13 ms·

Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity

239 points by T-A 5y ago

peter_retief 5y ago
Fungi are very good bio chemists so we could ask them a lot of questions. I was keen to setup a fungi computer some time back that created reactions to viruses and bacteria.
steveaux 5y ago
Those who doubt that primitive organisms could be conscious should take a serious look into 'slime molds': https://www.quantamagazine.org/slime-molds-remember-but-do-they-learn-20180709/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/slime-molds-remember-but-do-t...
trhway 5y ago
Probably a fungi net can be trained similar to NN and talked to like GPT-n.
bsedlm 5y ago
It's a fun unrelated fact that neurons come from the germ (embrionic) layer of cells which correspond to external cells, like the skin. i.e. neurons are made from ectoderm germ cells (not endoderm --inside, nor mesoderm -- middle, but outer layer)
xvilka 5y ago
We should come with the device converting fungi signals into digital signals and connect vast fungi mycelium networks to the internet. To connect our forests to the internet.
xvilka 5y ago
There is Fungi[1] language, by the way. It has nothing to do with real fungi though. [1] https://github.com/Adapton/fungi-lang.rust https://github.com/Adapton/fungi-lang.rust
westurner 5y ago
Is there emergence? Do they need time, or clocks? Is it full duplex; is the channel blocked while just one transmits?
reality_inspctr 5y ago
This is wild. "We also construct algorithmic and Liz-Zempel complexity hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that species S. commune generate the most complex sentences." Is this the first time a non-animal species has exhibited such behavior under verifiable conditions?
- AyyWS 5y ago
  The wind is talking to us. Chicago confirmed as having the most talkative wind. They are consuming too much of their subject matter.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  They don't appear to literally be claiming that this is a language, a less click-baity title would be 'Calcium wave communication in networks of fungi mycelium'. This is not a newly discovered phenomenon - we've known that fungi use calcium derived electrical potentials to signal the mass to do things for a long time. There's no evidence this is any more complex than hormonal communication in plants, just a different media.
throw1234651234 5y ago
I don't have anywhere near the scientific background to even consider whether this is a report on "fungi are intelligent" or "just some random electrical signals". If the former, it's absolutely hilarious, because Terrance McKenna was possibly right after all: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/stoned-ape-hypothesis.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/stoned-ape-... Of course, if this were "true" and "proven", I would imagine it would be all over front-page news for every major publication.
- vga805 5y ago
  How would "intelligent" fungi have any bearing on the stoned ape theory? The former seems neither necessary nor sufficient for the latter.
  - throw1234651234 5y ago
    You are absolutely right - the underlying premise is that "fungi is intelligent, and it passes some of that intelligence to the apes, when consumed". This makes no sense. Just came to mind since McKenna also rants about fungi networks being the largest intelligent being on the planet, etc.
    - jonathankoren 5y ago
      McKenna said some weird stuff, but the stoned ape theory is probably his most believable idea. Intelligence and creativity didn’t arise because protohumans became fungal hybrids, but rather the psychedelic mushrooms not only provided sustainance, but also provided behavioral changes like better visual acuity (I believe this claim is proven), sexual arrousal. This mean mushroom eaters were more likely to reproduce. As a sideffect, the psyliopsybin either promoted neural placticity, or novel wirings. Protohumans that didn’t eat mushrooms died out, and the most successful eaters were the most clever protohumans. (Perhaps behavior became the dominate sexual selection criteria, rather than say meer physical features.) He says a lot of other weird stuff like, mushrooms are from space, are conscious, or maybe are communication devices, or maybe prerecorded messages from alien “self transforming machine elves”, or maybe they are the elves? Oh well. All will become clear when universe hits maximum novelty in 2012.
bognition 5y ago
Neuro PhD here. I haven't read the entire paper but this citations stands out: > Fungi also exhibit trains of action-potential-like spikes, detectable by intracellular and extracellular recordings Action potentials are the fundamental signaling mechanism used by neurons [1]. Think of them as an electrical signal that a cell actively propagates. Lots of cells use electrical potentials for signaling; however, most of them spread gradually or passively. Action potentials on the other hand the cell actively expends energy to send information quickly. Really cool to see convergent biology (my personal guess) here. I can only imagine what new things we're going to learn about fungi and mycelium in the next few decades. In all seriousness mushrooms COULD be conscious. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential
