To The Best Of Our Knowledge; The Weird, Wild World of Mushrooms

It's to the best of our knowledge. Can mushrooms save the world? Anybody who gets close to mushrooms becomes a mushroom obsessed. If you talk to any mycologists, they are the most idiosyncratic people, the most passionate people, and they very quickly become convinced that mushrooms explain everything and can essentially save the world. I'm Anne Strange, and today mushrooms. Some can heal you. Some can kill you, and some can change you forever. It is still absolutely mysterious, appalling, challenging, boundary dissolving, and unavoidably ecstatic. It is the living mystery. The magic of mushrooms, and the stoned ape theory of human evolution. First this. I'm Anne Strange. I'm Anne Strange.

I'm Anne Strange. I'm Anne Strange.

I'm Anne Strange. I'm Anne Strange. I'm Anne Strange.

I'm Anne Strange. I'm Anne Strange. I'm Anne Strange.

I'm Anne Strange. I'm Anne Strange. I'm Anne Strange. I'm Anne Strange. It's to the best of our knowledge. What if I told you that you owe your existence to a mushroom? Oh yes, fungus man. Fungus man is very interesting. He's the personification of a large bracket fungus. Lawrence Millman, with a story from way back in the mists of time. Fungus man was a friend of raven who created the world. Raven created the man, but then scratched his

head. What can I do next? There doesn't seem to be any more of the species I've just created. But fungus man was quite smart. He told raven, I can take you in my canoe to the island where female genitalia scampered around. And they arrived on this island and there are all these female genitalia scampering over the rocks. A description in the myth makes them look a little bit like kite and shell. So raven is really happy. He collects a lot of them

and takes them back and affixes them to the man. They therefore become women and then the men who don't have them fixed to themselves look very happily at the man who do or now women. As the old man who told me this story said, if it wasn't for fungus man, I wouldn't be telling you this story and you wouldn't be here to listen to it. There's a lot of truth buried in myths. I'm Ann Strainchamps and this one is from the height of First Nation people in British Columbia. And the truth? We do owe our past and maybe future existence on Earth to the Kingdom of Mushrooms. Fungi. Let's

go back in time. Most people may not realize that we shared a common answer with fungi 650 million years ago. My college is Paul Stemitz. Fungi were their first organisms to come to land. As they grow, they lead the path and then plants came to land several hundred million years after fungi. Now we go back to 250 million years ago and we had a great cataclysmic event. Enormous amounts of debris were jettisoned into the atmosphere. Sunlight was choked off, probably for decades. We don't know how long. A massive extinction. Most plants and animals became extinct and fungi inherited the Earth. And those organisms that paired with fungi survived. And this is a lesson that we need to learn. We are now in 6x, the sixth greatest extinction event known in the history of life on this planet. We pair with

fungi. We will hopefully survive this extinction event. Can mushrooms save the world? Let's find out. First of all, can I just say? Other than when I'm cooking, I don't really think about mushrooms all that much. But then, Steve Paulson started talking about Paul Stemitz. This has to be the most passionate microbiologist on the planet. Paul is an evangelist for the healing power of mushrooms. He spends his time roaming old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest looking for rare species. He works with the U .S. Defense Department and the NIH to develop new technologies and new medicines from mushrooms. For example. Well, of course, everyone knows about penicillin that came

from a mold. But many of the mushroom producing fungi are very strongly active against bacteria, including MRSA, staff, including E. coli. And I'm doing research against mycobacterium tuberculosis. One of our fungi from the old growth forest, which is called a gyrocon, shows to be highly active against orthopoxes, including smallpox. And so much of my resources and attention has been focused on getting as many strains of this old growth fungus in culture as possible, because it's rapidly on the decline. And as pollution and the forests are cut back, we're losing what I call micro -diversity. And it's very important that we preserve some of these ancestral strains before they become extinct. So tell me how this would work. I mean, suppose there wasn't outbreak of smallpox. How might this particular fungus be used as a remedy? So it was unique about this fungus. It used to grow in Europe, and it's now practically extinct. The ancient name is called a gyrocon, but the Greek name for it was elixirium adlongum -vitam,

