Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Simple Steps to Being Happier & How Fungi Powers Life

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Starting point is 00:00:18 That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Today on Something You Should Know, does a full moon really bring out the worst in people, or is that just a myth? Then, what you didn't know about acquiring happiness that will make you a lot happier. A lot of recent research is showing is that happiness itself is best experienced when

Starting point is 00:00:50 it's not pursued directly, but rather when it becomes the byproduct of other behaviors that we are motivated to pursue. Also, your grandmother was wrong. Fidgeting is a great thing to do. And mushrooms, fungus, without it, you might not even be here. Fungus is truly amazing. There are fungi found growing in the blasted nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. They seem to be able to use radiation as plants use the energy in sunlight. You also have fungi that live in the fuel tanks of aircraft. You have a specialist's mold that live around whiskey barrels.

Starting point is 00:01:26 All this today on Something You Should Know. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Something you should know.

Starting point is 00:02:00 Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. So, my wife is a nurse at a hospital and she is among those people who believe that a full moon has an effect on things like automobile accidents and hospital admissions. And it's more than that. There are people who also believe that a full moon has an effect on things like cancer survival rates,

Starting point is 00:02:37 births, depression, violent behavior, and even criminal activity. Ask anybody who's worked in a hospital emergency room and chances are they believe things are different and a bit more wacky on the night of a full moon. In fact, the word lunatic is derived from the Latin word luna, which means moon. So a professor of astronomy at UCLA did some extensive research and looked into these claims,

Starting point is 00:03:04 and he found that the moon is innocent. That in fact, there is no connection whatsoever between a full moon and just about anything else except the tides. So why do so many people believe

Starting point is 00:03:19 otherwise? He concluded that it's what's called confirmation bias. It's people's tendency to interpret information in a way that confirms their beliefs and ignores the data that contradicts those beliefs. When life is hectic on the day of a full moon, many people remember the association because it confirms their belief. But hectic days that do not correspond with a full moon are promptly ignored and forgotten because they do not reinforce that belief. And that is something you should know. A topic we've touched on before on this podcast is happiness. And we discuss it from time to time

Starting point is 00:04:05 because, well, it's important. Many people say in surveys that happiness is at the very top of their list of things they want. Often more than fame or money or anything else, it's happiness. Who doesn't want to be happy? Yet happiness is not always easy to find

Starting point is 00:04:24 and often even harder to hold on to. Still, happiness has been studied a lot, and one of the people who studies it is Tim Bono. Tim is on the faculty in the psychology department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches courses on the psychology of young adulthood and the science of happiness. He's author of a book called Happiness 101, Simple Secrets to Smart Living and Well-Being. Hey, Tim. Thanks, Mike. It's great to be joining you today. So how do you view happiness? It seems like it's a hard term to define because happiness is so subjective.

Starting point is 00:05:03 What makes me happy might not make you happy. So what is it? Well, when we think about happiness from a psychological perspective, and specifically how we study it in the academic world, we actually don't even use the term happiness. A much more common phrase is subjective well-being with a really important emphasis on that word subjective. Because to know how happy somebody is, you can't always look at the objective circumstances of their life, like how much money they have in the bank or what their education level is. A much stronger predictor, I should say, is their subjective appraisal of what's going on in their life

Starting point is 00:05:42 and the extent to which they are grateful for what they have and how they savor the experiences around them. And how important generally is happiness, at least when you ask people, you know, are you happy? Do you want to be happier? How important is happiness? Where does it rank? Well, typically when you ask people what's most important to them, and researchers have gone to all different corners of the world to do this, happiness is pretty consistently among the very top priorities that people set for themselves.

