Not a metaphor. Not a thought experiment.
An actual, functioning computer component grown from a shiitake mushroom.
Researchers at Ohio State University took a common edible fungus—the same kind you’d toss in a stir-fry—and trained it to store and process information like a silicon chip.
The future of computing might be growing in a forest right now.
The team grew shiitake mushrooms and connected their mycelium—the underground web of threads—to electrodes.
Then they trained the fungus to act as a “memristor,” a component that remembers past electrical states. It’s the same technology that powers memory in modern devices.
The mushroom version worked.
It switched between electrical states up to 5,850 times per second with roughly 90% accuracy.
A living mushroom was processing data like a computer chip.
Here's what's wild: fungi were basically built for computing.
Mycelium already operates like a network. It sends electrical signals. It processes information about its environment. It adapts and responds and remembers.
In a way, fungi have been running biological computations for hundreds of millions of years—long before humans invented the transistor.
The researchers didn’t teach the mushroom to compute. They just gave it electrodes and let it do what it already knew how to do.
Regular computer chips are an environmental nightmare.
They require rare-earth minerals dug from the ground. They need massive factories running at high temperatures. They consume enormous amounts of power and create toxic waste that doesn’t break down.
Mushroom chips? You grow them at room temperature. They cost almost nothing. And when they’re done, you compost them.
A computer component that you can literally throw in your garden when you’re finished with it.
We've spent decades trying to build computers that work like brains.
Billions of dollars. Rare materials. Cutting-edge labs.
And it turns out nature already solved the problem. The structure scientists are desperately trying to replicate in silicon already exists in the fungal kingdom—efficient, adaptive, low-power, and self-assembling.
We weren’t inventing brain-like computing. We were reinventing what mushrooms already do.
There's something poetic here.
For most of human history, we’ve looked at mushrooms as food, medicine, or curiosity. Something beneath us. Something simple.
Now they might power the next generation of technology.
The same organism that connects forests underground, recycles death into life, and predates almost everything we recognize as living… could soon be running our computers.
Nature isn’t behind us. It never was.
We’re just now realizing how far ahead it’s been the whole time.
Water Your Mind 💚
Mushie Media of the Week:
"Powered by Mushrooms, Living Computers Are on the Rise"
by: Ohio State University