the elixir of long life. And diascoritis first published in 65AD as a treatment against consumption, a respiratory illness later thought to be tuberculosis. And so we have a sort of a mystery at hand, because a gyrocon is duly active against DNA viruses, which is pox and herpes, and RNA viruses, which is flu A's and flu B's. And that's a conundrum, because most virologists would say, well, that's not right. And it may well be that this a gyrocon mushroom, for instance, it grows a hundred feet up in the trees oftentimes. So I have to find them when the trees are falling down or in the growing low, or I'll climb the trees with a friend of mine. But it is subject to a hundred -mile -hour winds, hundreds of inches of rain per year. And yet this mushroom grows for up to 75 years under these adverse conditions, and this mushroom does not rot. Why is it so hardy? Oh, good question. I'm asking the same question as well, and I think we can benefit from examples in nature, and that's what we are on the path to discovering, hopefully. Do you have been talking about how you love doing your research in Old Growth Forest, and you live in the state of Washington? And you have brought into the studio a

huge fungus, or is it a mushroom, I guess? Well, I'm not exactly sure what the difference is there. So, yes, this is a mushroom. Now, there's one to two million species of fungi estimated in the kingdom, ten percent are mushroom -forming fungi, about 150 ,000 species. But we've only identified 14 ,000 species so far. So, more than 90 percent of the species of mushrooms have not yet been identified. This one is a large woodcunk. It's roughly what about a foot -and -a -half long, maybe a foot -high, sort of roughly the shape of an oversized football? Well, it looks to many people like a waspness or a beehive, and it has concentric rings of growth, and those are annual growth rings, as hard like wood. In fact, TSA broke my agaricon, as you were going through the airport. They wanted to know what was inside of it. I was horrified. It's a fungus. What's inside of it? More fungus, right? So, this is a particularly rare mushroom. This is one of the rarest mushrooms in the Old Growth Forest. It's exclusive of the Old Growth Forest, now thought to be extinct in Europe. The more that I study this mushroom, the more excited I am. And it's really, I think, could go down in history as a medical

breakthrough, as a resource for novel antibacterial and antiviral medicines together. Now, there have also been fungi used to help clean up toxic waste sites, right? Yeah, that's micro -remediation. That's something I've been actively involved in running these mycelial mats on woodchips outdoors, downstream from factories and farms, and the mycelial networks capture pollutants, and they gobble them up. Wait, what do these mats look like? Everyone can see them today. Just go outside, find a piece of wood, and just tip the piece of wood up. And you'll see underneath this white velvet fine -fibreous network called mycelium. And it's analogous to the roots of an apple tree, it gives rise to the tree that gives an apple. Well, the roots are the mycelial network that is in all landscapes. And under certain conditions, it produces a fruit, which is called mushrooms, that largest organism in the world is a mycelial mat in eastern Oregon. It's 2 ,200 acres in size, 1665 football fields. You're saying this is one single organism? One single organism, and

it's one cell wall thick. When you see a dense on the ground, they can be more than eight miles of mycelium per cubic inch. This is the foundation of the food web. These are the interface organisms between life and death, and they build soil. So what kinds of toxic substances then are sucked up by this mycelium? A whole pantheon of compounds. These are grand molecular disassemblers. We've been able to break down diesel spills, oil spills, two of our fungi broke down VX, Soman and Serran, which is a potent neurotoxin. So the trick, in a sense, to having a successful cleanup operation at a waste site, particularly a toxic waste site, is to be able to break down those nasty substances. And you're saying fungi have particular properties that can do that. Indeed, a lot of the hydrocarbon -based contaminants, even pesticides and herbicides, weak actually, can break them down with fungi. There's a mushroom called turkey tail, a Trimades Versa color, that's circumpolar all over the world, grows on wood, and has an amazing property. It binds mercury.

Even when it's dead, you can powder this mycelium up, and you can throw it into mercuric ions in water. And the mycelium hyperaccumulate selenium. And the selenium and the mercury come together as a biomolecular unit that makes it totally non -toxic. So the implications are enormous. These fungi offer a platform of solutions on multiple levels. And this is what's so exciting about them, but this is what nature is all about. Nature speaks to us all the time. We just need to listen. So here you are telling us that mushrooms can, in some ways, help save the world. And yet my guess is that the vast majority of scientists could take mushrooms for granted, or they don't really think about it very much. So why are you out there when so few other people are, you know, touting the great benefits of these things? Well, I'm in great despair that something so important is so under -evaluated and understudied, underfunded, and not given the priority that it should be. I like to say that the Micology Department should be as well funded as the computer science departments. It is that important for the survival of life on this planet. And it speaks a little bit to what we call microphobia, the irrational fear of fungi.