- lubujackson 5y ago
  We already know that trees communicate with each other using the underground network of mushrooms. The more we learn about them the more fascinated I am by mushrooms.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  mushrooms are certainly not conscious. The information conveyed over the whole of the network by this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour. That particular box is a little small for consciousness to be hiding in. A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude.
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    Complaining about bitrate and comparing that to animals that a motive with complex sensory organs is pretty weird. There’s certainly no evolutionary pressure to develop a high speed computational system, but that doesn’t mean a slow speed one couldn’t work.
  - shak3zz 5y ago
    But if you have enough time and size... Reminds me of portia from Echopraxia by Peter Watts
sn00tz00t 5y ago
Really impressive considering the setup. Would love to see them grow fungi around a lattice to have input and output in a controlled manner.
rini17 5y ago
If we ever get viable neural interface available, I definitely want to wire myself to my garden. The first thing I did on bare plot was to put in rotten wood and cartons for fungi to grow.
bitwize 5y ago
And when we translate these fungal sentences... "Juffo-Wup is the hot light in the darkness. All else is unfulfilled Void."
doodlebugging 5y ago
It would be interesting to see an experiment like this run on a large fungal colony in the wild like one of those huge organisms that you find in old-growth forests. You may be able to fine-tune your understanding of their "language" syntax and format if you could deploy a grid of sensors to track a message as it spreads through the organism to see how efficiently it is delivered to distant parts of the colony. It would also give an opportunity to see whether fungi play the telephone game and how that affects those at the other end of the "conversation". Thanks for this article. For me it confirms the notion that all things alive need a method of communication that allows them to use the resources in their environments to greatest effect. Whether that involves chemical signaling, electrical signaling, disapproving glances, the spoken word, etc. is irrelevant. It appears that no matter how deeply you dig, there is a sense of community in most living things and most things find ways to work together with their environments to guarantee survival. Humans could probably learn a few things from their steak toppings about how best to utilize the bullshit many of us find ourselves wallowing in.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
giantg2 5y ago
Wow this is really cool. I wonder if this can be harnessed to charge a very small battery, which in turn can power a small LED. Might be a unique variation on the potato powered light bulb science fair project. I have quite a few blocks of mycelium sitting around...
dilippkumar 5y ago
Book recommendation: "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake [0]. The author discusses the possibility of intricately connected subterranean mycelium networks electrically signaling each other acting as a giant nervous system. He stops himself from calling it a giant brain, but admits that the possibility isn't really far fetched given everything else that we know about fungi. It's a fantastic book. Strong recommend. [0]. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WJ84V9B/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WJ84V9B/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
- triyambakam 5y ago
  Thanks! I'm listening to it on Audible now.
mario143 5y ago
vmoore 5y ago
I always wondered if certain fungi reached earth via an asteroid that hit earth and was from a fertile exoplanet, and somehow reached here. I like the idea of panspermia[0]. I always imagined psilocybin-containing mushrooms as somewhat alien and almost designed to alter consciousness, as if from another planet. McKenna's 'stoned ape' theory, if true, would explain much of the 'missing link' problem. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
- pvarangot 5y ago
