glad i asked that now because that was a hell of an answer that was yeah that was great let's go to questions uh matt all right well well there's a couple that neil's already touched on with his questions but i just want a slightly more specific answer from uh teresina rojas's question what are the differences between plants and fungi and then and then also which ones evolve first i believe the answer to that is mushrooms are built first and fungi involved first no plant plants i think right so we'll let him answer the questions matt and i agree to shut up merlin go for it um so so plants uh photosynthesize fungi don't photosynthesize and have to find food and digest it um and so what are they eating what what is the food well they can eat many things they're the great decomposers of the planet um they underwrite much of the regenerative capacity of the biosphere because of their voracious appetites so um wood for example if fungi didn't decompose wood then the earth would be piled kilometers deep in unrotted forests but they can also eat all sorts of unusual things there's a specialist mold that lives in canadian distilleries off the vapors evaporating from whiskey barrels as they age and there's a fungus called the kerosene fungus which lives in the fuel tanks of aircraft so they have that they have a wide variety of wow different appetites you know they if they wanted to they could just be our overlords from what you're describing here yeah totally or underlords [Laughter] but that does connect a bit to a low rosie's question but starts with very nice things saying big fans of the show and then asks mushrooms are not only very resilient to extreme conditions they also have the ability to spread even when they're technically inactive and to thrive when can and i believe thrive is there's a typo there when conditions become bearable again in that respect do we know if mushroom spores can survive the vacuum of space and if yes can we imagine them seeding distance planets and making a better job of surviving than the human race so fungal spores are really tough and and some of them can survive these um extraterrestrial conditions other types of fungal organism can too lichens which are a symbiotic organism a combination of fungi and bacteria and algae they can and they're some of the hardiest organisms known and when they're taken to extraterrestrial conditions they're suspended on the outside of the international space station in trays known as the expose facility um but they're they dry out uh very quickly of course in the vacuum of space but then they can withstand the radiation and the temperature swings and when you bring them back to earth they rehydrate and get on with living and so there are different aspects of the fungal kingdom different parts of the fungal kingdom can can withstand these um these extreme conditions so they don't need spacesuits is what you're telling us no okay actually i didn't know the space station had sort of an outdoor tray for the vacuum of space experiment lab uh i didn't know that that's cool they've also tested them in the mars simulation facility um where you can just put them in the box and turn on mars and you can just dial up or dial down the radiation um to test them to the utmost limits of survival pretty useful man i have a whole new respect for mushrooms now damn okay matt keep them coming okay so alec asks alec from the oregon coast says hi from there uh and hope we're all doing well and how long have fungi been on the earth and does that give a glimpse into what prehistoric does that give a glimpse into what prehistoric animals might have eaten so um general consensus from fossils and from looking at the dna is that fungi have been around for just over a billion years but mysterious fossils bearing an uncanny resemblance to mycelial fungi have been found in lava deposits dating from over 2 billion years ago and it's not clear whether they were true fungi or not but they suddenly look like funky and if they were funky it would totally off-end everything that's thought about the history of multicellular life and so but do you think mushrooms would have been a part of early animal diets oh yeah for sure i mean i don't see why animals would neglect these nutritious delicious organisms growing up within easy reach would an animal knowingly an animal not human knowingly eat a mushroom that has psychedelic properties it's a very good question i was talking to michael michael buech who runs the um toxicology reports for the north american mycological association and he has a number of reports of dogs that watch their owners picking psychedelic mushrooms and after watching them would also eat the psychedelic mushrooms and and it would appear to be under the influence there was only one example of a cat that repeatedly ate its own psychedelic mushrooms and appeared to be mushroomed in his words see i think i think cats are always eating mushrooms based on behavior patterns that i've seen i have no idea how you would tell with my cat whether he's taking anything that's what i'm saying ed before we go to break let me just uh understand this the pronunciation of the plural of fungus uh i i've heard fungi and fungi how do they how do the italians say it italians say fungi fungi i say fungi but people say fungi people say fungi and it's really up to you oh okay i'm glad to hear that because i think i've said at least three different versions in the course of just the last 15 minutes all right so i will do as the romans do and call it a fungi is that correct that's what i'll do i don't know about matt i don't know where his allegiances are are found but i'm going with fungi and just before we cut here i just want to finish out some of your resume uh it's interesting here you're on the board of the advisory board of the fungi foundation that's great that's just sounds like that on a business court car you know advisor to the fungis you know it's just it just sounds so