Mushrooms May Communicate With Each Other Using Up To 50 "Words"
hubie writes:
Mathematical analysis of the electrical signals fungi seemingly send to one another has identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech.
Previous research has suggested that fungi conduct electrical impulses through long, underground filamentous structures called hyphae - similar to how nerve cells transmit information in humans.
Prof Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England's unconventional computing laboratory in Bristol used tiny microelectrodes to investigate patterns of electrical spikes transmitted through long, underground filamentous structures called hyphae generated by four species of fungi. He noted that the pulses changed depending upon the surface the fungi are in contact with. He found that the spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words, and that the distribution of these fungal word lengths" closely matched those of human languages.
[...] The most likely reasons for these waves of electrical activity are to maintain the fungi's integrity - analogous to wolves howling to maintain the integrity of the pack - or to report newly discovered sources of attractants and repellants to other parts of their mycelia, Adamtzky suggested.
There is also another option - they are saying nothing," he said. Propagating mycelium tips are electrically charged, and, therefore, when the charged tips pass in a pair of differential electrodes, a spike in the potential difference is recorded."
Whatever these spiking events" represent, they do not appear to be random, he added.
In discussing these results, Dan Bebber, an associate professor of biosciences at the University of Exeter, and a member of the British Mycological Society's fungal biology research committee said, Though interesting, the interpretation as language seems somewhat overenthusiastic, and would require far more research and testing of critical hypotheses before we see Fungus' on Google Translate."
Journal Reference:
Andrew Adamatzky, Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity [open], R. Soc. Open Sci. 9: 211926.
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211926
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