  The missing link is already explained by wild discontinuities in evolution, which are pretty much a given on the evolutionary chain of any species on earth given for how long life that evolves has been present on the planet. There's records of tribes with click based languages that can arrange very effective and powerful hunting squads using spears an overpower even herds or packs of the most dangerous animals in their regions. Yeah they look wildly different than apes, but imagine what they were doing to the other kinda differently looking apes that didn't understand their clicks but understood "pointy stick good", and that happened for thousands of years. Whole indigenous languages went exting in the late 20th century in places like Bolivia or Australia and even during the 21st century native languages are going extinct in California. In thousands and thousands of years someone trying to re-walk Darwins path may wonder were is the missing link in evolution between something like Aztec and European remains found in the West Coast, when there's none. Species can evolve in isolation and then obliterate each other leaving a discontinuity or clique within the genus, it happens all the time, and it's puzzling but natural.
  - kuprel 5y ago
    Aztecs and European-Americans only separated about 40k years ago, which is more recently than when East Asians and Europeans separated. Would be confusing for future civilizations to figure that one out
- contingo 5y ago
  Psilocybin-producing mushrooms are widely dispersed across the clade of all other true mushrooms and their genomes clearly show there is no great mystery about their evolutionary history or relationships to other fungi. Modern phylogenetics completely discredits panspermia as an origin for particular species or groups of fungi: they all share a single common ancestor and they are all connected to our single Tree of Life as with every other known lifeform on Earth.
xg15 5y ago
It's absolutely an interesting paper, but just to note: Their finding is not that the spike activity is a language. They just propose it might be a language and then derive a number of statistics by treating it like a language for the sake of the argument. ... at least that was my understanding from the abstract and introduction.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Seems so. Tangentially, I think it's unfortunate that "hope" can't help form the frame here. I mean, it's an elephant in the room, but I think it's friendly.
yosito 5y ago
Maybe my anecdotal experience of taking mushrooms and feeling like I can communicate with plants is not completely far fetched nonsense.
samaman 5y ago
Adamatzky is a GOAT in biocomputing. Hes the sort of researcher who really makes me question why we spend so much money on developing quantum computers and other new ways of modeling biosystems when using other biosystems as analogs seems far cheaper and more fruitful.
- tomcat27 5y ago
  The goal of people doing basic research in math and science is not producing more economic value. They really do it just for fun. If what they do happen to be useful for others outside their club, great, but that's never the goal. They might twist words a little to get grants. Historically, their work has been useful. ;)
  - fnordpiglet 5y ago
    I wouldn’t say they do it for fun, but to understand. A lot of science isn’t fun, but understanding is it’s own reward that lasts a lot longer than fun.
bob55 5y ago
Melatonic 5y ago
People do not realize just how important Fungi are - there was a point at which Trees were the new hotness and Fungi had not evolved yet - prehistoric trees basically took over the entire planet and there was nothing to break down all of the leftover dead wood on the ground. We are talking layers and layers of dead trees everywhere. Then Fungi evolved and started breaking all that down and eventually a long time later we get animals.
- roeles 5y ago
  I wonder how those trees communicated then. I am reading "the hidden life of trees" at the moment, which talks quite a bit about how trees communicate using fungi. The fungi benefit from this by receiving certain nutrients.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    Its an interesting symbiotic relationship for sure. When I was backpacking in Alaska I was basically walking non stop on lichen (which sort of looks like large tuft balls of colorful and very tiny coral reefs but super soft and springy). All of the animals there eat tons of this stuff. Its basically a hybrid between a plant and a fungi (not just a symbiotic relationship). Sort of like fungi-moss.
- kmc059000 5y ago
  IIRC the layers of dead trees also caused pervasive fires. One because of the fuel from the trees, but also because oxygen levels were much higher due to large amount of carbon trapped in the trees. Apparently much of worlds coal was also from this period. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-was-most-of-the-earths-coal-made-all-at-once/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-was-most-of-the-...
- citruscomputing 5y ago
  Fungi were on land before trees (they broke down rocks to make soil, and were the OG roots). It took them a while to learn to digest.. I think lignin was it? Half remembered from first chapter of Entangled Life.
williamsmj 5y ago
Here to recommend Sue Burke's Semiosis/Interference sci-fi duology about first contact with a intelligent plant life.
fnordpiglet 5y ago
I for one welcome our new fungus overlords.

