Mushroom cyborg taught to crave the light

Few people dared ask what would happen if you treated fungus as a giant brain, gave it a robot body and then started annoying it with a flashlight, but one group of scientists at Cornell University dared to dream the strange, strange dream. It turns out, what happens is, it flops about a bit.

You see, today’s robot researcher hungers for brains. Artificial brains, real human brains, anything they can get their brain-obsessed hands on. It wasn’t so long ago that we reported scientists were growing slightly human brains for use in their horrifying robots, but now, they’ve gone vegan. In a plot right out of the Super Mario Bros. movie (the good one from the 90s, not the new cartoon one), it turns out the fungus is thinking, and that thinking can be harnessed by a specially-constructed robot octopus. This is all real, by the way, we haven’t gone mental.

Researchers from New York’s Cornell University noticed that the vast, underground fibers of a mushroom colony’s mycelium function a lot like a neural network. Long fibers, vastly interconnected, and capable of transmitting electrical impulses thanks to all their ionic goo. So, if it looks like a brain and zaps like a brain, why not see if it acts like a brain? It turns out, it does. Sort of. The team grew a petri dish full of mycelium that responds electrically to light and hooked it up to a couple of simple robots, one with wheels, and one that looks like a starfish for some reason. The result? A mushroom cyborg creature that attempts to walk (or roll) towards the light. Does the mushroom robot understand what is going on? Does it understand that it fears the dark, craves the light, and is now a mechanical mushroom? Probably not. But, it’s a proof of concept for further study using mycelium as an organic, easy to grow and durable neural network.