Fungi seeks similar: scientist investigates mushroom ‘chat’

A new study suggests that buried in forest litter or sprouted from trees, fungi may be capable of communicating.

Patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech have been identified by mathematical analysis of the electrical signals sent to one another.

It has been suggested that the hyphae are similar to how nerve cells transmit information in humans.

It has shown that the firing rate of these impulses increases when the hyphae of wood-digesting fungi come into contact with wooden blocks.

Do the trains of electrical activity have anything in common with human language?

The University of the West of England's unconventional computing laboratory in Bristol analysed the patterns of electrical spikes generated by four species of fungi.

He did this by colonising their mycelia with tiny microelectrodes.

We don't know if there is a relationship between spiking patterns in fungi and human speech. There are many similarities in information processing between different classes, families and species. I was curious to compare.

The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that the spikes were clustered into trains of activity, similar to the way human languages are structured.

The most complex sentences were generated by split gills, which grow on decaying wood and have fruiting bodies that look like waves of coral.

The most likely reasons for these waves of electrical activity are to maintain the integrity of the fungi or to report newly discovered sources of attractants and repellants to other parts of the pack.

He said that there is another option, which is that they are saying nothing.

He said that the events do not appear to be random.

Other scientists would like to see more evidence before they would accept them as a form of language. There are other types of pulsing behaviour that have been recorded in the network.

Dan Bebber, an associate professor of biosciences at the University of Exeter and a member of the British Mycological Society, said that the new paper detected rhythmic patterns in electric signals, similar to the ones we found.

Though interesting, the interpretation as language seems overenthusiastic, and would require far more research and testing of critical hypotheses before we see it.