so otherworldly if you will and the society for the protection of underground networks what do you do there prevent people from putting pesticides or something or herbicides so i didn't know the underground networks needed a lobby you know lobbyists yeah well part of it's just mapping the mapping the networks around the world um what type of fungal networks and fungal networks interacting with bacterial species and plant species do you find in different places because obviously we can't know what damage we're doing until we know what's there but it's very clear that we will be damaging these networks but it doesn't feel like they care about i mean well let me not speak for them for the mushrooms let me just say broadly if they are all over the place then why should it matter to us if we dig up some ground over here and not over there i mean what is what is it you're actually trying to protect so many fungal networks enable plant life plant life would be inconceivable without the fungi that live in their roots without the fungi that live in their leaves and in their shoots and in fact plants would have wouldn't have evolved if it hadn't been for their relationships with fungus so if we depend uh our say on an ecosystem a forest for various reasons um then and we kill all the fungi in the forest then we're making a trouble trouble for ourselves and for everyone else who lives in the forest so um there are lots of reasons to so some some fungi are able to withstand intense conditions but many fungi aren't and so um it's for these fungi that we need to be mindful got it got it okay and that's part this is the perennial challenge of anything we do to the environment because one thing depends on another depends on another and ultimately it comes back to bite us in the ass right so exactly and then the most worrying things are the unknown unknowns and there's so much of fungal life we don't understand there's so much of microbial life we don't understand um and so in kind of a race to to just to get a picture of what everyone's doing so that we um can avoid making even more catastrophic mistakes that's why we have you we'll see okay so let's take a break here and when we come back we're gonna find out more of what our fan base wants to know about mushrooms their psychedelic properties and anything else that mushrooms have been hiding from us for a billion years on star talk we're back star talk cosmic queries we're talking about mushrooms everything you ever wanted and never wanted to know about them it's going to happen in this show i got with me my co-host matt kirschen matt what what's your your social media handle that you want to put out there oh uh matt kirschen uh on twitter and matt underscore cursion on instagram but i very rarely use that twitter's the one to look at okay christian uh k-r-k-i-r-s-h-e-n but if you um if you just if you're not sure just bang anything close to that into google and it'll find me that's very confident of you okay they just they just aren't many of us there's there's very few mackerson's in the world of anything way back i get it so for this mushroom expertise we've got merlin sheldrank who's got a book out uh just now in paperback entangled life how make our world change our minds and shape our futures this is an audacious title i'm loving every minute of it so merlin uh great to have you are you active on social media as well i think i saw you have a twitter handle merlin sheldrake yeah and instagram my name and instagrams yeah there's no other merlin shelters in the world yeah i mean did your parents have very high expectations for you you know i'm not sure um they said that they were calling me martin after the bird not after the wizard but i i complained that i didn't think they can really um make that kind of distinction so let's let's let's pick it up we're we're in the middle of our flow of questions and these are all patreon members we used to only lead off with patreon questions and now they own the whole stash so every one of these is from patreon members i just want to publicly thank them for their support it enables us to do experiments that might not otherwise be commercial uh thank you for that uh it keeps going yeah and there's some great questions that have come in from the patrons including a couple of people have asked about the this phenomenon of fungi taking over other animals so zack metcalf says um some species of i hope i'm pronouncing this one correctly is it cordyceps fungi uh can infect insect hosts and compel them to die in very specific locations the famous examples are infected bulletins climbing trees and dying on the undersides of leaves the ideal location for spores to rot from their skin and infect more ants below how do they how do the fungi relay such specific instructions to its insect victims is the electrochemistry of walking and climbing really so straightforward as to be hijacked by fungus man and this they sound like they they sound evil yeah i mean that's quite a remarkable thing to do this is an evil set of species you got here merlin all right so what's going on there yeah so first i i wouldn't underestimate the metabolic abilities of fungi so um they're metabolic wizards and can do all sorts of extraordinary things so even if it was a complicated task to hijack an insect and control its behavior with a great deal of precision which no doubt it is i wouldn't put that past them um and we don't need to try it because we know that this takes place but broadly speaking i mean the degree of precision is remarkable so you can have for example a carpenter ant and off your cordyceps fungus and the fungus will grow into the ant to start growing its way through its bodies for its legs through its cavities it won't grow into its brain though which is interesting um but and then it produces whatever it does it produces in the ant uh a irresistible urge to climb upwards overwriting the normal instinct of the ant which is just staying close