How to Change Your Mind

intricate tracery of blue lines on a night sky, the lines representing at once
mycelium, roots, neurons, the Internet, and dark matter.
Displayed on the walls heading upstairs from the living room are
framed artworks, photographs, and keepsakes, including a diploma
signifying the successful completion of one of the Merry Pranksters’ Acid
Tests, signed by Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady. There are several
photographs of Dusty posing in old-growth forests with impressive
specimens of fungi and a colorfully grotesque print by Alex Grey, the
dean of American psychedelic artists. The print is Grey’s interpretation of
the so-called stoned ape theory, depicting an early, electrified-looking
hominid clutching a Psilocybe while a cyclone of abstractions flies out of
its mouth and forehead. The only reason I could make any sense of the
image at all was that a few days earlier I had received an e-mail from
Stamets referring to the theory in question: “I want to discuss the high
likelihood that the Stoned Ape Theory, first presented by Roland Fischer
and then popularized/restated by Terence McKenna, is probably true—
[ingestion of psilocybin] causing a rapid development of the hominid
brain for analytical thinking and societal bonding. Did you know that 23
primates (including humans) consume mushrooms and know how to
distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’?”
I did not.
But the brief, elliptical e-mail nicely prefigured the tenor of my
weekend with Stamets as I struggled to absorb a torrent of mycological
fact and speculation that, like a rushing river, is impossible to ford
without being knocked sideways. The sheer brilliance of Stamets’s
mushroom’s-eye view of the world can be dazzling, but after a while it can
also make you feel claustrophobic, as only the true monomaniac or
autodidact—and Stamets is both—can do. Everything is connected is ever
the subtext with such people; in this case what connects everything you
could possibly think of just happens to be fungal mycelia.
I was curious to find out how Stamets came by his mycocentric
worldview and what role psilocybin mushrooms, in particular, might have
contributed to it. Stamets grew up in an Ohio town outside Youngstown
called Columbiana, the youngest of five children. His father’s engineering
company went belly-up when Paul was a boy, the family “going from
riches to rags pretty quickly.” Dad began to drink heavily, and Paul began
looking up to his older brother John as a role model.