Fungal language: Mushrooms speak, says one scientist

Fungi might seem to be a silent organism. But they might be using electrical spikes to communicate information with each other or distant parts of the fungal colonies in a “fungal language” — and it’s very similar to human speech.

Professor Andrew Adamatzky, a scientist who works in the computing laboratory at the University of the West of England (UWE), has recorded electrical impulses passing through filamentous structures called hyphae and analysed their patterns of electrical spikes.

This is not the first time that researchers have looked into the electrical signals of fungi and argued that they might be sharing information through filamentous structures called hyphae. 

Previous research suggested that fungi use signals to share information about food and injury, the Guardian reported. It even said the firing rate of impulses increased when wood-digesting fungi came into contact with the wooden blocks.

But Adamatzky’s research stands out for asking the question: are the trains of the electrical activity of fungi similar to humans at all?

In research published in the Royal Society Open Science, the researcher said the answer might be a yes.

The researcher tested it out by inserting microelectrodes into substrates colonised by hyphae threads.

Connecting devices to four different species of fungi, enoki, split gill, ghost, and caterpillar fungi, Adamatzky translated signal spikes into binary strings, only to decode the “words” they were saying. In total, he recorded around 50 “words.” Their big trains of electrical spikes matched that observed in the central nervous system.

Among them, the split gill mushroom that is often seen on sickly hardwood trees “said” the most complicated sentences.

Adamatzky told Newsweek that the fungi may use these spike trains to communicate their presence in a network, similar to a wolf’s howl.

The research, however, doesn’t eliminate the possibility that the findings could be meaningless. “The similarity could be just phenomenological,” the published research says. But the researcher thinks the spiking events don’t seem to be random.

“There are many similarities in information processing in living substrates of different classes, families, and species,” the Guardian quoted Adamatzky as saying.

Some scientists are sceptical of Adamatsky’s suggestion that the spikes function as a fungal language, saying the interpretation is “overenthusiastic.”

“This new paper detects rhythmic patterns in electric signals, of a similar frequency as the nutrient pulses we found,” University of Exeter mycologist Dan Bebber, a coauthor of previous studies on the phenomenon, told The Guardian. 

“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,” Bebber said.

But Adamatsky thinks his research, contributing to the emerging body of studies on the language of creatures without a nervous system and invertebrates, is significant for another reason too.

“A modified conception of the language of plants is considered to be a pathway towards ‘the de-objectification of plants and the recognition of their subjectivity and inherent worth and dignity,’” his research says.