239 points by T-A 5y ago

Fungi are very good bio chemists so we could ask them a lot of questions. I was keen to setup a fungi computer some time back that created reactions to viruses and bacteria.

steveaux 5y ago

Those who doubt that primitive organisms could be conscious should take a serious look into 'slime molds': https://www.quantamagazine.org/slime-molds-remember-but-do-they-learn-20180709/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/slime-molds-remember-but-do-t...

trhway 5y ago

Probably a fungi net can be trained similar to NN and talked to like GPT-n.

bsedlm 5y ago

It's a fun unrelated fact that neurons come from the germ (embrionic) layer of cells which correspond to external cells, like the skin. i.e. neurons are made from ectoderm germ cells (not endoderm --inside, nor mesoderm -- middle, but outer layer)

xvilka 5y ago

We should come with the device converting fungi signals into digital signals and connect vast fungi mycelium networks to the internet. To connect our forests to the internet.

xvilka 5y ago

There is Fungi[1] language, by the way. It has nothing to do with real fungi though. [1] https://github.com/Adapton/fungi-lang.rust https://github.com/Adapton/fungi-lang.rust

westurner 5y ago

Is there emergence? Do they need time, or clocks? Is it full duplex; is the channel blocked while just one transmits?

reality_inspctr 5y ago

This is wild. "We also construct algorithmic and Liz-Zempel complexity hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that species S. commune generate the most complex sentences." Is this the first time a non-animal species has exhibited such behavior under verifiable conditions?

AyyWS 5y ago
The wind is talking to us. Chicago confirmed as having the most talkative wind. They are consuming too much of their subject matter.
idiotsecant 5y ago
They don't appear to literally be claiming that this is a language, a less click-baity title would be 'Calcium wave communication in networks of fungi mycelium'. This is not a newly discovered phenomenon - we've known that fungi use calcium derived electrical potentials to signal the mass to do things for a long time. There's no evidence this is any more complex than hormonal communication in plants, just a different media.

throw1234651234 5y ago

I don't have anywhere near the scientific background to even consider whether this is a report on "fungi are intelligent" or "just some random electrical signals". If the former, it's absolutely hilarious, because Terrance McKenna was possibly right after all: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/stoned-ape-hypothesis.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/stoned-ape-... Of course, if this were "true" and "proven", I would imagine it would be all over front-page news for every major publication.

vga805 5y ago
How would "intelligent" fungi have any bearing on the stoned ape theory? The former seems neither necessary nor sufficient for the latter.
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  You are absolutely right - the underlying premise is that "fungi is intelligent, and it passes some of that intelligence to the apes, when consumed". This makes no sense. Just came to mind since McKenna also rants about fungi networks being the largest intelligent being on the planet, etc.
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    McKenna said some weird stuff, but the stoned ape theory is probably his most believable idea. Intelligence and creativity didn’t arise because protohumans became fungal hybrids, but rather the psychedelic mushrooms not only provided sustainance, but also provided behavioral changes like better visual acuity (I believe this claim is proven), sexual arrousal. This mean mushroom eaters were more likely to reproduce. As a sideffect, the psyliopsybin either promoted neural placticity, or novel wirings. Protohumans that didn’t eat mushrooms died out, and the most successful eaters were the most clever protohumans. (Perhaps behavior became the dominate sexual selection criteria, rather than say meer physical features.) He says a lot of other weird stuff like, mushrooms are from space, are conscious, or maybe are communication devices, or maybe prerecorded messages from alien “self transforming machine elves”, or maybe they are the elves? Oh well. All will become clear when universe hits maximum novelty in 2012.

