Mycelium as a Cat with Different Temporality
I’ve said many times over the years, not-so-jokingly, that working with mycelium is like working with a cat that operates on a different timescale. In all seriousness, I think this analogy sets the right headspace and expectation for the challenges, opportunities, and frustrations the mycelium engineer will meet.
Like a cat, mycelium is dynamic, moody, responsive, and often inscrutable. It will ignore you until it doesn’t. It will surprise you with sudden change. And if you try to force it into behavior that doesn’t suit its nature it will resist thoroughly, and with consequences. And to make life more challenging, it will do this allochronically; on a temporality distinct from our own. Its decisions unfold over hours, days, or weeks. Its movements are measured in millimeters, its moods in gradients of branching, density, or decay.
To work effectively with mycelium on a whole-body level requires a shift in how we understand behavior, how we time our interventions, and how we build a relationship with something that doesn’t speak in seconds or linear logic. This article explores what it means to design with an organism that may be slow but not simple, that may be silent but not passive, and that may, in its own way, possess something akin to a mind.
Closer to Animals than to Plants (or Bacteria)
Fungi are not plants. They don’t photosynthesize. They don’t build their bodies from sunlight. And while that distinction is now broadly accepted, what’s still underappreciated, especially among newcomers to mycelium design, is that fungi are genetically and biochemically closer to animals than to plants. Modern molecular phylogenetics places fungi and animals within the same eukaryotic lineage (Opisthokonta) indicating that they share a more recent common ancestor with each other than either does with plants. In other words: fungi and animals are evolutionary siblings; plants are a more distant cousin.
Like animals, fungi are heterotrophs: they lack chloroplasts and must acquire nutrients by breaking down and absorbing organic material. Their digestion is external (akin to an animal with an external stomach), and their survival rooted in competitive conquest.
Their cell walls are built from chitin, the same tough polymer that makes up arthropod shells, unlike the cellulose of plants or the peptidoglycan of bacteria. When they store excess carbon, they do so as animal starch (i.e. glycogen), the very same carbohydrate animals use. And while they don’t run, swim, or fly, most fungi are not truly immobile: they move by growing, directionally and purposefully, through solid substrates. Their mode of locomotion is sessile, but their growth can show the same targeted opportunism you'd expect from a slow-moving predator; a cat that grows its body toward the mouse.
Today, it’s well established that fungi form a separate kingdom, distinct from plants and protists, and genetically aligned more closely with animals. So when we approach fungi as material partners, it helps to remember we’re working with something more animal than vegetable; something that behaves, adapts, and sometimes refuses.
Memory, Decision-Making, and the Foraging Mind of Fungi
If fungi are cats with different temporality, then they’re cats that remember; slow-moving, history-bearing organisms whose present behavior is shaped as much by prior experience as by current conditions.
One of the more compelling demonstrations of this comes from work on cord-forming fungi like Phanerochaete velutina (Boddy et al. 2019). In soil microcosm experiments, colonies were observed reallocating growth toward fresh wood baits. But what stood out wasn’t just the resource tracking, it was the persistence of directional memory. When the inoculated wood block was physically relocated to new soil, growth resumed preferentially from the side of the block that had originally faced the bait, even though the bait was no longer present and the spatial context had changed. The fungus, in effect, remembered where it was going.
And this goes beyond polarity. Fungi make relocation decisions that reflect not just moment-to-moment gradients, but internalized context; resource size, spatial history, internal state. A small bait might provoke hedging: some growth toward the new site, some lingering in the old. But a large enough bait triggers a full migration, a network-wide commitment. Biomass is withdrawn from the old site and consolidated at the new one. It’s a kind of decision-making that mirrors the behavioral logic of animals abandoning a depleted environment for a more favorable one, except manifesting in a slower tempo, through entirely different mechanisms.
This isn’t metaphorical cognition, its decision making shaped by prior exposure, current need, and emergent behavior. There’s no nervous system here, no centralized control, but the patterns are unmistakable: memory without neurons, commitment without consciousness, decisions made through spatially distributed coordination of growth, decay, and redistribution.
For the mycelium engineer, this carries real weight. If your culture isn’t behaving as expected, it may not be a problem of media or air or temperature. It may be (passage) history. What did this mycelium experience in its last vessel, in its last substrate, in its last week of development? What signals did it integrate? What resources did it commit to or abandon? Designing effectively with fungi means thinking beyond static morphology or idealized conditions. It means acknowledging the organism’s path through time.
Sensitivity and the Case for Fungal Consciousness
What if fungi aren’t just slow, dynamic, and behaviorally complex, but conscious in a biologically grounded sense?
Not conscious like a human or an octopus. But perhaps conscious in the way some theorists describe as basal consciousness; a kind of sentience without neurons, where awareness emerges from patterns of sensation, integration, and response (Money 2019).
