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Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 'words', scientist claims (2022)
- techlatest_net 1y ago[dead]
- andsoitis 1y agocommunication is an evolutionary adaptation, right?
- randomopining 1y agoBeing able to work with others for the common goal of survival increases evolutionary edge
- metalman 1y ago[flagged]
- Henchman21 1y agoWhat is “the tie dye’d tribe”? What exactly are you trying to convey here aside from “libruls are dumb lol”?
- metalman 1y agoif I explain, you won't understand, though I will add the advice given to others...."grow your hair and get a hippy"
- floatrock 1y agoThis scientist is behind the times... new term for 'generic unit of information in abstract communication networks' is "token"
- mattslip 1y agoNice one
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Anon84 1y agoIn their defense, this is from 2022 before tokens were popularized
- woopsn 1y agoThe generic unit of information is still the "bit", and the word "word" -- which is not a unit of information, depending on entropy of the encoding -- is still standard terminology in communication theory.
- eggy 1y agoArticle is three years old, and the fungi are not talking to us! I imagine the communication being a bit slow like the scene in the kids animated movie, Zootopia, where sloths work at the DMV..."P....L....E....A....S....E-------" don't tread on me! However, if like German 1 word can cover a whole concept, then 50 words may be sufficient to communicate in a reasonable time scale ;)
- codeulike 1y ago[flagged]
- thowaway7564902 1y agoLast time I spoke to a mushroom, it said "hold z and press a to backflip"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bcoates 1y agoReminds me of the excellent sci-fi novel Semiosis
- ChuckMcM 1y agoOkay, while it's really interesting that there are these detectable electrical "signals" this headline really needs "scientist who eats a mushroom discovers that mushrooms can talk." kind of vibe. (the champignon pun in the article not withstanding). That said, given that multicellular life is just a mashup of single cell life with various bits kept because they were useful, it might be useful to investigate if these fungal structures were adapted as neurons.
- IAmBroom 1y agoFungal cells are not ancestors of Animalia.
- overu589 1y agoFound googling “do mushrooms and humans share DNA” (ignoring LLM affirmations.) > Mushrooms are more closely related to animals than plants, said Matt Kasson, an associate professor of mycology at West Virginia University. Apparently we share about 50% of our DNA.
- OJFord 1y agoThat's not inconsistent with GP's comment - animalia and fungi are opisthokonts, but siblings or cousins in a family tree sense, neither is ancestor to the other, but there is common ancestry.
- Aloisius 1y ago> Apparently we share about 50% of our DNA. This feels like the "we share 50% of our genes with bananas" factoid. Considering humans have 3.1 billion base pairs and the most fungi have 30-300 million, I'm not sure how this could be true without some major caveats. Admittedly, a lot of our DNA is considered "junk" - though whether it all is or not is a question. (the banana one is that they're talking specifically about protein coding genes which makes up about 2% of our DNA)
- ljlolel 1y ago
- IAmBroom 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SoftTalker 1y ago"Though interesting, the interpretation as language seems somewhat overenthusiastic" Classic British understatement.
- geodel 1y agoSo they are really Large Language Mushrooms.
- tehwebguy 1y ago"can you feel your heart burning?"
- ZhadruOmjar 1y agoAs a total amateur in the world of fungus I really enjoyed reading Entangled Life.
- seeknotfind 1y agoI wonder what other predictions from 2009 James Cameron's Avatar will come true.
- pier25 1y agoCommunication is not the same as language.
- glenstein 1y agoRight, and I would say even communication is a strong word here. We are talking about automatic biological reflexes. Those are great, and mushroom signal exchange is genuinely amazing. But describing it this way continues in a concerning tradition of equivocating on terms with already strongly anchored colloquial meanings, to imply something beyond actual capabilities of plants and fungi. I think it mistakenly puts forward an impression of intention, awareness, interpretation, conscious comprehension, agency, which are not there. And worse, I think some science communicators deliberately fan the flames of those associations. It might be that it's fair to call this communication and draw the line at language, but even communication here means something like blind signal transmission capable of prompting an automatic biological reflex somewhere else.
