source: Entangled Life (chapter 2) by Merlin Sheldrake

Mycelial networks are decentralized organisms, made up of swarms of interconnected hyphal tips

  • Hyphae are long, branched, and a single sell thick

How does one part of a mycelial network know what’s happening in a distant part of the network?

How do fungi eat?

Fungi use Mycelium to feed - they embed themselves in their food, digest it externally, then absorb the nutrients

  • food supplies are unpredictable, so the mycelium must be flexible (although growth patterns are not infinitely variable)
  • Fungi can exert high pressures to get into food

Facts about Hyphae

When Hyphae grow, they grow longer

  • sometimes this process is so fast we can watch it
  • this is in contrast to most multicellular organisms, which lay down new layers of cells

Life forms are processes and not things

  • matter is constantly passing through living things

Mushrooms are collections of hyphae, inflated with water

  • this is why mushrooms appear after rain
  • This process can exert enough pressure to push through asphalt
  • water must travel rapidly through a network in a carefully directed pulse

Microtubules dynamic filaments of protein, move substances across mycelial networks

  • act as motors, so they can be energetically costly

Fungi can perceive their world and act upon it

Most fungi can detect and respond to the following:

  • light (direction, intensity and color)
    • fungi use opsins, the same light-sensitive pigment in rods and cones in our eyes
  • temperature
  • moisture, nutrients, toxins
  • electrical fields

hyphae can integrate these data streams and take action

  • they don’t have central brains. How do they do it?

Max Delbruk (biophysicist) - in the 1950s, he studied the perceptive ability of Pycomyces blakesleeanus

  • Pycomyces can detect nearby objects, and we don’t know how

Electrical signals in mycelial networks

Stefan Olsson Swedish mycologist - researches how mycelial networks coordinate

  • Observed that signals spread through a Panellus stipticus network, but more quickly than chemicals can spread through the mycelium itself
  • When he repeated the experiment with two separate networks, the signal didn’t spread between the two

Animals use electrical impulses to communicate information throughout our bodies - Olsson looked into whether communication systems exist for fungi as well

  • used honey fungus (Armillaria), because it can stretch over kilometers and reach thousands of years in age
  • Honey fungus fires impulses at a rate very similar to animal’s sensory neurons
  • Olsson was able to replicate results with different types of fungus

animal brains

Also complex networks of electrically excitable cells, but they differ from mycelial networks

  • synapses, junctions where neurons connect, are not present in mycelial networks
  • there could be other ways to regulate electrical impulses, though

Fungal networks and Biocomputing

Biocomputing is already a field

  • slime molds can act as sensors and computers
  • mycelial networks are more convenient for computing

Andrew Adamatzky director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory

  • Observed spontaneous waves of electrical activity in oyster mushrooms
  • published a paper called “Towards fungal computer” where he proposed that mycelial networks could compute information

fungal reactions are slower than silicon ones, but Adamatzky thinks we can use mycelium as “large-scale environmental sensor[s]”

  • fungal networks already monitor lots of data streams, and we could use that to learn more about ecosystems

defining intelligence

Traditional definitions of intelligence require a brain or a mind, since we define it by studying humans

  • Daniel Dennett dismisses this requirement as an “archaic myth”
  • Charles Darwin: “Intelligence is based on how efficient a species becomes at doing the things they need to survive”

Swarm intelligence describes problem solving behavior of brainless systems

Our brains are filled with neurons that don’t know what our thoughts are

Animals can do a lot without brains

  • If you train a flatworm to do something and cut off its head, it will grow a new head. Moreover, the new head will act on the original’s training

Octopuses have nerves distributed throughout their bodies

  • lots of nerves are in the tentacles