Mushrooms could be communicating in a structure that resembles human language, suggests a study published in the Royal Society Open Science.
Professor Andrew Adamatzky analysed the electrical signals in fungi and found patterns that have a structural similarity to English and Swedish languages at the University of the West of England’s Unconventional Computing Laboratory. The hope is to better understand how information is transferred and processed in mycelium networks, and to one day create fungi-based computing devices.
In plants, electrical signals could explain that different parts of fungi communicate to one another. Researchers in Bristol, England, measured these electric pulses by inserting microelectrodes into substrates colonised by mycelia, the microscopic roots of a fungus.
They examined the patterns of spikes in the electrical currents of four species of fungi and revealed that their spikes are clustered into "trains of activity." Those spikes resemble vocabularies of up to 50 words, with ...