to the ground for purposes of safety so the ant climbs up in a syndrome known as summit disease and then it finds at the nearest vein on the other side of the leaf at exactly the right height for the fungus to fruit in the case of offia cordyceps and carpet ants about 25 centimeters off the floor of the forest and then around noon the ant performs a death grip and it grips on to the left vein and the objectives has um her special needs and um and then the air fungus kills the ants and it grows a stalk out of the ant's head and rains down spores on unfortunate ants passing below it grows out of its head yeah and so the movie alien has nothing on this really because that's just coming out of your belly that's the normal place you might find something growing inside of you but it goes out of its head there are lots of different ways that lots of different fungi do it differently there's fungi that infect cicadas and it causes the back third of the cicada's body to break off and and for the male cicadas to become hypersexual despite the fact that their genitals have long since crumbled away and the cicadas sprouts spores from this broken back end of its body as it flies around erratically well we're in a cicada invasion now in the northeast in the united states you surely know that i committed online that i said i would eat three of them when they finally uh came so you might want to um watch out because the the master sport are the funky that overtake these cicadas and no doubt that we're doing it right outside um your house and they they do it they produce psilocybin and also an amphetamine so if you eat enough of them then you might start feeling stranger than you realize okay and i might i might have accredited the the the cicada but it was really the invading mushroom spores that would have done you'd probably tweet quite a few before you noticed that i think you'd be safe yeah that's not happening no risk eating any more than i that i'd uh committed well a related question well a related question from teresina who asked earlier was is it possible for for a fungi to take over a control of a relatively large animal and to what extent do they influence our own behavior yeah how about mammals like small mammals like um you know under scurrying mice and things you know field mice that sort of thing so these fungi that take over insects with this great precision and none of them are known to take out animals and mammals mammals are a bit trickier because we have a higher body temperature which gene tends to put off funky doesn't always put them off and there are a number of fungi that can cause a big problem in an animal body in a human body but there aren't any examples of quite such specific um alterations there are fungi that will infect you and cause a life-threatening disease and make you feel strange and will change your behavior because it's made you sick but not that will grow inside you and puppet your behavior um or make you climb up a tree and scatter spores out of your abdomen so when i was doing that i can't blame that on any kind of uh fungi [Laughter] yep that's that's you got to own that one matt that's all you do so what i got one for you and i want to pretend i'm a patreon member now so if you ever get what they call athlete's feet the cure for that is anti-fungal cream so are you telling me if i have athlete's feet i have fungus growing in my toes that's right it's one of these things you study this is your fault you you your your species your families of species are giving me athlete's feet that's what you're saying either neil i mean your subject matter wiped out the dinosaurs you got me there i got no comeback on that okay we have an asteroid the size of mount everest that took out a whole str 70 of earth species okay all right i i take it back but that is a kind of mushroom is what you're saying it's a fungus it doesn't produce mushrooms but it but it is sorry mushroom is the fruit but it's a fungus yeah i gotcha damn so so gordon patreon patron gordon vu asks something related says i suffered from jock itch which i believe is the same or i think that's the same uh fungus and the doctor said it was a fungal infection does this fungus grow elsewhere besides the human body you know this is too much information about this guy's hygiene do we really have to find out he puts out his name and he's telling the world he's got jock itch it's all science okay it's for science very good okay we have we have a devoted following so there he didn't even say i have a friend who has jock itch he didn't even say that i think i think that's worse though i think if you know about your friend's jock itch that's a good point what the hell are you doing knowing about your friend's jocket okay so so is that is it the same species because what's interesting merlin i learned is that head lice is a different subspecies of lice than um a genital ice so i couldn't tell you whether they're the same i suspect that they're slightly different and i couldn't tell you whether or not it um it lives in other places but it's very common for funky to to be able to live in different situations if you have an oyster mushroom mycedium that would grow on a book that would grow on used cigarette butts if you do train is in the right way it could grow on grains it could grow on um logs of wood so many fungi have catholic tastes and it's possible so i can't say for sure because i don't know um the jock itch species also lives in other places you're giving no reason to think they'd be different right right i think it was an oyster mushroom that was growing out of our carpet after a week or so after the toilet was broken at the party would that be plausible it look it certainly looked oyster like it was a surprisingly large mushroom that had appeared in our house in a place that shouldn't have been in this gross place that i live back in my early matt when you climb the tree you sport out the the i know we shouldn't put the