I asked him if there is reason to believe that psilocybin is a defense chemical for the mushroom. Defense against pests and diseases is the most common function of the so-called secondary metabolites produced in plants. Curiously, many plant toxins don’t directly kill pests, but often act as psychostimulants as well as poisons, which is why we use many of them as drugs to alter consciousness. Why wouldn’t plants just kill their predators outright? Perhaps because that would quickly select for resistance, whereas messing with its neurotransmitter networks can distract the predator or, better still, lead it to engage in risky behaviors likely to shorten its life. Think of an inebriated insect behaving in a way that attracts the attention of a hungry bird.
But Beug pointed out that if psilocybin were a defense chemical, “my former student Paul Stamets would have jumped on it long ago and found a use for it as an antifungal, antibacterial, or insecticide.” In fact Beug has tested fungi for psilocybin and psilocin levels and found that they occur only in minute quantities in the mycelium—the part of the organism most likely to be well defended. “Instead the chemicals are in the fruiting bodies—sometimes at over two percent by dry weight!”—a stupendous quantity, and in a part of the organism it is not a priority to defend.
Even if psilocybin in mushrooms began as “an accident of a metabolic pathway,” the fact that it wasn’t discarded during the course of the species’ evolution suggests it must have offered some benefit. “My best guess,” Beug says, “is that the mushrooms that produced the most psilocybin got selectively eaten and so their spores got more widely disseminated.”
Eaten by whom, or what? And why? Beug says that many animals are known to eat psilocybin mushrooms, including horses, cattle, and dogs. Some, like cows, appear unaffected, but many animals appear to enjoy an occasional change in consciousness too. Beug is in charge of gathering mushroom-poisoning reports for the North American Mycological Association and over the years has seen accounts of horses tripping in their paddocks and dogs that “zero in on Psilocybes and appear to be hallucinating.” Several primate species (aside from our own) are also known to enjoy psychedelic mushrooms. Presumably animals with a taste for altered states of consciousness have helped spread psilocybin far and wide. “The strains of a species that produced more rather than less psilocybin and psilocin would tend to be favored and so gradually become more widespread.”
Eaten in small doses, psychedelic mushrooms might well increase fitness in animals, by increasing sensory acuity and possibly focus as well. A 2015 review article in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology reported that several tribes around the world feed psychoactive plants to their dogs in order to improve their hunting ability.*
At higher doses, however, one would think that animals tripping on psychedelic mushrooms would be at a distinct disadvantage for survival, and no doubt many of them are. But for a select few, the effects may offer some adaptive value, not only for themselves, but also possibly for the group and even the species.
Here we venture out onto highly speculative, slightly squishy ground, guided by an Italian ethnobotanist named Giorgio Samorini. In a book called Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness, Samorini hypothesizes that during times of rapid environmental change or crisis it may avail the survival of a group when a few of its members abandon their accustomed conditioned responses and experiment with some radically new and different behaviors. Much like genetic mutations, most of these novelties will prove disastrous and be discarded by natural selection. But the laws of probability suggest that a few of the novel behaviors might end up being useful, helping the individual, the group, and possibly the species to adapt to rapid changes in their environment.
Samorini calls this a “depatterning factor.” There are times in the evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adaptation. Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a population.
It is difficult to read about Samorini’s lovely theory without thinking about our own species and the challenging circumstances in which we find ourselves today. Homo sapiens might have arrived at one of those periods of crisis that calls for some mental and behavioral depatterning. Could that be why nature has sent us these psychedelic molecules now?
* * *
• • •
SUCH A NOTION would not strike Paul Stamets as the least bit far-fetched. As we stood around the fire pit, the warm light flickering across our faces while our dinner sizzled in its pan, Stamets talked about what mushrooms have taught him about nature. He was expansive, eloquent, grandiose, and, at times, in acute danger of slipping the surly bonds of plausibility. We had had a few beers, and while we hadn’t touched our tiny stash of azzies, we had smoked a little pot. Stamets dilated on the idea of psilocybin as a chemical messenger sent from Earth, and how we had been elected, by virtue of the gift of consciousness and language, to hear its call and act before it’s too late.
“Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we can understand.” Why us? “We humans are the most populous bipedal organisms walking around, so some plants and fungi are especially interested in enlisting our support. I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.”
These were riffs I’d heard Stamets deliver in countless talks and interviews. “Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share,” he explains in another one. “I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.” Stamets sounded very much like the volunteers I met at Hopkins who had had full-blown mystical experiences, people whose sense of themselves as individuals had been subsumed into a larger whole—a form of “unitive consciousness,” which, in Stamets’s case, had folded him into the web of nature, as its not so humble servant.
“I think Psilocybes have given me new insights that may allow me to help steer and speed fungal evolution so that we can find solutions to our problems.” Especially in a time of ecological crisis, he suggests, we can’t afford to wait for evolution, unfolding at its normal pace, to put forth these solutions in time. Let the depatterning begin.