Well, for one thing we've heard that some of them are poisonous. If a person dies from mushroom poisoning in the United States, virtually every news media will pick it up. Very few people do die from mushroom poisoning. Very few mushrooms comparatively are poisonous. Of course, you should know what mushrooms are edible or poisonous before you ingest them, just like any plants. Thankfully, we're a pluralistic society. And we've benefited from Polish people and Europeans, and the Japanese and Koreans, and the Chinese. They're very microphilic societies. The Chinese look at, for instance, the quarter -step mushroom that comes from insects as rebirth. You know, it's a whole different psychology of looking at nature. And this is, you know, Al Gore and E .O. Wilson and other people have spoke to this. But we are really in a serious trouble. It is far more serious than I think anyone fully realizes. We are in a massive extinction event. And E .O. Wilson predicts that 50 % of the known species have become extinct in the next 100 years. What happens when we lose biodiversity and microdiversity is like losing rivets of an airplane.

At some point, we'll undergo catastrophic failure. You know, we are evolutionary successes today. Yeah, who? We made it so far, but for how long? And I've often thought if there was the United Organization of Organisms, otherwise called, uh -oh. Will we be voted on the planet or off the planet? I think that vote's happening right now. And unless we get our act together and join with nature, we could perhaps be a victim of the extinction event that we're creating. That's my college's Paul Stammett's talking with Steve Paulson. Paul is a researcher and writer. He's filed 22 patents for mushroom -related technologies. He also runs a business called fungi perfecti. So as you've guessed, we're talking about the wonders of mushrooms today. And I have to say there is something both charming and also slightly weird

about the level of devotion that mushrooms seem to inspire. It's like this really intense fan club or cult. I mean, there are people all over this country who will go to all kinds of extremes for a single mushroom. Just last fall, here in New York, we had a really great year for my tacky Crafola Frandosa, which grow under mature oak. And we were having a fantastic time just looking up the names of cemeteries that had oak in the name. So then we go drive up to the cemetery and collect the mushrooms that are growing under the trees. And so on the way back from one of these cemetery hunts in the fall, I saw this really big, my tacky growing underneath the tree in somebody's front yard. This isn't Long Island. And my husband and I were like, should we just grab it? No, no, we can't. It's just wrong.

So after much walking back and forth in front of this poor person's house, I finally knocked on the door and he was like, I was wondering what you're doing out there. We said, is it okay if we take the mushroom and give you half of it? And he said, no, get rid of it. I don't want it, you know. How big was that mushroom? Well, I'm probably about 14 pounds. Wow, it was a really big mushroom. We could see it from the road. And they can grow to be tremendous. And this one was tremendous. Meet the mushroom hunters next. I'm Ann Strang champs. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. And PRX. See you next time.

How far would you go for a mushroom? And you can't find them at the grocery store. But you could also start picking your own, maybe in secret wild places you wouldn't tell even your closest friends about. Then you could start hanging out at mushroom festivals where you can drink mushroom beer and sing mushroom songs with other mushroom fans. At that point, you might start organizing your travel around mushroom seasons. Well, Eugenia Bone does all of that. She's a

food writer and a self -described microfiliac. Shannon Henry Clyber caught up with her the day before, yet another mushroom expedition. This one to the Sierra Mountains to hunt for Morels after a wildfire, with a very big duffel bag. So Morels, certain kinds of Morels grow in a copious amounts after a fire. So the fire happens in the summer. And if there's enough rain in the spring, you know, in certain habitats, these Morels come up in huge numbers. And for the last, well, quite a few years, I've been going out to hunt whatever burns I could find. And so the Sierra's have been happening burning for the last few years. So I fly out and I use my miles. I go on out there. I rent a car with knobby wheels. And we take off into the Sierra's and I bring home very large amounts of Morels. I will probably bring 15 pounds of Morels back