tree in the toilet either that was a that was another mistake that's the first giveaway right there all right man give me some more well so gordon goes on to actually ask uh i'm curious if there are telltale sell uh signs to differentiate between an edible and poisoned mushroom and why are some mushrooms poisonous and others not that's a good question i you know because matt i mean why i mean if if if i mean a mushroom is a mushroom i guess maybe a mushroom is just not a mushroom yeah a little different that's always been you know i i've been curious about that because i know there are people you know mushroom foraging is a big thing people foraging for for cooking reasons and then also people who are foraging for more party reasons but in either case the the the warning has always been well you better make sure you know what you're getting because if you pick up the wrong one then you can be in some real trouble right so we have uh healthy poisonous and psychedelic so how does the mushroom kingdom divide up well some mushrooms will will kill you and so you definitely need to know your money to eat them but at least they won't kill me by having something grow out of my head it's just a regular old poison i i'd rather that than be humiliated by having spores come out of my head i'm sorry well they're they're pretty deft uh some of them you'll eat them but deadly poisonous ones you might eat them you'll feel pretty pretty bad for a while then you'll get better and then a day or so later you'll drop dead it's called a false remission um wow so they do have their methods but um but there's no reliable trait that you can use to distinguish poison from poisonous from non-poisonous across the board because lots of the poisonous ones are poisonous in different ways often um and some of them it's not clear you know this i had a professor um a professor of history of science i used to go out mushroom hunting with he had a big collection of mycological texts and matt did you hear that i had a profession that i once went out okay did the professor give you a bad grade and we don't have the professor anymore in the world with your around us here i don't know what what you got going there but go on sorry to interrupt so what he said was that i i said other cases where the same mushroom species is described by different um books in radically different ways and he said that there was a book a german guidebook a hundred years old or so that he had and it described the yellow staining mushroom which in english guide books says poisonous don't eat as skull and crossbones stay clear in this german guidebook it said delicious and when fried lightly but might cause a light coma in those of weak constitution mild coma that's all i know i mean like it sounds quite fun doesn't it but um not a heavy one just a light one and and it turns out that it depends on your metabolism some people have the ability to to metabolize these toxins other people who don't so even if you can tell what mushroom you're eating in rare cases um people will have different reactions that very same mushroom it's a bit like plants you know plants that will kill you some plants delicious some plants people or some people are allergic to tomatoes you know that sort of thing i guess you know okay but that'd be a cap i guess it's all chemical at the end of the day but it's not a living thing that's attacking you for having consumed it all right i mean in other words a poisonous mushroom and you uh dying from eating peanuts because you have a peanut allergy these are different causes correct yeah because the peanuts won't kill everyone but a poisonous mushroom would kill everyone yeah an authentically poisonous mushroom if you ate sufficient quantity yeah yeah all right all right matt we got time for one more before we hit a break and then come to our final segment so what do you have so isaac lambert asks how much faster is mycelium in plants fungi and trees than the neurons in our brain i didn't even know that they were faster than the neurons in our brain oh oh i mean is and is a neurological analog sensible here so um some fungi produce waves of electrical activity analogous to the impulses that travel in our nerves which is a fascinating finding which um might really shake up the way we think about um the communication and that fungi can can conduct and the way that they connect other organisms together and so given that some fungi do produce impulses electrical impulses and then when you look at it you have our nervous systems which contain um long electrically excitable cells and you have fungal networks which are networks of long electrically excitable cells and on a superficial level there are some similarities the neurons in our bodies conduct impulses or action potentials very much faster than those that you find in some fungal networks because remember not all funky do this only some do so um there's a big difference in speed but then again we have a need for much faster speeds we live at a faster pace because we're locomoting we're moving or twitching much richie muscular bodies so so we need that speed but the funky uh made made you perfectly well without that because fast lane compared with mushrooms that's not gonna think about that all right so slip one more in matt before we hit the break uh tarasina asks are there any naturally occurring networks of bioluminescent fungi in fact i just know i was just notified we have to take the break but let's hold on to that and i think they call that a tease is that right bioluminescent bio chemical pathways when we return from this break on star talk cosmic queries all about mushrooms we're back again merlin sheldrake one of the world's experts in mushrooms and he did that on purpose like got his phd and studied it and everything and so that makes him really useful to people who have their own relationship with mushrooms and matt apparently you grew mushrooms in your toilet and yeah i really want to