Mushrooms can talk to each other, researcher suggests

Kieran Galpin

They can allegedly recognise up to 50 words

New research suggests that fungi can actually communicate with each other through a series of electrical impulses and can recognise up to 50 words.

Professor Andrew Adamatzky from the University of the West of England looked at four mushroom species, enoki, split gill, ghost, and caterpillar fungi, and found that their electrical impulses were structurally similar to human speech and even resembled vocabulary.

Explaining his research, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday, 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.”

By inserting tiny microelectrodes into substrates full of mushroom hyphae, which you can think of as similar to human nerves transmitting signals across the body, Adamatzky was able to record “speech” patterns.

Split gills, which usually grow on decaying wood, generated the most complex “sentences”, he found. Researchers also discovered that word-eating fungi displayed increased activity, which Adamatzky theorises is the mushroom’s way of signalling food sources to other fungi.

While scientists have now identified these “spiking events” it’s not yet clear exactly why they exist. Adamtzky suggests it could be an elaborate communication network, similar to how wolves howl, but it could also be “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,” he said, adding that they don’t appear to be random,” he said.

But not everyone is sold on the theory.

“This new paper detects rhythmic patterns in electric signals, of a similar frequency as the nutrient pulses we found,” Dan Bebber, an associate professor of biosciences at the University of Exeter, 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.”