“The thoughts is its personal place,” Milton wrote in Paradise Misplaced, “and in it self could make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” Whereas that is psychologically true — the thoughts is, in any case, how consciousness renders actuality — it isn’t all the time physiologically true: The mind and physique out of which the thoughts arises are a bodily system, contiguous with each bodily power and course of that touches it, permeable to myriad invasions and reconfigurations that alter the system and thus rework the thoughts into a completely totally different place.
Nowhere is that this haunting vulnerability to transformation starker than within the case of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and the thoughts of the carpenter ant, difficult our most elemental intuitions about company, about autonomy, about what a self is.
A part of a gaggle often called “zombie fungi,” Ophiocordyceps hijacks an insect, driving it to disperse the fungus’s spores on the value of its personal life. In his altogether fascinating e-book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Form Our Futures (public library), mycologist Merlin Sheldrake particulars this sinister puppet present of biochemistry:
As soon as contaminated by the fungus, ants are stripped of their instinctive worry of heights, depart the relative security of their nests, and climb up the closest plant — a syndrome often called “summit illness.” Sooner or later the fungus forces the ant to clamp its jaws across the plant in a “loss of life grip.” Mycelium grows from the ant’s toes and stitches them to the plant’s floor. The fungus then digests the ant’s physique and sprouts a stalk out of its head, from which spores bathe down on ants passing under. If the spores miss their targets, they produce secondary sticky spores that reach outward on threads that act like journey wires.
Zombie fungi management the habits of their insect hosts with beautiful precision. Ophiocordyceps compels ants to carry out the loss of life grip in a zone with simply the fitting temperature and humidity to permit the fungus to fruit: a peak of twenty-five centimeters above the forest flooring. The fungus orients ants in line with the route of the solar, and contaminated ants chew in synchrony, at midday. They don’t chew any outdated spot on the leaf’s underside. Ninety-eight % of the time, the ants clamp onto a significant vein.
As a result of the marks left on leaf veins by these death-bites are so distinct, proof of them might be discovered within the fossil report way back to the Eocene, almost fifty million years in the past — the daybreak of recent fauna, a time when forests lined the Earth from pole to pole. Sheldrake displays:
It’s probably that fungi have been manipulating animal minds for a lot of the time that there have been minds to control.
However in contrast to the mind-controlling parasite that drives wasps to desert their colonies, Ophiocordyceps appears to control the thoughts by means of the backdoor of the physique: Analysis signifies that the fungus might not have a bodily presence within the ant’s mind, as a substitute secreting chemical substances that activate the ant’s muscle tissue and steer its central nervous system (which we now know is the evolutionary underpinning of consciousness).
Couple with the brand new science of how fungi are altering human minds, then revisit Lewis Thomas’s magnificent meditation on how the connection between a jellyfish and a sea slug illuminates the thriller of the self.
