A New Study Discovered That Mushrooms Can Actually Communicate With Each Other And Have A Vocabulary That Reaches Around 50 Words
While psychedelic enthusiasts have boasted about the magic abilities of mushrooms for decades, the fungi’s ability to actually communicate with each other was never one of the superpowers mentioned.
But, a recent study conducted by Andrew Adamatzky– a professor at the University of the West of England– has found that mushrooms are exceptionally chatty. In fact, Adamatzky revealed that mushrooms have their own distinct vocabulary of up to fifty words.
Mushrooms typically grow from the same mycelium- or a network of white filaments that are similar to the roots of trees or the neurons in human bodies.
In turn, any electrical impulse sent by one mushroom will travel throughout the network and reach other mushrooms that grow from the same mycelium.
And while this natural electrical network was already quite amazing, Adamatzky pushed our understanding of the mycelium one step further.
He inserted electrodes into the surface where four different species of fungi grew– split gill, enoki, ghost, and caterpillar– in order to assess the various electrical outputs. And what he heard was astonishing.
“Assuming that spikes of electrical activity are used by fungi to communicate, we demonstrate that distributions of fungal word lengths match that of human beings,” Adamantzky began.
“We found that the size of fungal vocabulary can be up to fifty words. However, the core vocabulary of most frequently used words does not exceed fifteen to twenty.”
Additionally, he discovered that fungi communication spikes when mushrooms come into contact with potential threats or food sources. This was first observed among the split gill species, which survive by eating wood.
Iarygin Andrii – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purpose only, not the actual person
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
And when the split gill mushroom came into contact with a foreign piece of wood, Adamantzky noticed a significant spike in electrical signals. This suggested that the mushroom was notifying other fungi on the same mycelium network that food was available.
Since observing the communications, Adamantzky explained how the “words” are no different than how wolves howl or cats hiss. He also decided to mathematically distinguish the various words after realizing that they spiked in clusters.
And Adamantzky found that the average fungi word length was just shy of six letters– as compared to the five-letter average word length in English.
However, some other scientists are still quite skeptical of the study. For example, Dan Bebber of the University of Exeter claims that we still have a long way to go before we can actually translate what the organisms are communicating.
“Though interesting, the interpretation as a language seems somewhat overenthusiastic and would require far more research and testing of critical hypotheses before we see ‘Fungus’ on Google Translate,” Bebber said.
To read the study’s complete findings, which have since been published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, visit the link here.
If true crime defines your free time, this is for you: join Chip Chick’s True Crime Tribe
The Terrifying True Tale Of The Real Annabelle Doll And What Her Reign Of Terror Looked Like
More About:Science
Read This Next
