Link to the following: 

Supracellular: A Meditation by Sophie Strand

“I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multispecies, polynucleated mind.”

Letting her consciousness slip from the confines of her brain into the long tubes of hyphae that make up the mycelial network beneath her feet, author Sophie Strand wonders how much better we might think if we involved the wide web of more-than-human beings around us. She challenges the idea that our minds are individual—like siloed cells resisting exchange with the outside world—and offers a practice of opening up to a “supracellular state” in which thinking is less bound to an organ and more a relational process that moves through the fungal, geological, microbial, vegetal, ancestral threads that connect us with our ecosystem. This exercise in embodied empathy enables Sophie to enter the minds of rivers, black bears, and chanterelles; and as the borders between physical matter dissolve, her self flows into a wider space of multiplicity. She feels in the extended web of her cognition both the wonder of the land’s otherness and the pain of its increasing disruption. This essay is the first in a series of four we are sharing over the next month in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature.

On thinking

 Evan Thompson describes:

Part of the problem, however, comes from thinking of the mind or meaning as being generated in the head. That’s like thinking that flight is inside the wings of a bird. A bird needs wings to fly, but flight isn’t in the wings, and the wings don’t generate flight; they generate lift, which facilitates flight. Flying is an action of the whole animal in its environment. Analogously, you need a brain to think, but thinking isn’t in the brain, and the brain doesn’t generate it; it facilitates it. The brain generates many things—neurons and their synaptic connections, ongoing rhythmic activity patterns, the constant dynamic coordination of sensory and motor activity—but none of these should be identified with thinking, though all of them crucially facilitate it. Thinking is an action of the whole person in its environment.

Evan Thompson, “Spring Forward or Fall Back: Changing Times for Neuroscience,”
Psychology Today, May 13, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wakingdreaming-
being/201505/spring-forward-or-fall-back.

I quoted this from an article which I'll link tomorrow!