Starting point is 00:06:12 So it is something that I think is an age old interest that people have always had a desire to pursue. And more recently, you know, we've had the field of positive psychology to provide some scientific evidence on the behaviors and strategies that can help people realize that and incorporate it into their lives. But if happiness is so subjective, then how do you have objective ways to incorporate it into your life? Yeah, that's a really important question because certainly if we are to develop a science around happiness, we have to have an objective way of measuring it. Which is why the most common way for us to measure happiness is simply by asking people to rate their happiness on a single item questionnaire. For example, saying on a scale from one to ten, how would you rate your happiness? And that does seem to capture that subjective appraisal of that overall well-being. Because even though it is the case that different behaviors or mindsets can bring different levels of happiness for different people, in general, we know that happiness usually boils down to incorporating behaviors that will be associated with at least one of three characteristics. And those three characteristics are number one, a sense of autonomy, which is focusing on those behaviors that are within our own control. Number two, it has to do with a sense of competence, feeling a sense of accomplishment

Starting point is 00:07:36 from pursuing goals that are important to us. And third, which is arguably most important, is pursuing a sense of relatedness, connecting with friends and family and other people who help us feel connected to something bigger than ourselves. Is happiness, though, very fleeting? Can I be happy now and get a phone call and then be unhappy? Or is happiness more of a state of being that maybe ebbs and flows a little bit, but generally you're happy? Well, we know that all emotions by their nature tend to ebb and flow. And that's why when we look at the behaviors and mindsets that bring about happiness, we have to acknowledge that there's really nothing that we can do to put us in a state of everlasting bliss or position us to always be experiencing happiness. So most of the strategies

Starting point is 00:08:26 within positive psychology are interested in doing one of two things. They're interested in slowing down how quickly we adapt to happiness so that when we do have that positive moment or we get that good news or we do something that we enjoy, that we're able to hang on to it a little bit more and make it last a little bit longer before it goes back to our baseline. And number two, the other strategy that becomes important is to help us identify strategies that help us to cope with life's stressors, such that when we're having a difficult time, we can incorporate behaviors that allow us to speed up how quickly we adapt so that that negativity, although it's there, won't last as long as it might otherwise. There do seem to be, though, just from my own observation, people who just, they're just generally happy people.

Starting point is 00:09:15 They just don't dwell on the problems in life like other people do. They just seem happier, and it seems to be part of their personality. Is it? Yes, there is some evidence that for some people they have a higher set point for happiness. There's some evidence to suggest that part of our happiness is due to genetics, you know, what we inherit from our parents. But we also know that there's generally a range that we all have. And that's why I think an important mindset when we think about the pursuit of happiness is not to think about whether I'm happy or how happy I should be, but rather to think about how can I become

Starting point is 00:09:57 happier, such that regardless of where I fall on the emotion continuum and whether I have a high set point for happiness or whether that's relatively low, still there are things that I can be incorporating into my life to become happier. And that's really what the goal of the research, you know, it's not to say, well, let's all try to have a rank order to see who can be the happiest or can I be as happy as my neighbor or as happy as my coworker, but instead to say, given the circumstances of my life and perhaps things that are outside of my control preventing me from being as happy as I could be, positive psychology really has an interest in helping us identify those things

Starting point is 00:10:37 that are within our control that can at least help us to become happier. And if we can put ourselves in the habit of incorporating those behaviors and those mindsets into our day-to-day lives, that can really go a long way to help us a year from now or a month from now or maybe even a week from now at least become happier than we are today. So is unhappiness just the lack of happiness or is happiness the lack of unhappiness? I kind of see it like, you know, there's sea level, and then above sea level, you're happy, and below sea level, you're unhappy. But a lot of people may be just at sea level where they wouldn't characterize themselves one way or the

Starting point is 00:11:17 other. They're just, yeah, I'm okay. Yeah, and that's a really important question, because when we think about our emotions, we typically think about them residing on a continuum, that on one end of the continuum, we have really positive emotions. On the other end of the continuum, we have negative emotions. And then in the middle, there's sort of a zero point. I think this is what Pink Floyd once referred to as comfortably numb. And one of the things that we know about our emotional experiences is that those different kinds of emotional experiences operate independently, which means that it's possible for us to experience happiness at the same time that we are experiencing unhappiness. You can think of something like college graduation, where you are simultaneously

Starting point is 00:12:03 excited that you have accomplished something, but at the same time, you're sad that you're having to move away from your friends. Or there are days when you're not necessarily experiencing happiness or unhappiness, but you're just sort of at that zero point. So the question is happiness the opposite of unhappiness? Not necessarily. Those emotions can be experienced independently of one another, or they can happen all at the same time. Are there objective things you need to be happy? I would assume, you know, you've got to have food on the table and a roof over your head, or that there are things that without them, it would be almost impossible to be happy.