As Stamets held forth, and forth, I couldn’t help but picture in my mind Alex Grey’s wacked painting of the stoned ape, with the tornadoes of thought flying out of his hairy head. So much of what Stamets has to say treads a perilously narrow ledge, perched between the autodidact’s soaring speculative flights and the stoned crank’s late night riffings that eventually send everyone in earshot off to bed. But just when I was beginning to grow impatient with his meanders, and could hear the call of my sleeping bag from inside the yurt, he, or I, turned a corner, and his mycological prophecies suddenly appeared to me in a more generous light.
The day before, Stamets had given me a tour of the labs and grow rooms at Fungi Perfecti, the company he founded right out of college. Tucked into the evergreen forest a short walk from his house, the Fungi Perfecti complex consists of a series of long white metal buildings that look like Quonset huts or small hangars. Outside are piles of wood chips, discarded fungi, and growing media. Some of the buildings house the grow rooms where he raises medicinal and edible species; others contain his research facility, with clean rooms and laminar flow chambers in which Stamets reproduces fungi from tissue culture and conducts his experiments. On the office walls hang several of his patents, framed. Amid the torrent of words, what I observed in these buildings was a salutary reminder that while Stamets is surely a big
talker, he is not just a talker. He is a big doer too, a successful researcher and entrepreneur who is using fungi to make original contributions across a remarkably wide range of fields, from medicine and environmental restoration to agriculture and forestry and even national defense. Stamets is in fact a scientist, albeit of a special kind.
Exactly what kind of scientist I didn’t completely understand until a few weeks later, when I happened to read a wonderful biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the great early nineteenth-century German scientist (and colleague of Goethe’s) who revolutionized our understanding of the natural world. Humboldt believed it is only with our feelings, our senses, and our imaginations—that is, with the faculties of human subjectivity—that we can ever penetrate nature’s secrets. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice” that is “familiar to his soul.” There is an order and beauty organizing the system of nature—a system that Humboldt, after briefly considering the name “Gaia,” chose to call “Cosmos”—but it would never have revealed itself to us if not for the human imagination, which is itself of course a product of nature, of the very system it allows us to comprehend. The modern conceit of the scientist attempting to observe nature with perfect objectivity, as if from a vantage located outside it, would have been anathema to Humboldt. “I myself am identical with nature.”
If Stamets is a scientist, as I believe he is, it is in the Humboldtian mold, making him something of a throwback. I don’t mean to suggest his contribution is on the same order as Humboldt’s. But he too is an amateur in the best sense, self-taught, uncredentialed, and blithe about trespassing disciplinary borders. He too is an accomplished naturalist and inventor, with several new species and patents to his credit. He too hears nature’s voice, and it is his imagination—wild as it often is—that allows him to see systems where others have not, such as what is going on beneath our feet in a forest. I’m thinking, for example, of the “earth’s Internet,” “the neurological network of nature,” and the “forest’s immune system”—three Romantic-sounding metaphors that it would be foolish to bet against.
What strikes me about both Stamets and many of the so-called Romantic scientists (like Humboldt and Goethe, Joseph Banks, Erasmus Darwin, and I would include Thoreau) is how very much more alive nature seems in their hands than it would soon become in the cooler hands of the professionals. These more specialized scientists (a word that wasn’t coined until 1834) gradually moved science indoors and increasingly gazed at nature through devices that allowed them to observe it at scales invisible to the human eye. These moves subtly changed the object of study—indeed, made it more of an object.
Instead of seeing nature as a collection of discrete objects, the Romantic scientists—and I include Stamets in their number—saw a densely tangled web of subjects, each acting on the other in the great dance that would come to be called coevolution. “Everything,” Humboldt said, “is interaction and reciprocal.” They could see this dance of subjectivities because they cultivated the plant’s-eye view, the animal’s-eye view, the microbe’s-eye view, and the fungus’s-eye view—perspectives that depend as much on imagination as observation.
I suspect that imaginative leap has become harder for us moderns to make. Our science and technology encourage us in precisely the opposite direction, toward the objectification of nature and of all species other than our own. Surely we need to acknowledge the practical power of this perspective, which has given us so much, but we should at the same time acknowledge its costs, material as well as spiritual. Yet that older, more enchanted way of seeing may still pay dividends, as it does (to cite just one small example) when it allows Paul Stamets to figure out that the reason honeybees like to visit woodpiles is to medicate themselves, by nibbling on a saprophytic mycelium that produces just the right antimicrobial compound that the hive needs to survive, a gift the fungus is trading for . . . what? Something yet to be imagined.
Coda
You are probably wondering what ever happened to the azzies Stamets and I found that weekend. Many months later, in the middle of a summer week spent in the house in New England where we used to live, a place freighted with memories, I ate them, with Judith. I crumbled two little mushrooms in each of two glasses and poured hot water over them to make a tea; Stamets had recommended that I “cook” the mushrooms to destroy the compounds that can upset the stomach. Judith and I each drank half a cup, ingesting both the liquid and the crumbles of mushroom. I suggested we take a walk on the dirt road near our house while we waited for the psilocybin to come on.
