New Delhi: Mushrooms can talk to each other using up to 50 words, a new study suggests, according to The Daily Mail.
The study, conducted by Professor Andrew Adamatzky from the University of the West of England, found that electrical activity of four species of fungi were structurally similar to human speech and vocabulary.
Adamatzky analysed electrical spikes generated by enoki, split gill, ghost and caterpillar fungi.
The Daily Mail quoted Adamatzky as saying: “We do not know if there is a direct relationship between spiking 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 just curious to compare.”
According to the study, the spike clusters resembled human vocabulary of up to 50 words and the information is passed along fungal roots called mycelium. The average length of each ‘word’ was 5.97 letters (the English language averages 4.8 letters per word).
Adamatzky said this showed fungi had “minds and a consciousness”.
