Mushrooms Talk with Each Other Using a 50-Word Vocabulary But Skeptical Scientists Say Languages Spoken Are Just Scents

As if mushrooms did not appear "mystical" enough, researchers in the United Kingdom have discovered that the complex fungi can reportedly "talk to each other," and even have plenty of vocabularies.

As indicated in a Good News Network report, mycologists investigating the underground filaments of fungi are currently observing electrical signals akin to a nervous system, a usual phenomenon except that they discovered signals were quite similar to human language.

When filaments known as "hyphae" of a wood-digesting fungal species find a bit of wood to munch on the underground, they start to light up with "spikes" of the electrical signal reaching out to the hyphae of other individuals, including trees.

In a paper published in the investigations, Professor Andrew Adamatzky from the University of the West of England said spikes of electrical potential are usually considered the "key attributes of neurons," and neuronal spiking activity is interpreted as a language of a nervous system.

Nevertheless, he added, nearly all creatures that don't have a nervous system produce spikes of electrical potential.

4 Mushroom Species Analyzed

A New York Post report specified that researchers of the study published in the Royal Society Open Science journal found that the fungal language goes beyond the European languages in morphological complexity. Adamatzky carried out this study at UWE Bristol.

To discover if mushrooms are indeed communicating and not only with psychedelic adventures, the computer science professor analyzed the four mushroom species' electric impulses, including enoki, ghost, split gill, and caterpillar fungus.

Essentially, the fungal-linguist accomplished this by embedding tiny electrodes into the dirt penetrated by the hyphae of the mushroom. Hyphae are threads that comprise the roots of the organism called mycelium. Professor Adamatzky recorded the results.

As it turns out, he was not "tripping." He discovered that the electrical spikes frequently took place in clusters, mirroring the vocabularies of humans and using up to 50 words.

C. Militaris Fungi

The study investigators set the electrical spikes against a set of human linguistic phenomena used to successfully decode a portion of the carved language of the Bronze Age people of Scotland known as the Picts.

The average length of vowel expressed by humans is from 300 to 70 milliseconds, and thus the study authors assumed that if there was a zero-millisecond break between spikes, that was part of the same word.

C. militaris fungi, in particular, had trains of electrical spikes of a nearly identical length to English words, whereas split gill fungi spikes were even more closely akin to the average word length in the Greek language. Approximately 50 words could be identified according to repetition.

In their research, Adamatzky wrote, assuming that the electrical activity's spikes are employed by fungi "to communicate and process information in mycelium networks," they grouped spikes into words and offered a linguistic and information complexity evaluation of the fungal spiking activity.

The professor added they demonstrated that the distribution of fungal word lengths matched that of human languages.

Scents Translated Into Words

Some scientists, though, expressed skepticism over the research saying it was done searching for "language," suggesting that this is putting a shroud of overexcitement and exaggeration on the findings.

To his credit, Adamatzky explained that it could be simply that the hyphae's electrical-charged tips were generating electromagnetic reactions as they explored the forest underground.

This is not the first scientific study suggesting that life beyond Animalia communicates with language. Peter Wohleben, a tree scientist, believes trees produce scents instead of words. Soon, a computer would be able to identify and attach purposes to such scents and have them translated into words.

A report about fungi being compared to human language is shown on FreshCap Mushroom's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Medicine &Health in Science Times.