bognition 5y ago

Neuro PhD here. I haven't read the entire paper but this citations stands out: > Fungi also exhibit trains of action-potential-like spikes, detectable by intracellular and extracellular recordings Action potentials are the fundamental signaling mechanism used by neurons [1]. Think of them as an electrical signal that a cell actively propagates. Lots of cells use electrical potentials for signaling; however, most of them spread gradually or passively. Action potentials on the other hand the cell actively expends energy to send information quickly. Really cool to see convergent biology (my personal guess) here. I can only imagine what new things we're going to learn about fungi and mycelium in the next few decades. In all seriousness mushrooms COULD be conscious. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential

lubujackson 5y ago
We already know that trees communicate with each other using the underground network of mushrooms. The more we learn about them the more fascinated I am by mushrooms.
idiotsecant 5y ago
mushrooms are certainly not conscious. The information conveyed over the whole of the network by this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour. That particular box is a little small for consciousness to be hiding in. A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude.
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  Complaining about bitrate and comparing that to animals that a motive with complex sensory organs is pretty weird. There’s certainly no evolutionary pressure to develop a high speed computational system, but that doesn’t mean a slow speed one couldn’t work.
- shak3zz 5y ago
  But if you have enough time and size... Reminds me of portia from Echopraxia by Peter Watts

sn00tz00t 5y ago

Really impressive considering the setup. Would love to see them grow fungi around a lattice to have input and output in a controlled manner.

rini17 5y ago

If we ever get viable neural interface available, I definitely want to wire myself to my garden. The first thing I did on bare plot was to put in rotten wood and cartons for fungi to grow.

bitwize 5y ago

And when we translate these fungal sentences... "Juffo-Wup is the hot light in the darkness. All else is unfulfilled Void."

doodlebugging 5y ago

It would be interesting to see an experiment like this run on a large fungal colony in the wild like one of those huge organisms that you find in old-growth forests. You may be able to fine-tune your understanding of their "language" syntax and format if you could deploy a grid of sensors to track a message as it spreads through the organism to see how efficiently it is delivered to distant parts of the colony. It would also give an opportunity to see whether fungi play the telephone game and how that affects those at the other end of the "conversation". Thanks for this article. For me it confirms the notion that all things alive need a method of communication that allows them to use the resources in their environments to greatest effect. Whether that involves chemical signaling, electrical signaling, disapproving glances, the spoken word, etc. is irrelevant. It appears that no matter how deeply you dig, there is a sense of community in most living things and most things find ways to work together with their environments to guarantee survival. Humans could probably learn a few things from their steak toppings about how best to utilize the bullshit many of us find ourselves wallowing in.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

giantg2 5y ago

Wow this is really cool. I wonder if this can be harnessed to charge a very small battery, which in turn can power a small LED. Might be a unique variation on the potato powered light bulb science fair project. I have quite a few blocks of mycelium sitting around...

dilippkumar 5y ago

Book recommendation: "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake [0]. The author discusses the possibility of intricately connected subterranean mycelium networks electrically signaling each other acting as a giant nervous system. He stops himself from calling it a giant brain, but admits that the possibility isn't really far fetched given everything else that we know about fungi. It's a fantastic book. Strong recommend. [0]. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WJ84V9B/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WJ84V9B/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

triyambakam 5y ago
Thanks! I'm listening to it on Audible now.

mario143 5y ago

vmoore 5y ago

I always wondered if certain fungi reached earth via an asteroid that hit earth and was from a fertile exoplanet, and somehow reached here. I like the idea of panspermia[0]. I always imagined psilocybin-containing mushrooms as somewhat alien and almost designed to alter consciousness, as if from another planet. McKenna's 'stoned ape' theory, if true, would explain much of the 'missing link' problem. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