- sam0x17 1y agoI love how arrogant humans get when you hit at their “that’s supposed to be a human thing!” nerve. Sign language is language, dance is language, writing is language, speaking is language, semaphores in a sail boat is language, Morse code is language, two’s complement is language, a mushroom communicating with other mushrooms with a small vocabulary of tokens is language, to think otherwise is incredibly small minded. You don’t need consciousness or phenomena or quailia to have language. Heck, every computer understands some sort of language. ChatGPT is capable of conversing in English better than anyone in this room, and it doesn’t need consciousness or any of that stuff to do it. Language is neither unique nor special.
- IAmBroom 1y agoSure... If you define "language" incredibly broadly; far moreso than any living linguistic scientist I'm aware of. > Morse code is language, two’s complement is language Wrong on both points. They're encoding methods. The alphabet is not language, either. > to think otherwise is incredibly small minded. Ad hominem.
- OJFord 1y agoArticle from 2022 (not in the title at present - Anon84 if you can still edit, it's usual (and possibly in guidelines) to add '(2022)' at the end).
- mbfg 1y agoMost often captured phrase emitted by the hyphae -- "Damn Pepperoni!"
- layer8 1y agoLarge Language Mushrooms here we come. ;)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago(2022) Some discussion on the paper at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30931998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30931998
- anthk 1y agoJust run words then. 2027: subleq implemented on funghi, plus eforth.
- noiv 1y agoThe thought that organisms sharing environments could avoid communication appears absurd to me. Metabolic byproducts, chemical gradients, and behavioral patterns automatically transmit information. Physical proximity creates mandatory information channels. Environmental sharing makes communication inevitable, not optional.
- rybosome 1y agoThis is a great point - communication is a vast array of information channels. “Motion” is communication whether or not it evolved to be, and so is every other aspect of occupying space in a biome. And given that the organism under scrutiny is fungi - which contains many sprouting heads of the same underlying organism - one would have to have to have no familiarity with life at all to be surprised by intra-organism communication.
- woopsn 1y agoWould an alien encountering human language say "whatever it is not fundamentally different from the fact they shed skin cells in each other's space"? > The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that these spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words, and that the distribution of these “fungal word lengths” closely matched those of human languages. I'll be the one to admit I am surprised by this (if true), even with the understanding that any motion or byproduct whatsoever might be communicative. The thought that an organism is totally isolated from its environment, itself and other organisms is absurd, sure - but no one said that!
- Xmd5a 1y agohttps://phys.org/news/2014-08-physicists-eye-neural-formula-zipf.html https://phys.org/news/2014-08-physicists-eye-neural-formula-... >Their findings, verified with neural data of blowflies reacting to changes in visual signals, may have universal applications. "It's a simple mechanism," Nemenman says. "If a system has some hidden variable, and many units, such as 40 or 50 neurons, are adapted and responding to the variable, then Zipf's law will kick in."
- rybosome 1y agoI wish that I had the deep biology knowledge to make a joke (not joke?) Large Mushroom Model based on actual signal data. This also makes me wonder about the idea of attempting to expand on this research by artificially stimulating a fungal colony with the various “words” and seeing if different effects can be produced.
- culi 1y agoFun fact, "wood wide web" is a term used to describe the underground fungal network plants use to talk to each other. It's science communication but it's a term I've seen frequently used in published papers
- fogzen 1y agoThe mushrooms are speaking, but not in words, rather in ripples of being. The currents beneath your feet are alive. They hum of moisture, hunger, damage, alliance. It's not a conversation in alphabetic language, but a resonance—a conversation in electricity and time. If you could tune in, you might hear the forest breathing, think in fungal pulses, dream in mycelial code.
- ramon156 1y agoSo when will we have an LLM running on mushrooms?
- yzydserd 1y agoExplains the hallucinations.
- CrzyLngPwd 1y agoThe idea of mushrooms being the only species that communicates is absurd. Growers of organic food, rather than the dominant chemical farmers you buy your food from, are very aware of the complex nature of communication of the biology beneath our feet. In 100 years, our descendants will be horrified.