Starting point is 00:12:50 Yes, certainly we know it's the case that if you don't know where your next meal is coming from, or you otherwise don't have your basic needs taken care of, it's really hard to achieve a sense of happiness in our day-to-day lives. It's kind of related to one of the age-old questions about whether money buys happiness. And what we've found is that although there is a small correlation between money and happiness, that relationship really exists at the lower end of the socioeconomic continuum. Because as you say, if you don't have your basic needs met, then you're so preoccupied with survival that you can't be thinking about the higher order goals like self-esteem or gratitude or social connection. But once we've reached that point where we do have basic needs met, that's where an increase in wealth doesn't necessarily correspond with an increase in happiness.

Starting point is 00:13:35 And it really has to do with other behaviors and mindsets that we are incorporating into our lives. But I would imagine, though, it would correlate in this way, that if you were once very wealthy, and then you lost a lot, but not all of your wealth, so now you've still got your basic needs met, but four out of your five mansions are gone, and your speedboat's gone, and your private plane's gone, you might be pretty unhappy about that. Yes, you're exactly right. One of the things that we know is that we human beings are very adaptable to our circumstances. So whereas many people would look at somebody who has many mansions and boats and all sorts of wealth and a life of luxury, people would look at that and say, wow, if I had those things, I would be a lot

Starting point is 00:14:21 happier. But once we get those things, we tend to adapt to them very quickly such that they simply become the new normal. And if we then suddenly lost those things, then we would be comparing our more modest way of living, which by other standards would be perfectly comfortable, but we are comparing that against this higher set of expectations about how amazing and how wonderful life would be. So when researchers have examined that, people who have had lots of money and then they've lost it for one reason or another, you do tend to see pretty reliably, in fact, a eventually recalibrate those expectations. And eventually, they are able to reach a new equilibrium about, you know, what life should be looking like and what life should be like. So one of the things that we've come to understand pretty reliably

Starting point is 00:15:17 in all of this research and positive psychology is that humans are adaptable, both to good things and to negative things. Great. Tim Bono is my guest. He is author of the book Happiness 101, Simple Secrets to Smart Living and Well-Being. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy.

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Starting point is 00:16:20 You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. us and the decisions we make and the things that situations that we're in? Or is happiness in and of itself something to try hard to attain? Or none of the above, I guess, you know, I think that that happiness is certainly a worthwhile goal. But when researchers look at the kinds of decisions that people make, or the kinds of circumstances they're in, unless it's people who are below the point where their basic needs are not met, you know, if they've lost a job and now, you know, they can't pay the mortgage, they can't put food on the table. That aside, you know, because those are circumstances where, again, that preoccupation with survival makes it very

Starting point is 00:17:20 difficult to achieve a sense of happiness. But once we've crossed that point, the objective circumstances don't seem to matter quite as much as the mindset that we take to the circumstances that we're in or to the outcome of the choices that we have made. And to this point about, you know, whether we can actively pursue happiness, that also is a very important one because what a lot of recent research is showing is that happiness itself is best experienced when

Starting point is 00:17:50 it's not pursued directly, but rather when it becomes the byproduct of other behaviors that we that we are intrinsically motivated to pursue. So, for example, there's a lot of research showing that people who keep a gratitude journal tend to see an increase in their overall well-being or people who exercise a lot tend to see an increase in their happiness. But if you're only doing those things so that you become happy, that can actually backfire. to me, to watch people who seemingly have, you know, maybe they've overcome some problems and they, by all objective standards, you would think would be pretty happy. But it almost seems human nature that you've got to find some problem to bitch about and to complain about. That perfect happiness with no problems and nothing to worry about is almost not human. Yeah, I agree with you completely there. And I think that that is another