that are fresh and then more that are dry. So yeah, I'll have a duffel full of mushrooms. We pick a lot of mushrooms and it's super fun. Morels, by the way, I think they're like 200 bucks a pound. That's what you'd pay. So you can do the math. Wow. Yeah. Are they your favorite? Do you have a favorite? You know, I have a sort of top three or four. I love gypsy mushrooms. I love Morels. I love porcini mushrooms, the bleedest mushrooms. I love chanterels. I love hedgehogs. You know, I like all the wild ones the most. But the cultivated, you know, I'm not going to turn up my nose in a nice plate of saute chimpignon. Oh, that sounds delicious. So tell me about the taste of some of those favorites. Take me through the taste. Because they all taste different from each other. Well, to a degree. Right? Mushrooms are mushrooms. So they're... They have umami, right? Yeah. They're all sort of... Yeah, exactly. This kind of meaty savouriness. And that's thought to be the result of

mushrooms contained in a kind of pretty high -grade protein. So that meaty savouriness is what... You're tasting that high -grade protein when you eat a mushroom. That's where the umami flavor is thought to come from. One of the main differences, I think, between, say, uh... Like, let's look at my talking, right? Which is the griffola frondosa. It's like this feathery mushroom. It looks like a little hen. You find them under oak trees in the wild and you can find them in the supermarket, too. They're cultivated. So the wild ones taste... It's like the difference between a domestic duck and a wild duck. The wild, my talkie, are kind of gamier. You taste more different soil -type things. Soil in bark and leaves and, you know, worms. And there are more complex, in a way, whereas the cultivated my talkie, which are grown on a bag of oak chips, they don't have quite the complexity. So that's a distinctive difference. Then, you know, the different tastes between the mushrooms, you know, some are more nutty, like the porcini, some are more perfumey or fruity, like the

shuntarell. The truffles are amazing. They're, like, pretty much always a combination of certain strong flavors like garlic and bio. It's always like the bio quality. And I think that's what's just so great. People always romance about truffles and, you know, you smell the wet leaves and I smell like bio and it's great. And you love it. I do. I do. And they're all like that. You may have truffles. I've gone truffle hunting in Oregon. They have other species. The black truffle is like a cross between like a pineapple and a fart. It's just divine. And then there's another one, a little white one. That's really kind of great. That's like a garlicky armpit. I love that one. A garlicky armpit. That's a great description. So to the very best kind of have that, that kind of dichotomy of like something amazing and something kind of awful and it makes the combination powerful.

That's, you know, that's what makes you love the slash lust it. You know, it's that it just turns people on. I mean, in the past, boy, one time I remember I was at Soma Camp in California that's Sonoma Micological Association and I picked a whole bunch of candy caps, which are great mushrooms. They have a flavor of maple syrup. And they're so cool because that maple -y taste, it gets into your bloodstream or something, but it's like when you pee, it smells like maple. I mean, all of your sweat, everything sort of smells like maple, your sex, it smells like maple syrup. It's a very cool mushroom on a lot of levels. That's great. Those are interesting. Where do you get candy cap mushrooms? Do you have to find those in the wild? Yeah, yeah. You know, there's camps and festivals all over the country, by the way. So how do you love to cook mushrooms? What are your, I love sautéed and butter and onions and garlic and cheese and eggs. I'm just thinking of all the kinds of things I like

to cook with mushrooms. What are your favorite ways to cook? I cook different mushrooms different ways. So the really exciting thing is, you know, you go out, you forge the mushrooms, you bring home a nice haul, and then what's the first thing you make? That's sort of my litmus test. So if I'm collecting the porcini, which we find in Colorado and the West Elks, and these are wonderful, chubby mushrooms that are, we find them at 12 ,000 feet, pretty high altitude, under conifer. And the porcini, we slice on a, you know, like a mandolin, into really, really thin slices, and then we slice Parmesan cheese from a hunk, into really thin slices, and then salt and olive oil. And we eat them raw. Oh, that sounds delicious. There's not a whole lot of mushrooms that are ideal to eat raw. But these, like, like, morals, if you eat a moral raw, you'll probably get sick from it, because morals have to be cooked. But

the porcini is fantastic raw. If I get a big load of morals, like the first thing I'll do when I get home after the red eye, after I collect these mushrooms in the siaras, then I take the red home eye home with all of my mushrooms in my suitcase. I'll do one of my favorite dishes, which is in a dutch oven, I put in a cut -up chicken, and a stick of butter, and a bottle of dry sherry, and as many morals as I feel like I can part with at that meal. And I cook it all together, and then finish with a little cream and chopped tarragon, and black pepper. And it's very luscious and very, I mean, French, I guess. It's just divine. So, obviously, some mushrooms are dangerous. They could kill us. They could make us very sick. How can you tell the difference? And have you had a close call? You know, I always have thought it's a good idea to try to learn the ones that are poisonous with as much