However, after only about twenty minutes or so, Judith reported she was “feeling things,” none of them pleasant. She didn’t want to be walking anymore, she said, but now we were at least a mile from home. She told me her mind and her body seemed to be drifting apart and then that her mind had flown out of her head and up into the trees, like a bird or insect.
“I need to get home and feel safe,” she said, now with some urgency. I tried to reassure her as we abruptly turned around and picked up our pace. It was hot and the air was thick with humidity. She said, “I really don’t want to run into anybody.” I assured her we wouldn’t. I still felt more or less myself, but it may be that Judith’s distress was keeping me from feeling the mushrooms; somebody had to be ready to act normally if a neighbor happened to drive by and roll down his window for a chat, a prospect that was quickly taking on the proportions of nightmare. In fact shortly before we got back to home base—so it now felt to both of us—we spotted a neighbor’s pickup truck bearing down on us and, like guilty children, we ducked into the woods until it passed.
Judith made a beeline for the couch in the living room, where she lay down with the shades drawn, while I went into the kitchen to polish off my cup of mushroom tea, because I wasn’t yet feeling very much. I was a little worried about her, but once she reached her base on the living room couch, her mood lightened and she said she was fine.
I couldn’t understand her desire to be indoors. I went out and sat on the screened porch for a while, listening to the sounds in the garden, which suddenly grew very loud, as if the volume had been turned way up. The air was stock-still, but the desultory sounds of flying insects and the digital buzz of hummingbirds rose to form a cacophony I had never heard before. It began to grate on my nerves, until I decided I would be better off regarding the sound as beautiful, and then all at once it was. I lifted an arm, then a foot, and noted with relief that I wasn’t paralyzed, though I also didn’t feel like moving a muscle.
Whenever I closed my eyes, random images erupted as if the insides of my lids were a screen. My notes record: Fractal patterns, tunnels plunging through foliage, ropy vines forming grids. But when I started to feel panic rise at the lack of control I had over my visual field, I discovered that all I needed to do to restore a sense of semi-normalcy was to open my eyes. To open or close my eyes was like changing the channel. I thought, “I am learning how to manage this experience.”
Much happened, or seemed to happen, during the course of that August afternoon, but I want to focus here on just one element of the experience, because it bears on the questions of nature and our place in it that psilocybin seems to provoke, at least for me. I decided I wanted to walk out to my writing house, a little structure I had built myself twenty-five years ago, in what is now another life, and which holds a great many memories. I had written two and a half books in the little room (including one about building it), sitting before a broad window that looked back over a pond and the garden to our house.
However, I was still vaguely worried about Judith, so before wandering too far from the house, I went inside to check on her. She was stretched out on the couch, with a cool damp cloth over her eyes. She was fine. “I’m having these very interesting visuals,” she said, something having to do with the stains on the coffee table coming to life, swirling and transforming and rising from the surface in ways she found compelling. She made it clear she wanted to be left alone to
sink more deeply into the images—she is a painter. The phrase “parallel play” popped into my mind, and so it would be for the rest of the afternoon.
I stepped outside, feeling unsteady on my feet, legs a little rubbery. The garden was thrumming with activity, dragonflies tracing complicated patterns in the air, the seed heads of plume poppies rattling like snakes as I brushed by, the phlox perfuming the air with its sweet, heavy scent, and the air itself so palpably dense it had to be forded. The word and sense of “poignance” flooded over me during the walk through the garden, and it would return later. Maybe because we no longer live here, and this garden, where we spent so many summers as a couple and then a family, and which at this moment seemed so acutely present, was in fact now part of an irretrievable past. It was as if a precious memory had not just been recalled but had actually come back to life, in a reincarnation both beautiful and cruel. Also heartrending was the fleetingness of this moment in time, the ripeness of a New England garden in late August on the verge of turning the corner of the season. Before dawn one cloudless night very soon and without warning, the thrum and bloom and perfume would end all at once, with the arrival of the killing frost. I felt wide open emotionally, undefended.
When at last I arrived at the writing house, I stretched out on the daybed, something I hardly ever took the time to do in all the years when I was working here so industriously. The bookshelves had been emptied, and the place felt abandoned, a little sad. From where I lay, I could see over my toes to the window screen and, past that, to the grid of an arbor that was now densely woven with the twining vines of what had become a venerable old climbing hydrangea, a petiolaris. I had planted the hydrangea decades ago, in hopes of creating just this sort of intricately tangled prospect. Backlit by the late afternoon sunlight streaming in, its neat round leaves completely filled the window, which meant you gazed out at the world through the fresh green scrim they formed. It seemed to me these were the most beautiful leaves I had ever seen. It was as if they were emitting their own soft green glow. And it felt like a kind of privilege to gaze out at the world through their eyes, as it were, as the leaves drank up the last draughts of sunlight, transforming those photons into new matter. A plant’s-eye view of the world—it was that, and for real! But the leaves were also looking back at me, fixing me with this utterly benign gaze. I could feel their curiosity and what I was certain was an attitude of utter benevolence toward me and my kind. (Do I need to say that I know how crazy this sounds? I do!)
How to Change Your Mind Page 13
