Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211926

by T-A • 4 years ago

239 126 4 years 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• 4 years ago

The wind is talking to us. Chicago confirmed as having the most talkative wind.

They are consuming too much of their subject matter.

idiotsecant8• 4 years 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.

throw12346512342• 4 years 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-...

Of course, if this were "true" and "proven", I would imagine it would be all over front-page news for every major publication.

vga805• 4 years ago

How would "intelligent" fungi have any bearing on the stoned ape theory? The former seems neither necessary nor sufficient for the latter.

throw12346512342• 4 years 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.

bognition2• 4 years 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

idiotsecant8• 4 years 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.

shak3zz• 4 years ago

But if you have enough time and size...

Reminds me of portia from Echopraxia by Peter Watts

mellosouls• 4 years ago

mushrooms are certainly not conscious

Considering we don't understand consciousness it might be wiser not to claim limits with certainty.

bognition2• 4 years ago

Thats all going to depend the constraints you place on consciousness. Hell in the animal kingdom we struggle to define which animals are conscious and they all have very similar compute hardware.

Mushrooms are so different than anything we know it's hard to rule out what they are or are not doing. There are mycelium networks that span massive spaces, 10s of square kilometers. There is a lot of mass, a tightly interconnected network that senses, computes, and changes its environment. So its hard to really rule anything out yet.

Honestly, I think there is a lot of complexity happening on this planet that we are missing, especially if we open ourselves up to larger timescales.

djitz• 4 years ago

Well, that settles it. Let’s pack it up, team.

fjabre• 4 years ago

Your statement “mushrooms are certainly not conscious” cannot be proven.

It also makes the assumption that consciousness is something we understand. This is certainly not the case. As science still doesn’t have a clue as to what it really is.

wonderwasp• 4 years ago

I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at different time scales? If an alien lived for one second but its brain processed information billions of times faster than ours, would they be right to consider us non-conscious?

voldacar• 4 years ago

There is no way to prove the statement "x is conscious". You are just stating your opinion.

xhkkffbf2• 4 years ago

How many bits per hour do solitary animals like cougars or hawks convey? I agree that whales sing endless, perhaps even annoying other whales with their wails. But many animals don't seem to even hit one bit per day.

timschmidt• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uffu5XM-s

Fungi expertly transport material around themselves. This time-lapse shows traffic through a fungal network. DNA-containing nuclei are stained green. Pulses of nuclei – ‘nuclear comets’ – travel in hordes through the mycelium (of Neurospora crassa).

The role of nuclear comets is unclear. The most plausible hypothesis is that the fungus uses comets to supply growing spores with nuclei, although how the fungus is able to shuttle the nuclei so quickly remains a puzzle. Nuclear comets travel faster than material transported by microtubule ‘motors’ (dynamic filaments that behave like a cross between scaffolding and escalators). Comets are followed closely by flocks of energy-producing mitochondria, which might play a role in their rapid transport.

Video was made using laser scanning confocal microscopy of Neurospora crassa. The field of view is approximately 0.6 mm.

Video © Patrick Hickey

RosanaAnaDana2• 4 years ago

A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude.

My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds. Can you please explain to me the relationship between processing power and consciousness?

shironineja• 4 years ago

no offense but I think you should consider 5g of cubensis and report back after a few hours.

e12e• 4 years ago

The information conveyed over the whole of the network by this mechanism is on the order of bits per hour.

How many hours, though?

jonathankoren4• 4 years 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.

RosanaAnaDana2• 4 years ago

Man just wait till you hear about plasmodesma..

dilippkumar2• 4 years ago

In all seriousness mushrooms COULD be conscious

There is a fungus [0]. that takes over a carpenter ant's brain and makes it climb up plants and clutch on to a leaf with it's jaw and hang down from it. The fungus then sprouts the fruiting body from the dangling ant and spreads its spores.

As an armchair theorist, anything that can interface with a brain and coordinate a nervous system to produce complicated movement has to be capable of computation at some level.

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis#Na...

Aardwolf• 4 years ago

Armchair theorist as well, but all consciousness aside, it could also be that there's just a simple chemical that makes ants want to climb up (just like some hormones make the human brain want things), so that there's no computation involved, the mushroom might just happen to excrete the right chemical in the right place

colechristensen3• 4 years ago

People tend to underestimate the ability of very simple systems to result in complex behavior. It is entirely possible that this ant hijacking is entirely done though a few very simple manipulations of the existing ant nervous system and more likely than a much more complex fungal brain replacement.

gigaflop• 4 years ago

If fungus has a language, it means we can 'talk' to it.

So long as we can put electricity in, and get different electric signals out, we have a sort of interface.

If they're sentient, then wow, great. If not, we can probably work out the right signals and species to use in growing a mushroom-based Turing machine.

meetups323• 4 years ago

computation at some level

Unfortunately that term applies to basically everything... computation at every classical level we know only requires "maybe have state, maybe update state in response to environment, maybe move to new environment based on new state, maybe repeat".

PartiallyTyped• 4 years ago

We have quite a bit of evidence that our gut bacteria influence our long term actions and behaviour through neurotransmitter precursors.

axiom92• 4 years ago

Cool video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vijGdWn5-h8

uoaei• 4 years ago

Premise 1: Any arbitrary 4D volume in spacetime (i.e., one connected component wrt physical interactions) can be considered a system.