interest and vigor as the ones that are edible. There's not so many poisonous ones. I mean, there's not so many that are going to take your liver out right in 36 hours, but there's a few. And learning to identify them, it's just learning how to identify, you know, you're not going to go into the woods and just eat, like, some berry on a bush, right? You're going to know which ones are edible and which ones are poisonous. So, it's just a kind of learning curve. But then there's, like, all these mushrooms, you know, it's a spectrum, right? So, there's some that kill you and then there's some that are really delicious, like truffles, and then there's everything in between. So, a typical example would be, you know, those mushrooms that we eat that are considered poisonous, but we eat willingly, like, intoxicating mushrooms, or mushrooms that some people eat willingly. Or, for example, they omni to mascara. The red mushroom with the white dots. So, most of the time people think, oh, that's a poisonous mushroom.

But my dad told me this story about how there's this fellow Nick Mastro Pietro. He lived in Yonkers and he had a Christmas tree farm. And dad was visiting Nick at the Christmas tree farm and they were walking around and Nick points to the omni and a mascara and the red mushroom with the white dots on it that's growing underneath the Christmas trees. And Nick said, oh, that's a good mushroom. My dad said, are you kidding? That's a poisonous mushroom. And Nick said, no, no. It's really good. It's just that every time I eat it, right afterwards, I fall right to sleep. And my dad's like, you're lucky to wake up. Well, it is, in fact, edible. I've eaten it before. So, I ate it. It was really great. Promptly. Right after I ate it, I fell into this coma, like, sleep. I mean, it lasted three and a half hours or something. It was like the, you know, the drug they give you when you have to have a colonoscopy. And it was completely out. And I woke up with, you know, one shoe on.

Well, but it turns out that this is a mushroom in this capacity that's used with one tribe. Anyway, the Evan tribe in Siberia and then the mushroom is prepared and used as a sleep bait for elderly people. So, when we talk about poisonous mushrooms, you know, it's just, it's a spectrum. So was it a good sleep? It was a complete and total unconsciousness. Do you think that in studying mushrooms, there's something we can learn more about ourselves as humans? For me, I would say, you know, I think there's a lot, but what is most meaningful to me was the realization that what I thought was the world, you know, was really limited by my perspective. And that when I started to get into mushrooms, I realized that there was a lot more to nature

than I could see from where I was standing. I had to take that extra step to start learning about it. You know, because fungi is interesting, they sort of bridge the unseen and seen world. They are microscopic with macroscopic parts, you know, the mushrooms, in a way, like fungi are like a gateway drug to microbiology, which is this huge subject of great import to the workings of our planet. Just, damn it, it's exciting. Eugenia Bohn is a food and nature writer. She's the author of Microphilia and Microbia, and she's a former president of the New York Micological Society. Shannon Henry Clybert talked with her. So mushrooms, have

inspired scientists and chefs, and my college's Lawrence Millman says they have also inspired a few composers. Russell Hallack was a Czech individual of extreme eccentricity who would go into the forest with a note pad and write down the songs that mushrooms were singing. He composed, I think it was about 1 ,500 mushroom songs. Now, he was indeed a Micologist, so he could identify different species, and the different species had different songs. And he said that he sometimes could identify the species from a distance by the song he heard it singing. I have not decided whether this

is an archetypal example of Eastern European humor, or some form of synesthesia of i .e. the music and the eyes somehow combine. He was both a serious musician and a serious Micologist. He composed what's called a Michael Symphony, a mushroom symphony, where he takes all the mushrooms in the forest and combines them into work. And it's rather obvious that he's heard Bela Bartok singing too. So then there's another composer though, John Cage. John Cage, yes. You know that my hobby is sounding wild mushrooms. The American John Cage composer is maybe a... The wrong word, he was a performance artist

who liked to amuse people and take them out of their boxes. However, he was also a Micologist. He helped restart the New York Micological Association. His interest in fungi was primarily inedibles, but he wrote these odd poems and books that were sort of theruvian about his appreciation of nature. I was sure that there was a high coupouette that would have to do with mushrooms. And one of his works he talks about this fly agaric. How many didn't scare you? It's not deadly poisonous. Is it a hallucinogenic? Yes, but it also can result in a trip to the restroom. In fact numerous trips because it opens the sieves at both ends, so to speak.

