When you think about it in your visual landscape with animals
You see them for months years and plants so you have a familarity factor
But mushrooms that come up and disappear in four or five days
Some of them can feed you some can kill you some can heal you some can send you on a spiritual journey
So to have something so powerful and yet so ephemeral
It's natural for humans to avoid that which they don't understand out of fear because they don't know the difference
Well, you know 23 primates
Consumed mushrooms humans being one of them and so that speaks for a long and successful use of mushrooms going back
You know in our primate
evolutionary tree for a very very long time
We separated from fungi six hundred and fifty million years ago
Maybe you did dude. I know some people that are probably still
Well basically we we are
descendants of fungi yeah
We shared more common ancestry with fungi than we do with any other kingdom
And fungi are closer to animals than they are to plants
Animals came from fungi
wo
You and I are actually fungal bodies
I'm speaking to basically another fungal body right now
Okay
And from a cellular point of view under the microscope a human cells animal cells and fungal cells are very very similar
We exhale carbon dioxide we inhale oxygen
And it's really interesting that the many of the bacterial diseases that infect fungi also infect us our best antibiotics against
bacteria come from fungi penicillin being the obvious example, but you know the universe was created about
13.8 billion years ago from the Big Bang. The earth coalesced out of stardust about 4.5 billion
There the earliest records of life we have is about 3.8 billion years ago
single-celled
single-celled organisms, but just recently on Lava Beds in South Africa
They found mycelium infused to the Lava
2.4 billion years ago, now we split from fungi 650 million years ago
And then in Brazil this past year they found a fully intact apparently a fossilized mushroom published in nature
Which is a very very reputable scientific journal and that one is?
1.4. Billion years old so the oldest multicellular organism in the fossil record today is
This fungus and lava in South Africa 2.4 billion years ago a fully formed mushroom
Who had as its form, grew... was growing 1.4 billion years ago.
We were, We separated from the fund a 650 million years ago mushrooms
Have had their form longer than we've had our form by more than a billion years
So, but think of that mushrooms had their form before we had ours
Yeah, These are elders. These are ancient organisms
These are the really the overlord under lord's of our ecosystem. And I suspect and as these neural networks
They have more neural connections than my silly old master. Over a thousand acres than we have in our brain. They are actually
Accumulating knowledge in an intelligence, but I think that as time goes on
I hope that we will be able to interface with them because I think that there is a there is
Many benefits of us communicating with mycelium that can give us
Rapid responses to catastrophe
oh
That's how they've evolved and
we're now the biggest walking catastrophe that I know... walking across the planet and we need to engage these fungal allies for the
benefits that we need to put into play in order to prevent the loss of biodiversity.
it seems like a communication gap would be very hard to bridge the communication gap
I mean if we really did find a way
to communicate in some form with mushrooms like the concept of language like you were talking about just the idea of nature and
intelligence and these words that we have that we have these sort of
Concrete definitions in our head that don't really apply to some things that are very
Very confusing to us like the idea of fungal intelligence the idea that you could somehow or another
Understand the language that these things we wouldn't we don't even understand dolphin language, right?
Well, one classic example. Japanese are so clever at this. they, There's a slime mold
you know, called Physarum polycephalum
And they had a and this slime mold is very very good at navigating through mazes and challenges
I mean first of food wins the conservation of energy you know is rewarded so
So, how do they set this up they....
They did several experiments the fun most fun. One is they they designed a nutrient
Basic... a nutrient like maze
replicating
Tokyo and the Japanese subway system and
So they started it with Tokyo and they put oats which is a nutritional source they inoculated
What is on this basic and Agra map?
with all the major cities the nodes around Tokyo and they
Then makes each of those nodes had a piece of oat on them. It was a source of nutrition the main oat
was where Tokyo was they inoculated it and
Then they let the slime mold then grow and first I grew out randomly
exploratory you know just like you would do if you're a hunter or something or hunting on the landscape looking for things and
then after about
28 hours it reorganized itself in the most efficient way possible
And reorganized the Japanese subway system in a more efficient manner than it's designed today
Thus they said, not me, not Paul Stamets. This is a demonstration of cellular intelligence.
wow
So this is the tip of the proverbial mycelial iceberg.
You know this is has broad implications
And I just want people to suspend their disbelief
and this goes into it actually the evolution of human consciousness and Terence Mckenna was a good friend of mine I
Love Terence. I especially loved them last five years of his life because he made fun of himself so much
Terence and Dennis both came up with a Stoned Ape Theory. now, It's not a theory its a hypothesis a
Hypothesis is speculative
but cannot necessarily be as not yet proven a theory is a
Hypothesis that is tested and proven with facts so I disagree with them and saying it's not theory its a hypothesis
But the hypothesis is the stone ape part
of the stoned ape
Which I think you've alluded to before is that with climate change and as a savannas increase in our primate ancestors
Came out of our the forest canopies there. They're trucking across the savanna, and if you're a hunter
what do you look you look for footsteps you look for scat.
And the most significant fleshy mushroom growing out of poop, in Africa, a hippopotamus, elephants you know
deer antelope etc
Is psilocybe cubensis. It's a very large mushroom. You're hungry. You're with your clan
you consume it and
Then 20 minutes later, you're you are catapulted in this extraordinary experience
psilocybin substitutes that serotonin
becomes a better neurotransmitter activates
Neurogenesis, it causes new neurons to form new pathways of knowledge so that's the Stoned Ape
Hypothesis and it speaks to a mystery that the human brain
Basically the brain cavity doubled in size in about two million years some people say it is less, it's less than 200,000.
Homo sapiens were here less than 200,000 years?
Homo sapiens arrive at 200,000-300,000 years ago. It's a big gap right? It's a big gap
Well the science is like that so you wanted. You know, to be scientifically accurate here,
I need to show the the extreme margins of what's been estimated so if we accept two million years that the
And it's shown in the fossil record this is true. The oldest Homo sapiens fossils are three hundred thousand years old now, but
we have a suddenly doubling of the human brain and
With that our language centers increased our ability to prognosticate to plan and there's no explanation for this
currently and
Even though we may not be able to prove it I asked people to suspend their disbelief for a second now think of this our
Primate ancestors are going across the savanna the ingest these mushrooms as a clan
Massive input for anyone's eating these mushrooms huge amounts of data is coming in
fractal patterns geometrical you know landscapes occur
You have empathy you have greater courage. You're fighting a saber tooth tiger. You know one day
You're you have a fear of it we know now from neurogenesis and the extinction of the fear response that has been clinically proven
psilocybin allows you to
Reset and have different neurological pathways to respond to fear
Overcoming the fear conditioned response potentially PTSD and there's a lot of research on this currently so but this wouldn't happen one time with one
Hominid group what happened two times ten times?
having millions and millions and millions
And millions of times over millions and millions of years this leads to what I think is called this should be called
Epigenetic neurogenesis we know that there's a regeneration of neurons we know this all subs
substitutes the serotonin
it opens the floodgates of the senses you have a lot more data coming in and we know that you have the extinction of the
fear response so if you're the leader of your clan you've had this traumatic
Event either war or cataclysm from earthquakes whatever the case may be or encounter saber-toothed tiger
Whatever if you're the leader of that clan and you can overcome your fear response
You have courage and you have empathy
those are leadership skills I
Think we people didn't take note of it
People like to follow leaders who are courageous and yet kind
Who they can trust they'll have their best interests in mind, so I think this propelled I think it's a lot
It's a very good explanation. It's an unprovable. Hypothesis well now
We're at a junction and for the net and we're ready for the next quantum leap in human consciousness
For more interesting videos like this one please subscribe