The Mushroom That Remembers You: How Fungi “Learn” and “Plan” Without a Brain

Jun 19

They have no eyes. No ears.
No neurons. No beating heart.
And yet, when you walk through a forest, they already know you're there.
The fungi.
The quiet architects beneath our feet.

Recent science suggests something radical:
Mushrooms may not just grow…they may learn.
Adapt. Plan. Remember.
Without a brain.

This is the story of the mushroom that remembers.
And what that says about life, intelligence, and the soft, networked mind of the Earth itself.

Fungi Are Not Plants. They’re Something Stranger.

Let’s start with the taxonomy.
Mushrooms are not vegetables, they’re closer to animals than broccoli.
They breathe oxygen. Exhale carbon dioxide.
Some glow in the dark. Some digest oil spills. Some outlive trees.

But their most incredible feature?
A living neural net called mycelium: a sprawling, underground web of filaments that behaves like a brain without a body.

Mycelium: The Internet of the Forest

Mycelium spreads through the soil like wires under a city.
It connects trees. Warns plants of danger.
Redistributes nutrients where needed.

But here’s where it gets wild:
Fungi remember where resources were.
They change their growth pattern in response to prior events.
They anticipate, as if calculating.

A 2021 study recorded electrical pulses in mycelium that look shockingly like action potentials in human neurons.
Not random. Not automatic.
Structured.

The Mushroom That Solves Mazes

In Japan, scientists placed nutrients at two ends of a maze and observed a fungus grow toward them.
It avoided dead ends.
It changed course when one path became blocked.

And here’s the kicker:
When they repeated the test later, the fungus took the right route immediately.
As if it had learned.

No eyes. No reward center.
Just a body made of memory.

But What Is Memory Without a Brain?

In humans, memory is stored in the brain.
But in fungi, memory is patterned in structure: a record of tension, electric spikes, and chemical gradients.

Think of it like this:
A trail that hardens as it’s walked.
Not a photo, but a groove.
Not thinking, but becoming.

And that leads to the question we’re all secretly asking:
Is memory a thing, or a pattern of change?

Related Read: Nanoflowers and Motherhood

Fungi’s Emotional Intelligence?

Okay…not emotion in the way we feel it.
But response to the environment…measured, adapted, remembered.

Fungi move toward calm.
Avoid chaos.
Seek balance.
Shift their networks after injury or stress.
Is that not, in its own language, feeling?

Fungal Memory as Muscle: Learning by Pattern, Not Thought

Fungi don’t memorize in the way humans do.
They don’t store memories in folders labeled “childhood” or “grief.”

Instead, they change their behavior in response to experience.
A wound makes them reroute.
A resource makes them grow faster next time.
It’s not remembering, it’s becoming different than they were.
A kind of muscle memory for organisms without muscles.

This kind of intelligence isn’t intellectual…it’s structural.
It’s in the branching, the thickening, the tilt toward shade or away from heat.
Just like trauma can shape the nervous system, fungi are shaped by what they survive.
That shape is their memory.
That rerouting is their story.

And if we listened to their way of remembering, maybe we’d stop assuming that healing always looks like words.

Fungi as the Earth’s Nervous System

Some ecologists now describe mycelium as the “Earth’s nervous system.”
Not just a metaphor…literally a communication web spanning continents underground.

It connects tree to tree, plant to root, mushroom to mushroom.
Information pulses through it: nutrients, chemical alarms, even warning signals from insect infestations.
Like a forest whispering through its own veins.

It doesn’t think, but it feels.
It doesn’t speak, but it responds.
The Earth, through fungi, may have more self-awareness than we imagined.

This decentralization makes it more resilient than any computer.
There’s no single point of failure.
If one node is damaged, the rest reroute.
In a world unraveling from climate change and chaos, maybe that’s the kind of intelligence we need to model:
Distributed. Resilient. Quietly aware.

The Fungus That Grieves (or Something Like It)

There’s a species of fungus that will continue growing toward the exact same location…even after the resource is gone.
As if it hasn’t yet realized the meal is missing.
Or can’t bear to change course.

Is it instinct?
Momentum?
Or something more haunting?

It reminds me of grief.
How we keep returning to places that once held comfort.
How we reach out for people who are no longer here.
Even if we know, deep down, that nothing will meet us there.

What if memory doesn’t just guide us, but traps us too?
And what if fungi feel the same echo?

Language Without Language: The Poetics of the Underground

Fungi don’t speak. But their bodies form syntax.
A branching here means opportunity. A thickening there means survival.
A withdrawn tendril, a loop, a halt, each movement says something.

They write their language in space, not sound.
Not unlike vines curling toward the sun.
Not unlike people building walls around pain.

Fungal networks record emotion in architecture, not just biology.
There’s elegance in that.
Not every organism wants to speak aloud.
Some want to build their words slowly.
Rooted in dirt.
Written in the dark.

And those are the ones we should listen to most.

Fungal Networks vs Human Brains

Let’s compare:

Your brain is centralized.
Fungi are decentralized, intelligence scattered like seeds.

You get trauma in a single lobe.
A mushroom…adapts everywhere.
Resilient. Flexible. More anti-fragile than we are.

Which makes you wonder:
Do we define intelligence too narrowly?
Do we miss the wisdom in the weave?

Related Read: The Emotional Lives of Fish

Fungi Can Rewire Themselves

One of the most mind-blowing studies?
Fungi that re-routed their mycelial traffic after damage…rerouting “thoughts” like a brain after stroke.

No panic. No freeze. Just a pivot.

What would we be like if we could do the same?
If trauma didn’t shut us down, but helped us reroute?
If our pain became a map instead of a cage?

What Fungi Teach Us About Memory and Survival

Fungi survive because they don’t hold on.
They let old networks decay.
Build new ones.
Over and over again.

They are both archive and erasure.
History and transformation.

If they can learn without a brain, can we heal without needing every answer?
Can we grow roots without remembering every pain?

The Memory That Grows

Fungi don’t have minds.
They have maps.
Maps they draw with their own bodies.

And maybe that’s a kind of knowing we’ve forgotten.
To feel with our feet.
To remember with our shape.
To heal by making new paths.

So next time you see a mushroom pushing through the soil…
Know this:
It might not have a brain.
But it remembers you.

Michele Gargiulo http://michelegargiulo.com