know about that any any mushroom cultivation in my life has been entirely uh unintentional okay so what's that last question you had about bioluminescence i love it so are there naturally occurring bioluminescent fungi yes is the answer there are a number of species of bioluminescent fungi some produce the mushrooms that bioluminesce and some produce mycelium that bioluminescence like bioluminescences in fact um the first ever submarine called the turtle which was invented during the american revolutionary war that um a fungally bioluminescing bits of wood were used to illuminate the depth gauge of the turtle known as fox fire this particular sort [Music] so we knew about that and how to then exploit it so so we early on you're saying we weaponized bioluminescent mushrooms well i don't know how effective the title was [Laughter] nonetheless we weaponized it okay what did it did offered the british but um wow okay very cool and by the way this all sounds like the the the the tree of life mapping for james cameron's movie for avatar right these are he's trying to come up with exotic life and he gets all the most exotic life on earth and makes that the regular life over there except they have like usb ponytails where they can connect and talk to the animals all right is that the mushrooms have that too i just i want to know how quickly they exactly exactly yeah well they do they grow into the plants and they kind of plug in if you want to use the the electronics metaphor but the plugging in involves growing into a plant root growing in and around plant cells it's a very intimate embrace and and i guess you can think about that in an analogous term to the way that the um the plugging in happens in avatar the fungal networks in avatar are based on on the fungal networks in the real world scientifically right because uh james cameron you know he has many movies including the abyss uh movies where he has cared about the science of what surrounds his storytelling and then he puts it in as uh as best as he's able so keep it coming matt all right well uh chas jen corelli i hope i'm pronouncing your name even at least vaguely closer correctly asks why are there so many different types of fungi still being discovered each year was that right you guys are not on top of everything no so there's an estimated um two to three million species of fungi on the planet and only about 150 000 have been described and that means that six to eight percent of the total number of fungal species on the planet have been described and that obviously leaves over 90 percent undescribed and and there's so it's a lot of work for fungal taxonomies to do just very basic descriptive work that hasn't been done for a number of reasons and one of the reasons is because fungi were thought to be plants for a very long time and so they didn't get a kingdom's worth of attention um from from biologists another reason is that they live hidden lives they live as mycelial networks which are buried in whatever they're eating mycelium is how fungi feeds so they've got to insinuate themselves in their food to digest it and what that means is that usually um we don't see so much of what they're doing so it's harder for us to access see they're doing that on purpose they don't want you describing them i have the privilege of having a species named after me a species of frog and so i looked at the the the the species the species paper the paper that makes it the species and i was astonished how much measurement went on on that you know the the ratios of the digits in the feet of the frog versus the hands and the eyes separation all of this gets characterized i'm thinking damn that must have taken a long time and if you've got like a gazillion species left i'm not doing it to get somebody else to do it but it's it's it's there's only so many tv scientists so how are you going to even come up with little names exactly exactly so i so it's the it's in the irani tysoni a species of leaping frog and so i was very honored by that wow you know linnaeus and lioness and the taxonomist and um buffon the french taxonomist has a big rivalry and both would name glamorous species after their patrons and they would name unglamorous speeches after each other because the wolfrack was mufa buffa because linnaeus thought that he'd get one over on buffalo is neil is your frog is it is it a glamorous frog or is it an unglamorous frog i was just happy that it was a vertebrate you know because they're like bugs and stuff and and slime mold and bacteria i'm sure those are wanting for names but at least i got a vertebrate i'm just putting it out there right now i would be honored to have a slime named after me if there's any slime scientists there i'll take any species of any kingdom the request is out in the in the mycelium we'll see who comes back on it all right so matt what do you have so i've saved these two towards the end because i i think they're they're connected and they're a big topic that i think a lot of people are interested in when we talk about mushrooms and particularly talk about magic mushrooms so bo shankar asks is merlin familiar with terence mckenna and his views on magic mushrooms could magic mushrooms have expanded the human mind introducing complex language and culture to early humans through psychedelic experience and then robert schlosser asks how much of an impact would you speculate has psilocybin had on human evolution i think they're playing in similar worlds like those two together interesting yeah so these are these it's a great question um without a clear answer it's very hard to know one way or another when we're going back into prehistory i mean it seems clear to me that psychedelics including psychedelic mushrooms have had a very big impact on human culture um and for an unknowably long time and of course culture and nature are categories that we create but they aren't separated by an unbreachable divide anthropogenic climate change is a good