Starting point is 00:18:55 one of the myths about the nature of happiness. A lot of people think that if they're not happy all the time, that something must be wrong with them. And so therefore, they try to do everything that they can to downplay anything that could be going wrong in their lives and to sort of project this image that they're happy all the time. But the reality is that any psychologist will tell you that if you were happy all the time, that would be the indication that something were wrong with you. We know that we humans have evolved this incredibly complex set of emotions, and there is a time and a place for each of them. And in fact, it's a natural, healthy response to experience sadness and anxiety when

Starting point is 00:19:40 things aren't going well, or when we find ourselves in circumstances that are not good for us. So part of psychological health involves, number one, acknowledging that negativity is simply part of life. And number two, it's about having strategies that allow us to cope with that negativity to allow us to get back up on our feet and back on the path toward well-being and happiness as quickly as possible. And that spirit of resilience turns out to be a really important characteristic of well-being. That brings up an interesting point about, can you really experience and appreciate happiness if you've never been unhappy? If you, I think of like the spoiled little rich kid who doesn't really realize how good they have it because they've never known anything else. Yeah, there has been some research to suggest that when you look at lifetime happiness and lifetime satisfaction, often the

Starting point is 00:20:38 people who have the highest scores on those variables who seem to be doing best on measures of well-being, are those who had to overcome some difficulty. So I do think that there is some value in kids having to struggle a little bit with something that they tried for or that they had their aspirations set toward that didn't seem to work out for them, because often it is in the process of having to overcome some obstacle or having to overcome some challenges in their lives where they develop a set of coping mechanisms. And those coping mechanisms provide that resilience to allow them to keep going when they experience

Starting point is 00:21:17 challenges in their careers or in their relationships. And persevering through that difficulty often is what positions them for success and happiness and the ability to work toward other challenging goals without quitting too early or quitting prematurely because that resilience is helping them to stay on track with that. Lastly, understanding that, you know, happiness is something that is a consequence of decisions in life and all that. But if somebody really wanted to make an effort to try to be happier, are there things that you can recommend that people do that that really seem to have benefits? Absolutely. you that when you look at the thousands of studies that have been conducted on the science of happiness, the single strongest predictor of happiness and well-being for an individual has to do with the sense of social connection that they feel with those around them. So doing

Starting point is 00:22:14 whatever we can to get involved in organizations in the community or reaching out to other people or rekindling friendships, that really goes a long way in ensuring a sense of well-being. In fact, every single study that has ever looked at happiness among a large group of people, when they examine, say, the top 10%, you know, the people who are in that top range of happiness, what is common to every single one of those individuals is that they each have rich and satisfying social relationships. And so doing what we can to invest in relationships with others, that's one of the most important things. And then on top of that, there are other daily behaviors we can be incorporating. The practice

Starting point is 00:22:54 of gratitude is incredibly important. We think about happiness often as the quotient of what we have compared to what we want. And gratitude really places a spotlight on those good things that we already have in our lives that we might simply be taking for granted. Another important thing is to prioritize our physical health, getting exercise on a regular basis, prioritizing sleep on a regular basis. We know that both of those activities are associated with the release of neurotransmitters that can boost our mood and help to put the brakes on negative thinking cycles. I did have one quick question.

Starting point is 00:23:27 Are people generally self-reporting that they are happier today than the past or less? It's a very good question. So we know that there have been a number of demographers who have been tracking happiness over time. And one of the things that we've found is that happiness was relatively steady for a large part of the 20th century. So all through the 90s, through the early 2000s, it was relatively steady. And then it started to take some dips around 2011. And at the same time, when you were tracking things like anxiety and loneliness and other forms of distress, those also were relatively stable.

Starting point is 00:24:07 And then around 2010, 2011, they took a sharp increase. with the advent of smartphone and other technology, especially with social media, that has made it very easy to compare ourselves with other people. So when we talk about the predictors of happiness being things like gratitude and exercise and social connection, one of the fundamental barriers to a sense of well-being is comparing ourselves with other people. And social media, you know, which to be clear, can be used for a lot of wonderful things. Sometimes it can be a vehicle for social comparison. It can be a way that we measure up the goodness of our life by comparing it to other people. And we sometimes feel worse about ourselves if we feel that our next door neighbor just got a

Starting point is 00:25:03 promotion and that their their career path seems to be on a trajectory that's better than ours or if a friend of ours from college is going on a really cool vacation that we ourselves would not be able to afford sometimes there's that inferiority and it's really difficult to be happy if we constantly have our head over our shoulder wondering how we measure up to other people. Well, it's interesting how happiness is really important in everyone's life, or people say it is anyway, and yet we're so often wrong about what it takes to be happy. And it's interesting to hear what the science says. Tim Bono has been my guest.

