Andrew Adamatzky, a computer scientist at the University of the West of England, analyzed the electrical activity of four species of fungi and published his findings last Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science. He found that spikes in electrical activity were used by fungi to communicate and transmit information to other fungi on their network.
“Well, with this latest study, a computer scientist sticks some electrodes in some mushrooms and asks, ‘What do the signals look like?’ And do the signals have any complexity? “CTV science and technology expert Dan Riskin told the CTV News Channel on Sunday.
Beneath each mushroom are textures, which are underground structures that look like roots that can be likened to nerve cells in the human nervous system. When textures form a network, called a mycelium, this can facilitate communication between fungi.
“There is a whole culture around mushrooms and they are definitely amazing architects of our natural world,” Riskin said. “They have this huge underground network and every once in a while they pop mushrooms for breeding. But most of the time, they stay hidden.”
The study found that spikes in electrical signals produced by fungi may look like tongues. Spikes can be grouped into “words” and “sentences” and according to the study, these fungi can have a vocabulary of up to 50 “words”.
“There’s a lot of growing evidence that these textures send some kind of signal between people; communicating about where the pores are, where the food is, and maybe also having mushroom-like conversations,” Riskin explained. .
The complexity of the language varies between species of fungi. The study found that broken gills could create more complex sentences with longer vocabulary, while other species such as enoki and caterpillar had much smaller dictionaries.
But while the study likens these electrical signals from fungi to “words,” Riskin said it was “a giant step” to suggest that fungi use real words to communicate with each other, similar to humans.
“I think most biologists will say that this pushes it a long way … But, saying that, this complexity is probably based on the actual communication that takes place between these organisms,” he said.
“It makes sense. They have the architecture to do it and it would benefit them from the perspective of natural selection. So, there’s definitely a lot to be deciphered here about how these mushrooms and how these fungi do what they do.”
