It’s been a long while since I wrote a new post – teaching has been keeping me busy for the last couple of years – but it’s really nice to pick this back up again! Today I wanted to write about finding fungi and the frequency illusion.
I started noticing different kinds and shapes and colours of fungi on my walks in early 2020. I joined an online webinar about identifying different mushrooms and their uses and read Merlin Sheldrake’s brilliant book “Entangled life: How fungi make our worlds”. And the more interested I became, the more that mushrooms started growing inside my story and becoming a bigger part of the plot. And then I saw them Everywhere.
Lockdown in 2020 meant most of my walks took place in Queen’s Park, Glasgow – next to where I lived at the time. I’d walked there many many times before, but I suddenly began to notice mushrooms everywhere. I recognised the tiny little matchstick-like fronds of candlesnuff fungus and the sickly sheen of glistening inkcaps. My eyes adjusted to tiny porcelain fungus growing up tree trunks and the rippled fans of turkey tail growing out of decaying tree stumps. I crouched down to make out orange peel fungus (guess what it looks like…) and was delighted to find the tiny red bowls of scarlet elf cups. It was the strangest thing – it felt like a whole new world had suddenly become visible to me. Every walk became a wide-eyed adventure of discovery.
I didn’t realise that this experience has a name: the frequency illusion. This is a cognitive bias which means that if you’ve just learned about something, you’ll see it more frequently. Our minds are primed to notice things which we’ve shown matter to us. In my case, this was fungi. Frequency illusion (and confirmation bias) are useful things to learn about, and I love recognising how the stories I am writing are actively changing my experience of the world. If I wasn’t writing a story filled with jelly ear mushrooms and amethyst deceivers, I wouldn’t notice half as many as I walked round city parks.
This is one reason I love writing stories about something I don’t know much about (yet) like marine life in The Girl who Lost her Shadow, and different fungi in my current project. This way, I can experience that shift in perspective which makes me walk through the world noticing entirely different things.
Has this ever happened to you when you’re writing a story about something you’re interested in? Do you start seeing it everywhere?
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