example of how cultural developments in in humans can affect what we think of as the natural world out there terence's claim terence mckenna's claim with the stoned ape hypothesis was that eating magic mushrooms had caused human brains to increase in size or primate brains yeah the pre-human brains and this is um this is a big claim it's unlikely we'll know either way there's certainly something to be explained um so between 3 million years ago and 200 000 years ago when when we're informed that what we think that um homo sapiens first arose the primate brains that led to us increased by four times so quadrupled in size they grew to four times the size that they had grown in the previous 60 million years of primate evolution this is sometimes called the brain boom and it's known as took place the fossil record is clear the question is why there are a number of hypotheses brains a really hungry hungry organ it makes up only it makes up two percent of our body mass but takes 20 percent of our energy at rest so i think one of the persuasive um the persuasive hypotheses is that the domestication of fire helps because once you can cook food then we have to eat less of it we have to spend less time foraging we can supply more energy to a hungry organ like the brain and terence said that this was brought about by the mushrooms uh maybe a little bit maybe some maybe not i mean it's psilocybe is being shown to increase nerve branching in dishes in culture but that doesn't necessarily suggest that it would increase brain size over time in real life humans there are different versions of the stoned eight hypothesis some of them suggest that the big developments like symbolic language and other major milestones in human cognition arose through psychedelics i think that's more plausible than the brain increase argument i understand if it's a temporary condition put on your brain chemistry how does that make any kind of biological evolution at all i don't know so i think so terrence isn't here to defend it but but what he might say it would be that um there are epigenetic shifts that would be carried over um or that the um that there are cultural changes which then go on to increase our brain size so if you you can imagine a hypothetical situation where someone took magic mushrooms had the idea to domesticate fire domesticated fire had cooked food and then that allowed our brains to increase in size so this chemical can give you brilliant ideas because what i understand the brain is pretty it barely works as it does right now you're going to toss in some extra chemicals that will alter your perception of reality and you want to claim that you're now closer to nature so so just sorry to jump in is is the claim kind of just i'm trying to untangle it but the claim isn't that the mushrooms themselves grow the brain but the mushrooms expand your horizons that make you then think of doing things that then down the line cause your brain to increase in size is that so yeah so the different versions of the standard then and so some of them would say that the mushrooms themselves cause an increase in nerve growth and that somehow passed on intergenerationally and some of them i think the more plausible ones would say that um the the experience the radically altered cognitive experience the unconstrained style of cognition that you have when under the influence of mushrooms and gives you new ideas and behavior invites you to behave in new ways and possibly synesthetic ways which might give rise to certain ways of using language or sounds and associating those with meanings for example has that happened to you in other words have you had a deep thought that you're pretty sure you wouldn't have had had you not exposed yourself to psychedelic mushrooms yes in a word yes um so you'd recommend everyone do it then no i wouldn't i wouldn't do that why if if it made you smarter or more insightful in your own work uh why not just recognize that you know have it over the counter at the pharmacy well these experiences can be somewhat unruly and so you'd want to be sure that you're taking it in the right frame of mind in the right setting um and some people might have constitutions that would not agree with this kind of radical alteration in their experience and they'd be wise to stay clear other people might need certain kinds of supervision um it's not a straightforward process so i wouldn't recommend that everyone everyone took them i think many people can certainly benefit from psychedelic experiences which is why it's exciting to see this new wave of research into psychedelic compounds pick up steam there you go well there is this isn't one of the patreon questions but i know there's been quite a bit of research recently there's been a fair few news stories that have come out of late into how psychedelic treatments might be beneficial for certain types of depression yeah i've seen more articles on that that's right so i it's it's one thing to know that it's there and it's psychedelic but it's quite a whole other exercise to take this chemical and see how it can be absorbed up up took into civilization in ways that can serve our needs yeah i mean the thing to remember is that these psychedelic compounds whether from fungi or from plants or from animals they've been really major parts of traditional human societies for a very very long time and so um it's not like this is news in the big picture of of human existence it's just this new way that science is finding to describe quantify and make sense of these experiences within the framework of modern medical pathology uh modern illnesses and treatment programs one final question then because this is tarisina sent in a bunch and this is the last question that we have and this is how can we take advantage of the properties of the fungi network to combat climate change and can we even is i possibly a bigger question yeah if it's if the field is in its infancy in in a way there could