A researcher grouped the electrical signals emitted by the mushrooms, before identifying them with what he compares to words. It’s a hypothesis, but he thinks it could be seen as a form of language.
Do mushrooms chat? This is the theory of Andrew Adamatzky, whose research was published in the journal Royal Society Open ScienceApril 6, 2022. He believes that fungi use, in a way, “words”, in a language that would be reminiscent of that of humans.
When you come across them in the undergrowth, the mushrooms give you the impression of being very quiet. Except that electrical signals are exchanged underground via their filaments, called hyphae, which together form the mycelium. But how much does this reflect communication between fungi? That’s the whole question.
Electrical signals show up in varying peaks and dips. It is precisely these peaks that Andrew Adamatzky has analyzed, and he thinks he has identified patterns, groups of peaks, which would resemble human language.
A linguistic analysis of electrical signals
To conduct this analysis, Andrew Adamatzky inserted microelectrodes into the mycelium of 4 species of fungi — enoki, cleft gill, ghost and caterpillar. ” Assuming that spikes of electrical activity are used by fungi to communicate and process information in mycelial networks, we group the spikes into words and provide a linguistic and information complexity analysis of the fungal spike activity », Details the author in his paper.
And this clustering of electrical spikes actually allowed Andrew Adamatzky to detect what he calls “trains of activity,” that is, multiple sets of similar electrical spikes, repeatedly returning and extending into the weather. For the author, these groups are very similar to the “words” found in human languages. In total, he identified 50 electrical spike patterns, or “words.”
” We found that the distribution of peak train length, measured in number of peaks, follows the distribution of word length in human languages. “says Adamatsky. In his article, he actually carried out a linguistic comparison with, in particular, English, Swedish and Russian. The length of the “words” showed similarities with English and Russian.
The author does not provide any potential explanation for the information exchanged between the fungi via these electrical signals.
Should we conclude from this that fungi do indeed use a language of communication like ours?
Beyond the risk of anthropocentrism (a vision of life based on human conceptions), it would be a little hasty to come to this: at this stage, it is a hypothesis. This one is however interesting, since it tries to decipher, with new paradigms, the communication within an organization very different from us. But let’s not jump to the conclusion that fungi actually use what we conceive of as “words,” further research is needed. You won’t see “mushroom” in Google Translate anytime soon.