Starting point is 00:25:40 He's on the faculty in the psychology department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches the science of happiness, and he's author of the book, Happiness 101, Simple Secrets to Smart Living and Well-Being. You'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Tim. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet.

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Starting point is 00:27:00 Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation.

Starting point is 00:27:36 And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. comes across my desk that I would have never come up with or even thought would sound like a good something-you-should-know topic that turns out to be really interesting. And that's the case with this next segment, which is all about fungus, mushrooms. Now, I've always thought of mushrooms as a plant.

Starting point is 00:28:41 You know, everything is an animal, a vegetable, or a mineral, and mushrooms are a vegetable. But it turns out that fungus, or fungi, or mushrooms, they're a category all unto themselves, according to Merlin Sheldrake. He is a biologist and author of the book Entangled Life, How Fungi Make Our Worlds,

Starting point is 00:29:03 Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future. I always thought it was pronounced fungi, but he says fungi, so we'll go with fungi today. Hi Merlin, welcome. Great to be here, Mike. Thanks for having me. So I have to start by asking, because, you know, with all the things in the world you

Starting point is 00:29:22 could study, why mushrooms, why fungus, what captured your attention and interest in this? I've been interested in the way that things change since I was a child. Now, how does a lump of wood turn into soil? How does a pile of leaves turn into soil? How do plants grow? Now, how do these transformations happen? And my inquiry into these various transformations always led me back to microbes, these organisms that compose and decompose the world. And so fungi are prodigious decomposers, and you can't ask questions about how things transform in the natural world

Starting point is 00:30:05 without encountering fungi before too long. What are fungi? What are we looking at when we look at a mushroom or we see something growing on the side of the wall? What is it? So mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of fungi. So it's like an apple on an apple tree. Imagine how much we would not be seeing if all we knew of apple trees were the apples that grew on its branches. So when we see

Starting point is 00:30:35 mushrooms, we're just looking at a small part of the organism, the part of the organism concerned with producing spores, concerned with dispersing itself. And most fungi live most of their lives as networks of cells known as mycelium. And mycelium lives usually out of our sight because mycelium is embedded in its environment, whether the soil or wood or plant shoots or leaves. So mushrooms are just a small part of these organisms. Fungi, the kingdom of fungi, which is as broad and busy a category as animals or plants. So there are many ways to be a fungus. The yeasts that convert sugar into alcohol, they are fungi. And some of the largest organisms in the world are fungi as well,

Starting point is 00:31:26 these enormous networks that range over kilometers. Well, it's interesting. I don't think, I know, I don't know a whole lot about mushrooms and fungus and, you know, it all seems to happen like underground and, you know, in caves and in the dark. So i it's interesting that it's so mysterious because much of fungal life takes place out of sight and it's only with the development of new technologies and tools that we're really beginning to understand more about fungi and the way they live their lives so science is within science, and you have departments of plant sciences, you have departments of animal sciences, but you don't really have departments of fungal sciences, because fungi were lumped in with the plant kingdom for much

Starting point is 00:32:16 of their history. It was only in the 1960s that they won their independence in taxonomic terms, and we decided to be another kingdom of life. So scientists neglect them on the whole, although that's starting to change, thank goodness. So mushrooms are not plants? No. So mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi, of fungal networks. They are just one part of the organism, which is there to serve a very particular function, to produce spores, which are the equivalent of plant seeds, and to spread those spores. And so when we say things fall into one category or the other, animal, mineral, or plant, fungi is something else entirely? Yes.