That that unknown brings mushroom and leave together. But he said that if you played a Beethoven quartet for this mushroom, it will become edible. Did he make any music inspired by mushrooms? Yes, he wrote some songs about collecting mushrooms. He didn't listen to mushrooms and then record their music. But he was inspired by looking at them. Definitely inspired by looking at them. Laurence Millman tells a lot more stories about mushrooms in his new book, Fundrapedia. Okay, we've given you lots of perfectly good rational reasons to love mushrooms.

Now, let's go down the rabbit hole to full on mushroom consciousness. By the way, I have a few more helpful hints. One side will make you glow taller. One side of what? And the other side will make you glow shorter. The other side of what? The mushroom, of course. Coming up. I'm Anne Strange. I'm Sitz to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. And PRX. I'm Sitz to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. I'm

Sitz to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. Oooh... Oh... So there are mushrooms... And then there are mushrooms. The magic kind. For me, this experience was all about nature. This is Michael Polling. I was in my garden in New England, and I had an experience of the plants that I'd never had before. It was a humid August day, and the air was palpable, you know, it was thick. And there were these dragonflies, a huge amount of dragonfly traffic to this day. I don't know how much of it was real and how much of it I imagine. It was the end of the day, and the pollinators were getting their last licks in, and

the plants were going, you know, me, me, me, come pollinate me. And they were talking to the bees, but they were talking to me too. They were returning my gaze, all these leaves. It was like, oh my God, they really are conscious. Everything was alive. And I know how crazy this sounds. I know that plants aren't really conscious in the sense we mean it. So they're, you know, mysteries abide. Michael Polling is a journalist who's written extensively about food and plants, and most recently about psychedelics, and a book called How to Change Your Mind. His experiences led him to join the ranks of ethno -botinists, neuroscientists, and others who are trying to unlock the secrets of psychedelic mushrooms, not in order to have more or better trips, but because they suspect that mushrooms might help answer some of the big questions, like

the origins of our evolution, the development of human consciousness. And there's also this totally bizarre idea, the stoned ape theory. Steve Falson has the story. The first thing to know is that magic mushrooms go way back in human history. Probably, Melania. I mean, the first reports we have, this isn't a written culture, but when the conquistadors get to Central America, they find people using mushrooms in their religious ceremonies as a sacrament. And they called it teonotic auto, which is meant flesh of the gods. And that's, of course, what the Christians call their sacrament, too, right? It was the flesh of God that you're eating in the communion. So this was very threatening to the Catholic Church, because here was a sacrament that actually really worked. I mean, you didn't need faith to see God. You met God. Or is the ethno -botinist Dennis McKenna puts it? It carries a much bigger kick than the Catholic

Eucharist. So Catholicism and Christianity brutally suppressed all of these shamanic practices. They were particularly brutal with the mushrooms. And they crushed it. They absolutely banned it. They destroyed mushroom stones. They tortured people who practiced it. Mushroom stones. So they're actually, like, little statues in the shape of mushrooms. Little statues and some of them pretty big, but they are stones carved in the shape of mushrooms. There've been many theories about what they're for. They're found all over Guatemala and southern Mexico. Some of these miniature mushrooms, stones, and Guatemala, they go back to 3000 BC. Which is pretty far back. And now they turn up in farmers' fields occasionally, because people buried them. They were afraid to be caught with them. So that mushroom cults, as they were called, and, of course, we call it religion a cult when we don't like it, went underground. And was

thought to have disappeared until the middle of the 20th century. So mushrooms largely disappeared from public view and psychedelics had gone underground. But then the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman accidentally stumbled onto LSD. And rumors started swirling around that the mushroom was still used in sacred ceremonies in Mexico. And that's when magic mushrooms came roaring back. Thanks to one man, Gordon Watson. That's right. Who would seem to be the most unlikely person to turn psychedelic mushrooms into a mainstream phenomenon? I mean, he was a vice president. He was a banker at JP Morgan. He was very plugged in in New York. He marries a Russian woman, a pediatrician. And she, like many Russians, is a passionate micro -file. He, like many Americans and people of English extraction, was a micro -phobe, fearful of mushrooms. Anyway, the story goes that on their honeymoon, they went up to the

