A recent study revealed that mushrooms can communicate with one another and recognise up to 50 words. Electrical impulses observed in the electrical activity of four kinds of fungus were structurally comparable to human speech and approximated the vocabulary of hundreds of words.
According to the study, when wood-digesting mushrooms came into touch with wood, the impulses increased, suggesting that fungi may use electrical communications to exchange information about food or harm.
Professor Andrew Adamatzky of the University of the West of England performed the study. Electrical spikes produced by enoki, split gill ghost and caterpillar fungus were studied by him and his computing group. The study was published in Royal Society Open Science.
Professor Adamatzky said: ‘We do not know if there is a direct relationship between spiking patterns in fungi and human speech. Possibly not. On the other hand, there are many similarities in information processing in living substrates of different classes, families and species. I was just curious to compare.’
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The information was carried by fungal roots called mycelium and the spike clusters mirrored human vocabularies of up to 50 words. Professor Adamatzky said that the average length of each ‘word’ was 5.97 letters, compared to 4.8 letters in the English language, indicating that fungus had ‘minds and an awareness.’
However, professor Adamatzky added: ‘There is also another option – they are saying nothing. 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.’
Dan Bebber, fungal biology research committee member of the British Mycological Society, said that the ‘interpretation as language would require far more research’.
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