Mushrooms can communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’ according to a new theory advocated by a scientist at UWE. Prof Andrew Adamatzky at 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 – enoki, split gill, ghost and caterpillar fungi.
He did this by inserting tiny microelectrodes into substrates colonised by their patchwork of hyphae threads, their mycelia. “We do not know if there is a direct relationship between spiking patterns in fungi and human speech. Possibly not,” Adamatzky said. “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.”
The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that these 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.
Next thing you know mushrooms will be walking the walk, as well talking the talk.