pvarangot 5y ago
The missing link is already explained by wild discontinuities in evolution, which are pretty much a given on the evolutionary chain of any species on earth given for how long life that evolves has been present on the planet. There's records of tribes with click based languages that can arrange very effective and powerful hunting squads using spears an overpower even herds or packs of the most dangerous animals in their regions. Yeah they look wildly different than apes, but imagine what they were doing to the other kinda differently looking apes that didn't understand their clicks but understood "pointy stick good", and that happened for thousands of years. Whole indigenous languages went exting in the late 20th century in places like Bolivia or Australia and even during the 21st century native languages are going extinct in California. In thousands and thousands of years someone trying to re-walk Darwins path may wonder were is the missing link in evolution between something like Aztec and European remains found in the West Coast, when there's none. Species can evolve in isolation and then obliterate each other leaving a discontinuity or clique within the genus, it happens all the time, and it's puzzling but natural.
- kuprel 5y ago
  Aztecs and European-Americans only separated about 40k years ago, which is more recently than when East Asians and Europeans separated. Would be confusing for future civilizations to figure that one out
contingo 5y ago
Psilocybin-producing mushrooms are widely dispersed across the clade of all other true mushrooms and their genomes clearly show there is no great mystery about their evolutionary history or relationships to other fungi. Modern phylogenetics completely discredits panspermia as an origin for particular species or groups of fungi: they all share a single common ancestor and they are all connected to our single Tree of Life as with every other known lifeform on Earth.

xg15 5y ago

It's absolutely an interesting paper, but just to note: Their finding is not that the spike activity is a language. They just propose it might be a language and then derive a number of statistics by treating it like a language for the sake of the argument. ... at least that was my understanding from the abstract and introduction.

dalbasal 5y ago
Seems so. Tangentially, I think it's unfortunate that "hope" can't help form the frame here. I mean, it's an elephant in the room, but I think it's friendly.

yosito 5y ago

Maybe my anecdotal experience of taking mushrooms and feeling like I can communicate with plants is not completely far fetched nonsense.

samaman 5y ago

Adamatzky is a GOAT in biocomputing. Hes the sort of researcher who really makes me question why we spend so much money on developing quantum computers and other new ways of modeling biosystems when using other biosystems as analogs seems far cheaper and more fruitful.

tomcat27 5y ago
The goal of people doing basic research in math and science is not producing more economic value. They really do it just for fun. If what they do happen to be useful for others outside their club, great, but that's never the goal. They might twist words a little to get grants. Historically, their work has been useful. ;)
- fnordpiglet 5y ago
  I wouldn’t say they do it for fun, but to understand. A lot of science isn’t fun, but understanding is it’s own reward that lasts a lot longer than fun.

bob55 5y ago

Melatonic 5y ago

People do not realize just how important Fungi are - there was a point at which Trees were the new hotness and Fungi had not evolved yet - prehistoric trees basically took over the entire planet and there was nothing to break down all of the leftover dead wood on the ground. We are talking layers and layers of dead trees everywhere. Then Fungi evolved and started breaking all that down and eventually a long time later we get animals.

roeles 5y ago
I wonder how those trees communicated then. I am reading "the hidden life of trees" at the moment, which talks quite a bit about how trees communicate using fungi. The fungi benefit from this by receiving certain nutrients.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Its an interesting symbiotic relationship for sure. When I was backpacking in Alaska I was basically walking non stop on lichen (which sort of looks like large tuft balls of colorful and very tiny coral reefs but super soft and springy). All of the animals there eat tons of this stuff. Its basically a hybrid between a plant and a fungi (not just a symbiotic relationship). Sort of like fungi-moss.
kmc059000 5y ago
IIRC the layers of dead trees also caused pervasive fires. One because of the fuel from the trees, but also because oxygen levels were much higher due to large amount of carbon trapped in the trees. Apparently much of worlds coal was also from this period. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-was-most-of-the-earths-coal-made-all-at-once/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-was-most-of-the-...
citruscomputing 5y ago
Fungi were on land before trees (they broke down rocks to make soil, and were the OG roots). It took them a while to learn to digest.. I think lignin was it? Half remembered from first chapter of Entangled Life.

williamsmj 5y ago

Here to recommend Sue Burke's Semiosis/Interference sci-fi duology about first contact with a intelligent plant life.

fnordpiglet 5y ago

I for one welcome our new fungus overlords.