Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is a brilliant exploration of the hidden lives of fungi and of the many ways they transgress and confound our categories and mental models.

What is it like to be a fungus? (3)

Fungi are everywhere, but they are easy to miss. (3)

They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. (3)

Fungi make up one of life’s kingdoms — as broad and busy a category as animals or plants. (3)

The mycelium of some fungal species is electrically excitable and conducts waves of electrical activity along hyphae, analogous to the electrical impulses in animal nerve cells. (6)

Although fungi have long been lumped together with plants, they are actually more closely related to animals. (9)

At a molecular level, fungi and humans are similar enough to benefit from many of the same biochemical innovations (e.g., penicillin) (9)

Plants are socially networked by fungi. (12)

Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life. (17)

There are two key moves by which fungal hyphae become a mycelial network. First, they branch. Second, they fuse. (35)

Some fungi have tens of thousands of mating types, approximately equivalent to our sexes. (36)

The methods fungi use to hunt nematodes are grizzly and diverse. (39)

Biological realities are never black-and-white. (42)

Imagine that you could pass through two doors at once. It’s inconceivable, yet fungi do it all the time. When faced with a forked path, fungal hyphae don’t have to choose one or the other. They can branch and take both routes. (45)

Is this organism singular or plural, I find myself wondering, before I’m forced to admit that it is somehow, improbably, both. (45)

A mycelial network has no head and no brain. (50)

Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food. (51)

All life-forms are in fact processes not things. (53)

Most fungi are able to detect and respond to light, temperature, moisture, nutrients, toxins, and electrical fields. (58)

Like plants, fungi can ‘see’ color across the spectrum. (58)

Hyphae distinguish ‘self’ from ‘other’ and between different kinds of ‘other.’ (58)

A given mycelial network might have anywhere between hundreds and billions of hyphal tips, all integrating and processing information on a massively parallel basis. (59)

A fungal computer may sound fantastical, but biocomputing is a fast-growing field. (64)

The flatworm’s memory appeared to reside in a part of their body outside the brain. (67)

Lichens [a union of fungi and algae or bacteria] mine minerals from rock. (75)

A portion of the minerals in your body is likely to have passed through a lichen. (75)

Lichens are go-betweens that inhabit the boundary dividing life and nonlife. (75)

Horizontal gene transfer means that genes, and the traits they encode, are infectious. (77)

The most significant moments in evolution had resulted from the coming together, and staying together, of different organisms. (80)

Eukaryotes (all animals, plants, fungi) arose when a single-celled organism engulfed a bacterium, which continued to live symbiotically inside it. (80)

Lichens are places where an organism unravels into an ecosystem and where an ecosystem congeals into an organism. They flicker between wholes and collections of parts. (88)

Lichens don’t contain microbiomes. They are microbiomes. (89)

It is no longer possible to conceive of any organism, humans included, as distinct from the microbial communities they share a body with. (91)

Life is nested biomes all the way down. (91)

A holobiont [is] an assemblage of different organisms that behaves as a unit. (92)

LSD and psilocybin are fungal molecules that have found themselves entangled within human life in complicated ways exactly because they confound our concepts and structures, including the most fundamental concept of all: that of our selves. (95)

Zombie fungi are able to control the minds of their insect hosts. (97)

There are many examples of intoxication in the animal world — birds eat inebriating berries, lemurs lick millipedes, moths drink the nectar of psychoactive flowers. (99)

Psychedelics open a window of mental flexibility in which people can let go of the mental models we use to organize reality. (111)

By softening the categories that organize human experience, psilocybin and other psychedelics are able to open up new cognitive possibilities. (111)

Today, more than ninety percent of all plant species depend on mycorrhizal fungi. They are the rule, not the exception: a more fundamental part of planthood than fruit, flowers, leaves, wood, or even roots. (124)

One of the things that mycorrhizal fungi do best is to mine phosphorus from the soil and transfer it to their plant partners. (130)

The fungus actively transported phosphorus from areas of abundance, where it fetched a low price when exchanged with a plant root, to areas of scarcity, where it was in higher demand and fetched a higher price. (137)

Intensive farming practices — through a combination of plowing and application of chemical fertilizers or fungicides — reduce the abundance of mycorrhizal fungi and alter the structure of their communities. (145)

Mycorrhizal mycelium is a sticky living seam that holds soil together; remove the fungi, and the ground washes away. (145)

It’s unlikely we’ll get far unless we question some of our categories. The view of plants as autonomous individuals with neat borders is causing destruction. (147)

Plant communication through fungal networks is one of the most compelling aspects of mycorrhizal behavior. (165)

[There are] parallels between shared [interspecies] mycorrhizal networks in forests and neural networks in animal brains. (172)

The dominant narrative in the United States and western Europe since the development of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century was one of conflict and competition, and it mirrored views of human social progress within an industrial capitalist system. (210)

Modern capitalist thought is founded on the idea of rational individuals acting in their own interest. (213)

How different would our societies and institutions look if we thought of fungi, rather than animals or plants, as typical lifeforms? (214)

As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome.