Magic Mushrooms

You can do more with mushrooms than just ingest them (especially the magic ones that make you "high" (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show, which is one of the pieces to Anne Strieber’s "Green Man" revelation and subsequent mission).

And how did the violin makers who worked between 1645 and 1715 create instruments with sound so beautiful that they are still treasured by professional musicians today? They used mushrooms!

Researcher Francis Schwarze knew that sound travels faster through healthy wood, which is stiff and dense. But he found that some fungi affect wood in ways that produce the warmth and mellow tones that violin-makers most desire. When Schwarze had some violins made from wood infected by fungi, he discovered that they sounded like a Stradivarius.

The period when the best violins were created coincides with a cold spell in Europe’s climate that produced long winters and cool summers wood, causing trees to grow slowly and evenly. It turns out that treating wood with a certain type of fungus does the same thing. It gradually degrades the cell walls of the wood it infects, thinning–rather than destroying–them, leaving behind a stiff scaffolding through which sound waves can easily pass.

In a blind trial conducted in 2009 by a famous violinist, that compared modern violins treated with the fungi to music played on a 1711 Stradivarius, many people listeners actually preferred the sound of the modern instruments.