At the hyphal scale, the signs are compelling. These tip-growing cells are highly sensitive to their surroundings, responding in real time to topography, resistance, chemical gradients, confinement, and damage. This responsiveness is orchestrated by the Spitzenkörper, a vesicle-organizing center that governs growth behavior (Simonin et al. 2019). Shifts in the Spitzenkörper align with changes in direction, branching, or rate, revealing behavior that is contextual, probabilistic, and tuned.
Hyphal membrane potentials even oscillate in patterns that resemble neuronal action potentials, though their function remains unclear. Some pathogenic fungi take this further, deploying anticipatory behavior; altering gene expression before immune contact, suggesting internal regulation or prediction.
But the most striking signals don’t reside in any one hypha, they emerge at the colony scale. The mycelium reallocates resources across space, integrates historical stimuli, avoids previously encountered barriers, and orients to past spatial arrangements. These are not metaphors, they are measurable behaviors driven by network-wide coordination. As Nicholas Money notes, the mycelium may not think, but it behaves like a system with a point of view.
This raises a real possibility: that mycelial consciousness, if it exists, is not hidden but distributed; an emergent property of integration and action across tens-of-thousands of interacting hyphae. Not a brain, but a field. Not a thinker, but a knower whose actions reflect memory, context, and self-organization.
For the mycelium engineer, this isn’t just poetic, it’s practical. If the mycelium behaves like it knows, our interventions should respect what it might have learned. We’re not just cultivating material, we’re engaging an organism that, in its own way, perceives.
Living on Fungal Time
One of the most fundamental challenges in working with fungi isn’t spatial, it’s temporal. Fungi operate on a timescale that diverges sharply from the pace of most animals. This is where the “cat with a different temporality” metaphor becomes fully apt: mycelium is reactive, temperamental, and behaviorally complex, but it unfolds at a tempo that demands patience, attention, and translational tools to make the emergent behaviors visible on our timescale.
Where an animal might respond in seconds or minutes, a fungus may take hours or days to do the same; whether growing toward a new resource, triggering reproduction, or reallocating internal materials. Even a fast-growing species like Neurospora crassa only expands a few millimeters per hour. That’s effectively invisible in real time. You won’t see a hypha reach like you’d see a cat paw. It takes long intervals for the agency to become clear.
Slower fungi amplify this further. Fruiting may take days or weeks after inductive cues. Colony competition or internal translocation can span weeks. But these are still animated behaviors (exploration, withdrawal, commitment), just expressed in slow motion.
For researchers, this requires a toolkit and rhythm attuned to the organism’s pace. You might set up an experiment, make an intervention, and wait days before you see meaningful change. Real signal needs time. Time-lapse, continuous sensing, and regular imaging become essential for making fungal behavior visible. Aligning your inputs with the organism’s cadence often determines whether you get clarity or confusion.
Understanding fungal time isn’t just operational, it’s relational. You learn to meet the organism where it is. You stop expecting it to conform to your schedule, and start designing with respect for its own. That temporal offset doesn’t just require better timing, it asks for humility. Some of the most important insights I’ve seen in fungal R&D didn’t come from pushing faster, they came from waiting long enough, and measuring enough, to notice.
Slow Motion Cat Trainers
In the end, working with fungi often feels less like culturing a microbe and more like training an animal you’ll never meet in real time. The mycelium engineer becomes something like a slow-motion behaviorist; closer to a cat trainer with time-lapse than a technician at the bench. We study intention through hyphal gesture, map decision through growth direction and eccentricity, infer mood from density, efficiency, and decay. And we do it all through the compression of time: watching the organism move across hours, days, or weeks, learning to read its tendencies, hesitations, and commitments. If you want to work effectively with fungi, you don’t just need protocols. You need patience, pattern recognition, and a willingness to build relationships with organisms that are thinking, just not with our language or on our schedule.
References
Fukasawa, Y., Savoury, M., & Boddy, L. (2020). Ecological memory and relocation decisions in fungal mycelial networks: Responses to quantity and location of new resources. The ISME Journal, 14(2), 380–388. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-019-0536-3
Money, N. P. (2021). Hyphal and mycelial consciousness: The concept of the fungal mind. Fungal Biology, 125(4), 257–259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.funbio.2021.02.001
Simonin, A., Bassani, C., Bardin, M., et al. (2019). Intracellular mechanisms of fungal space searching in micro‑fabricated environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(30), 14819–14824. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1816423116
Lovett, B. (2021, January 18). Three reasons fungi are not plants. American Society for Microbiology. Retrieved from https://asm.org/Articles/2021/January/Three-Reasons-Fungi-Are-Not-Plants