Premise 2: https://xkcd.com/505/

Conclusion: Every system, open or closed, is computational in a certain rigorous sense of implementing dynamics along the space dimensions (versus inputs, via transformations, into outputs) and demonstrating dynamics along the time dimension (flux of the energy+information carried through its constituent parts).

If we can create a "computer" using rocks in a binary-ish encoding, surely we can implement "computers" in more efficient encodings that utilize certain properties of physical reality.

We as humans began to approach this with mechanical computers using complex linkages, but only got so far before we decided on digital (binary) encoding and then enshrined that in silicon. To be sure, binary is a very effective way of organizing computation given our physical implementation(s), but most likely there are way more efficient ways of doing things.

One fascinating direction we are beginning to explore to achieve more efficient computation is marrying machine learning with materials engineering![1]

In fact, by this conclusion, we can only believe that the universe is merely the most efficient way to simulate itself, but this by no means precludes the possibility of simulating it in any other medium (encoding).

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04223-6

antattack• 4 years ago

Brings to mind this TED talk: Electrical experiments with plants that count and communicate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw

xg154• 4 years ago

Am I reading the abstract correctly that the spike duration is measured in hours though? That's an odd change of scale compared to neurons, especially as the scale of the actual entities (fungal networks vs networks of neuron cells) don't seem that different

trenchgun2• 4 years ago

Scale is quite different. Consider the density.

tehchromic2• 4 years ago

Use of the word conscious here is interesting. Is there any doubt that fungi are conscious of what they are conscious of?

I think that we have to be careful. Speaking philosophically it's safe to say that we do not yet have a clear, definitive definition of "consciousness" in scientific terms such that we can safely assess what is or isn't conscious.

Some believe consciousness is what distinguishes humans from lower beasts. Others believe it is an emergent phenomenon of some higher order macroorganisms, dolphins but not cows, monkeys but not fish. Still others believe that plants, fungi, bacteria, and all living things display some level of consciousness.

And some weird folks believe consciousness is a property of the universe expressed in all things, which happens to manifest in forms that we understand and relate to in living organisms due to the inherent bias of observing through the lense of being a biological organism ourselves.

It appears difficult if not impossible to prove which of these definitions is correct!

What seems clear is that the idea of consciousness cuts to the very core of the modern scientific paradigm and world view, such that the inherent assumptions made in building our scientific realism allow us only a very narrow understanding of what is consciousness accompanied by a certainty that what we do understand must be all there is.

That's to say, if you've ever questioned the fundamental axioms of scientific truth you've inevitably bumped into the philosophical problem of consciousness relative to the institution of scientific realism.

So to say, when someone says "we now have proof that X may in fact be conscious!" the statement comes across to some ears as most definitely vague and exactingly inordinate!

plutonorm3• 4 years ago

I object to being called weird. It's quite a logical position to hold, many modern philosophers hold a panpsychist or similar view.

oceanplexian• 4 years ago

Maybe this is closer to spirituality than science, but I’ve been reading Eckhart Tolle and he explains in a few of his books that the whole idea of “I” or “My self” is an illusion that’s created by the ego. This is also the message from a lot of Eastern philosophy.

I would hazard to guess that individual consciousness doesn’t actually exist, so of course a tree can’t be individually conscious because neither can a human. We (both the tree and the human) are part of a collective “consciousness” that is life itself.

mountainboy• 4 years ago

This goes to the age old debate between vitalists and materialists.

In other words, does conciousness/spirit precede and shape matter, or does matter precede and shape conciousness/spirit?

Modern/western science is pretty firmly entrenched in a materialist view. Although it seems more are questioning that these days.

Personally I think that the brain is probably closer to a radio than a CPU. In other words, it is the bridge that enables our ethereal spirit/conciousness to experience and interact with the material world.

Just as hackernews does not exist in my laptop, neither does my "self" exist in my brain. Rather my laptop and my brain are each providing a terminal to a remote realm.

No amount of examining and dissecting my computer will reveal the code that runs hackernews, youtube, google, etc. It would be foolish to suggest it.

Yet that is exactly what neurologists try to do... with predictably miserable results.

lubujackson• 4 years 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.

sn00tz00t• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

And when we translate these fungal sentences...

"Juffo-Wup is the hot light in the darkness. All else is unfulfilled Void."

doodlebugging• 4 years 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.

giantg2• 4 years 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...

dilippkumar2• 4 years 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?...

triyambakam• 4 years ago

Thanks! I'm listening to it on Audible now.

vmoore• 4 years 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

pvarangot• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

xg154• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

yosito2• 4 years ago

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

samaman• 4 years 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• 4 years 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. ;)

fnordpiglet2• 4 years 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.

Melatonic3• 4 years 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.

citruscomputing• 4 years 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.

Melatonic3• 4 years ago

You are probably right - they just could not digest whatever they needed to do for the trees. Makes sense

kmc059000• 4 years 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-...

roeles• 4 years 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.

Melatonic3• 4 years 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.

williamsmj• 4 years ago

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

fnordpiglet2• 4 years ago

I for one welcome our new fungus overlords.

trhway• 4 years ago

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

bsedlm• 4 years 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)

xvilka2• 4 years 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.

xvilka2• 4 years 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

westurner• 4 years ago

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

peter_retief• 4 years 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• 4 years 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-t...

Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity

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