Starting point is 00:33:12 So to that game, the animal, mineral, or plant, you might add animal, mineral, plant, or fungus. And you might add also bacteria, which are another kingdom of life, are major categories and important categories that guide the way that we think and order the natural world. to me when when when i think of a fungus i either think of something in my salad or something growing on the side of a cave wall but it doesn't have much to do with me or does it well it does and many people describe fungi as a hidden kingdom of life which may so, but many hide in plain sight. And so there are many ways that you could find fungi impacting your life in a way that you haven't realized. For example, almost all plants depend on fungi that live in their roots in order for them to grow. So without fungi, we wouldn't have plants, as we know it. And if we didn't have plants, we wouldn't have anything to eat. And apart from that, many of the drugs that are used in the human world come from fungi, from statins, cholesterol-lowering statins, to the anti-cancer drug Taxol, to alcohol, very familiar, psilocybin.

Starting point is 00:34:47 So there's this pharmaceutical role that fungi play in our lives. And then there are the ways that we use fungi to produce enzymes and chemicals in industry. So citric acid, which is used in all soda pop drinks, that's produced by fungi in big fermenters. Many vaccines are produced in biochemically engineered yeast strains. So there are lots of ways that everyday life spins on fungal metabolic abilities in just ways that we don't often recognize. Why is it that I will sometimes be walking down the street, and in the middle of a lawn somewhere, there's a mushroom, and I don't know where it comes from? Those mushrooms that you'd see in a lawn,

Starting point is 00:35:36 most of the organism would be living below the surface of the soil. There's a big sprawling network that could range anywhere from a few inches to several feet to several meters. And at that moment, that organism would have sprouted a mushroom to disperse its spores, much as an apple tree would grow an apple. So in that moment, you could ask yourself, what would I be missing if I saw an apple sprouting from the ground in place of this mushroom? What about the apple tree sprawling and twisting below the surface of the soil? And it's a kind of analogous situation with this mushroom that you're seeing. The rest of the mushroom's organism, the rest of the fungal network,

Starting point is 00:36:21 would be making a living digesting, decomp decomposing rotting material in the soil. The mushroom seems to, if my recollection is correct, seems to pop up when it's wet though. There seems to be a particular weather element to it. Yes, so many prop up after rain because fungi use to grow, they inflate their cells with water. So when it rains, there's enough moisture to power the growth of mushrooms. And in fact, this growth can be very strong. We can have mushrooms that punch their way through asphalt roads or lift heavy paving stones. And you wouldn't think it possible if you picked one of these mushrooms. You know, they're a kind of soft, squidgy, fleshy material. Many you can eat, of course.

Starting point is 00:37:09 But nonetheless, they generate enough force by this hydrostatic, this water-driven power of their growth to crunch through very tough materials. And many of them we can eat, but many of them, even if you eat a little bit, will kill you. So what's going on there? Yeah, so it's a bit like much of the natural world. So there are lots of plants. There are also lots of plants that produce poisons that would kill us. And there are lots of animals that we could eat, but there are also animals that produce poisons,

Starting point is 00:37:39 whether scorpions or puffer fish or poisonous snakes that would kill us. And it's similar in the fungal world. There are these mushrooms which produce powerful poisons that will kill us. But it's not a unique feature of fungi to be potentially deadly. The way you describe it, it sounds very you know, almost like another life form. But when I think of mushrooms, fungus, I think of, you know, cultivated, you know, you buy them at the supermarket because somebody grew them rather than it's living under the ground in this kind of mysterious network. Yeah, exactly. And this is a very common perception, and it's a very understandable perception, because the parts of fungi that we can sense with our unaided senses are mushrooms, usually. These are the parts of the fungus made edible, poisonous, covetable.

