Geoff Pullum sent me a link to “Does electrical activity in fungi function as a language?” by Michael R. Blatt, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Andreas Draguhn, Barry Bowman, David G. Robinson, and Lincoln Taiz (Fungal Ecology 68 [April 2024], 101326), whose abstract reads:
All cells generate electrical energy derived from the movements of ions across membranes. In animal neurons, action potentials play an essential role in the central nervous system. Plants utilize a variety of electrical signals to regulate a wide range of physiological processes, including wound responses, mimosa leaf movements, and cell turgor changes, such as those involved in stomatal movements. Although fungal hyphae exhibit electrical fluctuations, their regulatory role(s), if any, is still unknown. In his paper “Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity”, Andrew Adamatzky, based on a quantitative analysis of voltage fluctuations in fungal mycelia, concludes that the patterns of electrical fluctuations he detects can be grouped into “words” analogous to those found in human languages. He goes on to speculate that this “fungal language” is used “to communicate and process information” between different parts of the mycelium. Here we argue on methodological grounds that the presumption of a fungal language is premature and unsupported by the evidence presented, that the voltage fluctuations he detects are likely to originate as nonbiological noise and experimental artifacts, and that the measured electrical patterns show no similarity to any properties of human language.
The Adamatzky paper is here; a credulous Graun story (“Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims”) is here and a credulous Ecologist story (“Further research is needed to understand the possibility of fungal language in more detail, such as syntax and grammar”) here. The answer to the titular question is, alas for interspecies communication, in the negative. Thanks, Geoff!
They have 50 words, including 50 words for soil.
Perhaps an instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines?
Very glad to hear that GKP is still cranking out interesting work and utilizing you as a way of alerting the wider world who may have let their _Fungal Ecology_ subscriptions lapse!
If a mushroom talks to itself and nobody listens, is it language?
I saw the Guardian article a couple of days ago. The final paragraphs saved me from trying to read the original paper:
Still good to see that somebody-not-just-anybody has read it and taken the time and effort to respond.
it’s probably easier to generate electric impulses than to interpret their sequences. While I love the fungi and believe that they are capable of the former, I strongly doubt the latter…
But just like any patterns in Nature (cue astrology!), I have no doubt that the mushroom-produced patterns can be used for divination by the humans!
Mycomancy!
Chomsky says yes…
If they could talk, I’m sure somebody would have called them “lips”.
JKB: Very glad to hear that GKP is still cranking out interesting work and utilizing you as a way of alerting the wider world who may have let their _Fungal Ecology_ subscriptions lapse!
This is MushroomHat.
If a mushroom talks to itself and nobody listens, is it language?
Chomsky says yes…
But mushrooms are too smart to listen to Chomsky, so it’s a draw.
Mushrooms talk rot.
‘Does electrical activity in fungi function as a language?’
A classic example of Betteridge’s law of headlines!
Thread won.
But do mushrooms have recursion?
Only when combined with dancing badgers.
Ah, the memories. And the snakes.
Blatt, Pullum et al. shouldn’t probably have named their article like this.
Betteridge’s law of headlines
“…To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’.”
It’s a scientific paper; journalists are not part of the intended audience.
In fact, I’ll hazard the guess that the answer to questions in the titles of scientific papers is usually “yes”, unless the question contains the word “really”.
@David Marjanović: I recall the ambiguous example of the paper, “Is SAX J1808.4-3658 a Strange Star?” The authors were ostensibly proposing that it really could be a compact object composed of strange matter, but when I read the paper I was convinced of the opposite, that almost surely wasn’t.
That’s a bit of a special case; if they’d been convinced, they’d have titled their manuscript “A star composed of strange matter”, no punctuation, and sent it to Nature.