I’ll be straight with you. When I first started looking into functional mushrooms I was sceptical. I’ve always grown my own food, I’m interested in natural medicine, but I’m not someone who buys into something just because it sounds good. I need to know why. So when I kept coming across Lion’s Mane, Hericium erinaceus, being talked about in the context of brain health and cognitive function, I did what I always do. I started digging.
What I found was more interesting than I expected.
Lion’s Mane is a strange looking thing. White, cascading tendrils, nothing like your typical mushroom. It grows on dead and dying trees, mostly in China and Japan, and it has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. But it’s the modern research that caught my attention, specifically a Japanese study from 2008 looking at its effects on mild cognitive decline.
The study examined what happens in the early stages of conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s. Without getting too deep into the neuroscience, one of the key issues in these conditions is the health of cholinergic neurons, the nerve cells involved in memory and learning. There’s a protein called Nerve Growth Factor, NGF, that promotes their survival. The problem is that NGF can’t cross the blood brain barrier. You can’t just take it as a supplement and have it arrive where it’s needed. The brain doesn’t work like that.
Here’s where Lion’s Mane gets interesting. It contains compounds that appear to stimulate the body’s own production of NGF. Not delivering it from outside. Encouraging the brain to produce more of it from within. The participants in the Japanese study who took Lion’s Mane supplement showed measurably less cognitive impairment than those who didn’t. And they did so with no reported side effects.
Paul Stamets, probably the most well known mycologist working today, conducted research on mice showing that a Lion’s Mane group had less development of beta amyloid plaque in their brains. Beta amyloid plaque is one of the things associated with cognitive decline and neurological disorders. A further human based study showed similar results on cognitive function alongside reductions in depression, irritability, insomnia and anxiety.
Now I want to be clear about something, because I think honesty matters more than a good sales pitch. These are studies. Promising ones, serious ones, but studies. The research is still developing. Lion’s Mane is a food supplement, not a medicine, and I’m not going to tell you it cures or treats anything because that would be both inaccurate and irresponsible. What I will say is that the mechanism being investigated here is genuinely fascinating and the early results are hard to ignore.
I started growing Lion’s Mane myself because I wanted to understand it from the ground up. Literally. Watching the mycelium colonise the substrate, the pins forming, those strange white tendrils emerging. I also ordered extracts from various suppliers and started taking them. I listened to every Paul Stamets podcast I could find. I read the books. I wanted to know what I was actually dealing with before I said anything about it to anyone.
What struck me, and this is just my own experience so take it for what it is, was how quickly I noticed something. Whether that’s the Lion’s Mane or whether it’s the placebo effect of paying close attention to your own cognition I genuinely can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that I kept taking it. Still am.
The mycelium analogy keeps coming back to me here. The way hyphae grow outward, extend, connect, promote growth in the organisms around them. The way Lion’s Mane appears to work on the brain, encouraging the growth and survival of neurons rather than delivering something from outside, feels entirely consistent with how fungi operate everywhere else. They don’t impose. They facilitate.
Whether that translates into something meaningful for human brain health at scale is what the research is working out. But the question being asked is a serious one, and the people asking it are serious scientists.
That’s enough for me to keep paying attention.
May the spores be with you.