Catskills, and they're walking in the woods, and she starts finding all these mushrooms, and she starts collecting them in her skirt and makes this big pile of mushrooms. And she proposes to cook them for dinner. He absolutely refuses to eat them. She eats them. He thinks he's going to wake up a widower the next morning. But lo and behold, she knew what she was doing. And this got him very interested in mushrooms. So in his spare time, Watson developed a lifelong obsession with mushrooms, especially the psychedelic ones. He studied how they influenced human cultures around the world and came up with a theory that the origin of religion was actually rooted in people's transcendent experiences on magic mushrooms. And if you think about it, where do these interesting bizarre ideas that the heart of many religions come from, that there is a beyond, that there's an unseen world, that there is a realm of the dead that you could visit, that there is a heaven and hell. I mean, these are interesting ideas, and you could see why having a psychedelic journey would convince you of their

truth. He looked into the use of Aminita mascara in Siberia, I think it is. And the Elyusian mysteries of the ancient Greeks, where they all got together once a year, and they had a right around demeter, worship of demeter. And everybody per took of this potion called the Kikian, which has also never been really identified, gave people access to an unseen world, and they went and visited their ancestors. And he believed that, too, might have been a derivative of the Ergot fungus. That is the fungus from which LSD is derived. But then the last case in the most relevant, he heard about these mushroom cults in Central America, and he went looking in Mexico for years, didn't he? Multiple trips down there. I think he had like 11 trips down there. Looking for someone who would take a man so he could participate in a mushroom ceremony. Yeah, and given the secrecy that surrounded it, earning

someone's trust, so they would actually say, yes, we do use mushrooms this way, and yes, I will administer some to you. But he finds a woman, a current dera, or healer named Maria Sabina in the town of Huatla de Menes, which is a couple days by Mule outside of Oaxaca in the very remote mountains. And she gives him the mushrooms, what she calls the little children, and he has this experience in the basement of this house, and he brings a photographer, and he recounts this experience in the pages of Life magazine in a like 17 -page article. The reason he gets it into Life magazine is that he's friendly with Henry Luce. The publisher. And Henry Luce, as it turns out, is a giant fan of psychedelics. He's had psychedelic therapy. I know, it's the weirdest history. Oh, yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. But you have to remember, all this is legal, right? This is 1955. He has his experience in 56 or 50 -70, publishes the article.

And this article really introduces much of the West to psychedelic mushrooms and psychedelic experience in general. So Gordon Watson is really a pivotal figure in this history. By the 60s, psychedelics had become part of the counterculture. Not only was there plenty of experimentation, scientists launched a series of innovative research projects on possible therapeutic uses. So I went to Mexico. Timothy Leary. He's a mushroom. He calls it a sacred mushroom. Red Gordon Watson's story in Life magazine, and once he became a Harvard professor, he ran various studies of both psilocybin and LSD. Often involving his own students. Which got him kicked out of Harvard. And by the late 60s, the psychedelic revolution had imploded in the FDA, shut down all the research. And this wasn't exactly like the Spanish crackdown on mushroom calls, but once again.

The sacred mushroom went underground. And it might have stayed that way if not for a few mushroom obsessives who kept stoking the flame. It is still absolutely mysterious, appalling, challenging, boundary dissolving, and unavoidably ecstatic. It is the living mystery. Terrence McKennaf, an ethnobotanist and legendary psycho nut, had traveled all over the world, studying and experimenting with a whole range of hallucinogens. Even after they were banned, McKenna was one of the few people who still talked openly about mushrooms. And he came up with a wild idea that eating magic mushrooms led directly to the origins of human consciousness. Essentially, the mushroom made us human. This is known as the stone ape theory. If we're looking for a missing link,

it isn't a transitional skeleton. It isn't meddling by extraterrestrials. It has to do with the fact that we began to allow into our diet an exotic pseudo neurotransmitter. And I believe that mushroom was the triggering factor that moved us from being an advanced hominid, an advanced animal, to being in fact a conscious self -reflecting, caring, thinking, dreaming, striving. Human being. Is this true? I find it completely implausible. Okay, this is really far out. The idea that magic mushrooms rewired the brains of our ancient ancestors and created human consciousness. But the funny thing is people can't stop talking about

