After reading about new research recently conducted at Penn State and new data published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, I'm even more convinced that mushrooms really are the bacon of Earth.
It's not just good for you - like, 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away' - kind of good; they provide what our body actually needs in order to function at peak performance at all times. There are so many varieties of mushrooms, but they're fundamentally all the same in that they all contain essential nutrients so that our bodies can battle it out with things our bodies don't need, but consume anyway. This includes our mental health.
Penn State researchers found that people who incorporated mushrooms into their diet had lower odds of having depression. The Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London and COMPASS Pathways ran a study with microdoses of Psilocybe mushrooms resulting in great promise for treating serious mental health problems like PTSD and TRD (treatment-resistant depression).
How mushrooms came to be so beneficial to human existence is another one of Earth's marvelous wonders. Professor Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England’s Unconventional Computing Laboratory experimented with four types of fungi to get to know them a little better: ghost (Omphalotus nidiformis), Enoki (Flammulina velutipes), split gill (Schizophyllum commune) and caterpillar fungi. He and his research team found that during colonization, the mycelium of these mushrooms transmit electric impulses to each other in patterns that somewhat resemble human language.
"First evidence has been obtained that indeed fungi respond to mechanical, chemical and optical stimulation by changing pattern of its electrically activity and, in many cases, modifying characteristics of their spike trains. There is also evidence of electrical current participation in the interactions between mycelium and plant roots during formation of mycorrhiza ... We compared complexity measures of the fungal spiking train and sample text in European languages and found that the ‘fungal language’ exceeds the European languages in morphological complexity."
So if mushrooms communicate and humans talk, maybe the more mushrooms we consume, the healthier and subsequently happier we'll be? Good thing they're delicious!