Friday, March 29

Fungi use up to 50 words to communicate with each other | Digital Trends Spanish


Research carried out in England and published in the journal Royal Society Open Science ensures that fungi could communicate with each other using a language similar to that used by humans.

According to the study carried out by the University of the West of England in Bristol, fungi can interact with each other, even when they are separated, by means of electrical impulses that are conducted by them with the help of long underground filamentary structures called hyphae. This is a process similar to the way human nerve cells transmit information.

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Previous investigations ensured that this type of living beings increased the impulses when the hyphae came into contact with wooden blocks. Scientists think this may be a kind of electrical language for sharing food information with other fungi that are linked to hyphae.

Andrew Adamatzky, from the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of West England, analyzed the patterns of electrical spikes generated by four species of fungi: enoki, split gill, ghost and caterpillar.

“We don’t know if there is a direct relationship between spike patterns in fungi and human speech. Possibly not. On the other hand, there are many similarities in information processing in living substrates of different classes, families, and species. I was curious to compare,” said Adamatzky.

The researcher found that the electrical spikes were often grouped in a kind of train, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words. “Assuming that fungi use spikes of electrical activity to communicate, we show that fungal word length distributions match those of human languages.”

For his part, Dan Bebber, a professor at the University of Exeter, says in an article in Guardian that more evidence is still needed before the scientific community accepts that fungi have their form of language.

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