Stuart Isett
By Richard Schiffman
Tell me about the hat you’re wearing.
It’s made from a birch polypore mushroom. Our ancestors realised that you could get this tough bracket fungus off birch trees, hollow it out and put fire in it and carry it for days. This enabled the portability of fire that is so critical for human survival. When the same mushroom is boiled and stretched, it produces a fabric. There are only a handful of people in Transylvania who are making these hats now. Because of deforestation and the difficulty of finding large-enough mushrooms, the hats are becoming very rare.
What started your fascination with mushrooms?
One day I decided to try some psilocybin [magic] mushrooms. After eating a whole bag of them, I climbed to the top of an oak tree just when a huge lightning storm with boiling black clouds was rolling in. I was thinking, “This is it Paul. If you make it through this, what does it mean to you?”
The biggest problem in my __life at the time was a bad stutter. It was a social phobia that made dating girls really difficult. So I started repeating a mantra: “Stop stuttering now, stop stuttering now.” On my way back, I ran into a girl who I liked a lot but was always too shy to talk to. “Hi Paul, how are you doing?” she asked. I answered, “I’m doing just great!” That was basically the end of my stuttering.
How do you think this stopped your stutter?
Recently scientists have discovered that psilocybin stimulates neurogenesis ...
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