it. Now Terence McKenna died nearly 20 years ago, but his younger brother Dennis, who traveled with Terence on some of their wild psychedelic adventures in South America, wrote two books with him. He has his own take on the stone ape theory. Actually, I came up with the idea. You really want to know. I came up with the idea, but he popularized it. His idea was psilocybin mushrooms enhance visual acuity. They were useful for hunting. You take mushrooms and you could spot the game. Yes, they do do that. This is where his theory and my theory differ. I say one of the things that can happen often with psychedelics, and especially with mushrooms, is so called synesthesia, where you get cross -talk between sensory modalities, so you can see sounds. What I've said for a long time is that this is the

key to language, because language is synesthesia. It's a learned skill that mushrooms taught us. I can say a word table. Chances are you visualize a table in your head, right? Mushrooms provided that key link between a meaningless sound, a potentially meaningless image, and a meaningful interpretation. So mushrooms were the key to how we learn to create symbols. I have to back up for a moment just to see if I understand what you're saying. That this ancient consumption of mushrooms, magic mushrooms, tens of thousands of years ago, triggered something in the brains of our human ancestors that helped us be able to talk. To help us be able to talk. Yes, and actually helped us be able to develop a language. But it's not simply that we ate mushrooms and became smart. We do know

from the fossil record that there was an enormous, almost explosive expansion of the dominant brain over about two million years that had increased three times in size. Two million years is not very long in evolutionary terms. Something made this happen. These people evolved in complex environments, and with a lot of challenges. I think the mushrooms gave them the ability to visualize abstractions, essentially, to create models in their heads that gave them imagination. So today, once again, psychedelics are back, not legally, at least yet. But in labs around the world, scientists are rediscovering their therapeutic uses. We are in a new golden age of psychedelic research, and Robin Carhartt Harris is one of

the leading experts. In his lab at London's Imperial College, he's been putting people on psilocybin into brain scanners in his groundbreaking studies of treatments for depression and anxiety. So what does he think of the stoned ape theory? It's a fascinating idea, really exciting, kind of, you know, spine chilling. Yet, I'm not sold. I just think that it's a bit too psychedelic -centric, and it's not clear that every human culture took psilocybin mushrooms. So it could be, we're asking the wrong question. Maybe this isn't really a matter of trying to prove that magic mushrooms jumpstarted the human brain long ago. Carhartt Harris is more interested in figuring out why psychedelics have such powerful effects on the mind, and what that might tell us about the nature of human consciousness. He says these substances can open up new neural pathways, and they actually give our brains access to more information. In fact, he calls psychedelics mind revealing, rather than mind

altering. People have insights, emotional insights, personal insights. Remember things sometimes very remote into their childhood. Is this tapping into our unconscious? Well, that's the implication, yes. It suggests something pretty powerful, which is that we don't normally in our everyday waking state, really don't have access to maybe what's most important in our minds. Maybe we need some help getting there. Yes, and then it raises curious questions like, why has the mind and the brain evolved that way? In the world as bigger is what you're saying, unpsychedelics, more expansive. Yes, I suppose because so much of world is actually inner, and it's so vast, that's the huge revelation, I think, that psychedelics bring is just the symbolism and the iconography that you'll see in art, for example, or that's depicted in horror films or in religions. It's all there, you know, in a very vivid and elaborate way that one can experience under a

psychedelic. There's no question a psychedelic experience can blow your mind and can also be terrifying, and the thing about psychedelics that's different from any other drug every person's experience is unique and unpredictable and for most people unforgettable. Remember Michael Pollan from earlier? He says his psychedelic experiences fundamentally changed him. The brain is more mysterious, or my brain is more mysterious than I understood in my mind is. But I also was changed in my understanding of what it means to have a spiritual experience. Something I don't think I'd ever had, something I was kind of allergic to, I tended to think that to be spiritual was to believe in the supernatural and I very much didn't. I'm really a pretty staunch materialist in my outlook on things. But I

found that what happened when my ego dissolved in that psilocybin experience, the walls come down and you merge with whatever is around you. And it made me understand that, no, the real definition of spiritual is not something supernatural. It's connection. Spiritual experience is deep, powerful, undefended connection between the self and what is normally another in object. Whether it's another person, music, the universe, the nature, the walls come down and you have this powerful sense of connection which many people call love. To the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio. Our executive producer Steve Paulson brought us today's mushroom episode. Joe Hartke is our sound designer and technical director and they add help from Mark Rickers, Angela Bautista,

Shannon Henry Cliver, and Charles Monroe Kane. I'm Ann Strain Champs. Thanks for listening. P -R -X.