be so much potential if people are thinking the right way about it or you bring people from other disciplines to then help explore what applications might exist that would be invisible to someone who's really close to the problem yeah there's an explosion of interest in in fungal applications at the moment and many of them to do with the ways that funky can help us adapt to the um the climate change problem or problems rather so there are a number of ways you can think about it um there are fungal medicines that can um that can help humans recover from illnesses but also can help other animals the mycologist paul stamets has done some amazing work showing that fungal extracts can help bees overcome viral pathogens and so extend the lifetime of bees and beehives which in turn can help us adapt to changing climates and changing pressures on pollination schemes and there are also fungal materials built using mycelium which can help disrupt polluting plastics industries um can create sustainable materials for use in in buildings or structures but also for clothing and kind of method-like material fungi in agriculture and forestry we're never going to not need to grow trees and plants and fungi are fundamental to all plant life so other ways that we can change our behavior so that the plants and fungi can better support each other in these changing situations we find ourselves in um there are fungal foods are there new types of ways that we can grow so proteinaceous um delicious meat substitutes using mycelium and which would relieve our dependence on on unsustainable meat farming there are many such examples there are also ways that that climate change might make things worse in conjunction with the funky um so some fungal pathogens of plants for example might be able to move into new areas when climates change and whole swathes of forests might become vulnerable to new fungal pathogens it's already happening and killing off huge areas of forest which would then be decomposed by other types of fungi and lots of co2 will then be emitted into the atmosphere so it's not a straightforward story about fungal saviors fungi are startlingly ingenious opportunists and as things change and they will be able to move into new niches and and maybe sometimes that will be good for us and sometimes less good do you have any party thoughts for us about uh as we go forward um any advice any uh bits of wisdom you have gleaned from this mycelial madness well you know neil one thing i i've often thought about because these fungal networks are astonishing and and and raise all sorts of questions about how life works um but one of the things that's been interesting recently maybe you'll be able to tell me a bit more about it is that the cosmic web the very structure of the universe is now thought to be made up of big filaments of gas and galaxies arranged in clusters linked together in this way so i would say um as below so above when i'm looking at these fungal networks and thinking about the structure of the universe presumably you would say as above so below well okay i can i'm happy to say that they look alike right the the cosmic web that they speak of but a web implies some coherence to what's going on and in this cosmic web the distances between nodes is so far that even at the speed of light an appreciable fraction of the age of the universe has to go by before it could communicate with another if we want to use the word communicate so for so we have we have galaxy clusters that are so large they're clearly together but it can take the age of the universe for any one galaxy to cross and get to the other side well that's really that's the slow boat all right so it's not authen it's not legitimate to think of these as functioning systems if if we're limited by the speed of light of course as we expect that they are whereas your mycelium and everything else that's sort of terrestrial or smaller yeah you could have interconnectivity on the time scale of the lifespan of the organism you're talking about so just because things look the same doesn't always mean they are the same and i say in this case that's one of those examples yeah i mean i didn't i didn't think for a moment that the um the cosmic web and the oyster mushroom mycedium were were the same but but it would be cool if they were if the mushrooms in fact were communicating with the galaxies so matt that's we just give up at that point we got no hope as humans in this universe the day we discover that mushrooms are controlling galaxies all right guys we got to call it quits there so merlin thank you for coming on to star talk uh all the way from london and we're going to follow your work and just in case you discover some new mushroom and you want to tell everybody about it you can do it here first we can get it we've got some new got some new fancy mushrooms got new properties uh we'll we'll take that interview and matt always good to have you dude oh it's good to be here and i'm fascinated i want to know more about i'm getting this book because i feel like we've not even scratched the surface no of course not of course not right that's not possible for something that complex all right so merlin when the mushrooms become our overlords i think see matt i think he's practicing for that so that he won't get con keep him as their pet and they'll eat the rest of us you see that's how that'll work i think they've already infected me which is why this has been star talk and i'm neil degrasse tyson as always bidding you to keep looking up [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 374,506

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, mushrooms, fungi, shrooms, psychedelics, merlin sheldrake, the mysterious kingdom

Id: 59JisQXUeTg

Length: 54min 16sec (3256 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021

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Space?

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Everything is in space.