Starting point is 00:38:40 Some of the most expensive foods in the world are fungi, truffles, the fruiting bodies of some fungi. So these are the parts of the fungus made perceivable, made noticeable. And so we would naturally think of mushrooms when we think of fungi. But that's what's so thrilling about this, the fungal world, the fungalgal kingdom is that the more we find out about it the more we realize that these organisms underpin many of the natural processes that we take for granted they they support many of the ecosystems that we we didn't know they supported we um we learn more and more about how how different things would be if fungi didn't exist? How different would things be if fun didn't exist? Well, they'd be unrecognizable. I mean the history of life would would have unfolded in a very different way These kind of questions are always very hard

Starting point is 00:39:36 But for example plants could only make it out of the water and onto the land About 500 million years ago because of fungi because of the partnerships that they formed with fungi so when the ancestors of plants which were small algae you know these photosynthetic they were green they photosynthetic so they could eat light they could produce energy from light but they weren't able to scavenge and forage around in the soil, in the solid ground. So when they washed up onto the shores of lakes and rivers, they formed relationships with fungi, which are very capable foragers in solid ground. And fungi behaved as root systems of these plants for about 50 million years until plants could evolve their own root systems. So the rest of the history of life on land is a history driven by this relationship between plants and fungi.

Starting point is 00:40:33 And plants, what we call plants, are really fungi that have evolved to farm algae and algae that have evolved to farm fungi. So all of the ecosystems that sustain us and in which we live, these are all things that arise from these relationships formed by fungi. When I think of fungi, I think of mushrooms because that's what I see. Are there other ways to see it? The naked eye sees it other than when it creates a mushroom? Yes. So you can see fungal networks.

Starting point is 00:41:10 You can grow them on, when you have moldy bread, for example, when your bread goes moldy, what you see there, those are fungal mycelium growing across the surface of the bread. So there are many ways in which we can see it in the natural environment You could see you can sometimes See molds growing you can sometimes see fungal Networks growing if you peel off the side of a rotting log you'd be able to sometimes see fungal tissues there Digesting the log so there are other ways to see fungi apart from mushrooms

Starting point is 00:41:46 and so when mold grows on my bread, generally we know that the bread's probably been sitting around for a long time. And what happened? Where did that mold come from? And then if I put it in the fridge, it probably won't come, or at least won't come for a few more days. So those molds on your bread would have come from spores in the air. And spores are how fungi disperse. So spores are a bit like plant seeds. And they're a fascinating subject. Fungal spores are the largest source of living particles in the air. So fungi produce about 50 megatons, 50 million tons of spores every year,

Starting point is 00:42:33 which is the weight of about 500,000 blue whales. And these spores circulate in the air, in the atmosphere, and they can even trigger, they change the way that weather patterns take place because they trigger the formation of droplets and ice crystals and so can influence the pattern of rain and hail and snow. So these fungal particles are traveling in the air and when they land on a suitable surface for them to grow they sprout and they develop into a new fungus and so when you see the mold growing on your bread you're seeing this the early life of a fungus that has most likely arrived as a spore what is it about my bread that makes it do that that it doesn't do on my crackers or on my plates or whatever well you probably find fungi that did grow on the

Starting point is 00:43:21 crackers after a while the bread is more moist and so fungi could find an easier home there. Plates would be hard because there isn't much organic material for them to digest. They live on the sources of food. You do find fungi living on all sorts of strange materials. They have a wide variety of appetites. There are fungi found growing in the blasted nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. These fungi grow towards radioactive hot particles. They seem to be able to use radiation as plants use the energy in sunlight. You also have fungi that live in the fuel tanks of aircraft, the kerosene fungus. You have specialist molds that live around whiskey barrels in Canadian distilleries that live off the evaporating alcohol fumes that emerge from these barrels over the course of years. So fungi have different appetites and that determines where they grow. in the sense that when I think of a fungus and when you say oh a fungus is growing a fungus and

Starting point is 00:44:26 mold and things like that are really have a bad reputation we want to get rid of them we don't want to embrace them there's a kind of cultural distaste in some places for for fungi. It depends where you are in the world. If you are in China or Japan or Korea, there tends to be a greater love of fungi and mushrooms, both in medicinal terms and culinary terms. But on the whole, in England and North America, we tend to find more mycophobic attitudes. It relates to our attitudes to supposed germs more generally. For much of the 20th century, germs were understood to be agents of disease. Now we understand our bodies to be made up of more bacterial and fungal cells than our own cells. And so these microbial partners and inhabitants of our lives are key players in the way that we behave and develop and grow.

Starting point is 00:45:30 And so this germ gross attitude that we've inherited is not always appropriate. And so fungi suffer a bit from that, I'd say. It seems so kind of mysterious and out there in the wilderness and the wild and under logs and everything. How does it get to the point where people say, well, here we're growing, you know, porcini mushrooms and here we're growing portobello mushrooms? How does it get so controlled and so farmed when it sounds like the way you're describing it, it's so like out there and kind of out of control it's a good question it's and it depends on the fungus so many fungi can't be cultivated so truffles for example white truffles can't be cultivated which is what makes them so valuable when i i joined truffle hunters hunting in italy and for these white truffles, they have to be found in the wild

Starting point is 00:46:26 because we don't understand enough about their life cycles. We don't understand enough about the relationships they form with their partner trees. We don't understand enough about the relationships they form with their bacterial partners to be able to simulate that environment and grow them in a controlled setting. There are other kinds of truffles and fungi that we can grow quite readily. So we understand a lot less about the workings of these organisms. But when we do grow them, and many can be grown and many are grown very fruitfully, then it's a question of finding out what, so shiitake, for example, you'd grow on wood, on logs, because wood is what they eat.

Starting point is 00:47:09 So you'd provide them with an ideal food source, you'd provide them with the conditions that they need to grow, and then you'd let them grow, much as you do with a plant or with any animal that we domesticate. We have to anticipate the needs of these organisms and then supply those needs. So they can be grown in these controlled environments. But as I say, many can't. But it must be hard because, you know, I can grow in my backyard a lot of the things I can buy at the supermarket, but not mushrooms.

Starting point is 00:47:40 I've never heard of anybody that has a mushroom garden, or maybe I have. Well, there are plenty. I mean, you can order online mushroom grow kits, just add water kits. And so you can grow a range of mushrooms quite easily from your kitchen. Don't even need to take them outside. It's a field that's growing quite rapidly. There's more and more interest in the subject because mushrooms are very good for you and they're very fast growing. And they're pretty interesting. I think the next time I see mushrooms in the supermarket, I'll look at them a little differently.

Starting point is 00:48:16 Merlin Sheldrake has been my guest. He is a biologist and author of the book Entangled Life, How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for coming on. Well, thanks for having me. Do you fidget? You know, do you doodle or click your pen over and over again, or just fidget with an object with your fingers?

Starting point is 00:48:47 Well, if you do, good for you, because it turns out that that behavior can promote creative thinking and faster learning. Researchers at New York University's Polytechnic School of Engineering studied a group of 40 workers who used various fidget widgets to improve focus, ease anxiety, and boost creative thinking. The study taps a relatively new field of research called embodied cognition that maps the connection between body movement and cognitive function. The same logic helps explain why students who take notes in longhand retain subject matter better than those who take notes on laptops, or why children who play with blocks and puzzles show better performance on spatial reasoning tests, according to studies published

Starting point is 00:49:38 in Psychological Science, or even how counting your fingers can improve mental arithmetic functioning in adults. So despite what your grandmother told you, fidgeting is a good thing and can apparently make you smarter. And that is something you should know. Hey, do me a favor and leave a rating and review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts. It'll help us and it will immortalize you on Apple Podcasts forever. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa DeMonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up four hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you

Starting point is 00:50:25 know, possibly enrage you. And don't blame me. We dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real. Whether you're dealing with relationship drama or you just need a friend's perspective, we've got you. Then switch gears with but am I wrong, which is for listeners who didn't take our advice and want to know if they are the villains in the situation. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events and present situations that we might even be wrong in our lives. Spoiler alert, we are actually quite literally never wrong. But wait, there's more. Check out See You Next Tuesday, where we reveal the juicy results from our listener polls from But Am I Wrong? And don't miss Fisting Friday, where we catch up, chat about pop culture, TV and movies. It's the perfect way to kick off your weekend.

Starting point is 00:51:06 So if you're looking for a podcast that feels like a chat with your besties, listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate We were both on a little show you might know Called Supernatural

Starting point is 00:51:29 It had a pretty good run 15 seasons, 327 episodes And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times We figured, hey, now that we're wrapped Let's watch it all again And we can't do that alone So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have

Starting point is 00:51:50 some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe

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