Open AccessLanguage of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity
Author(s) -
Andrew Adamatzky
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
royal society open science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.84
H-Index - 51
ISSN - 2054-5703
DOI - 10.1098/rsos.211926
Subject(s) - mycelium , schizophyllum commune , cordyceps militaris , fungus , pinus densiflora , flammulina , cordyceps , botany , physarum polycephalum , biology , spike (software development) , fungal protein , biological system , mushroom , computer science , gene , biochemistry , software engineering , mutant
Fungi exhibit oscillations of extracellular electrical potential recorded via differential electrodes inserted into a substrate colonized by mycelium or directly into sporocarps. We analysed electrical activity of ghost fungi (Omphalotus nidiformis ), Enoki fungi (Flammulina velutipes ), split gill fungi (Schizophyllum commune ) and caterpillar fungi (Cordyceps militaris ). The spiking characteristics are species specific: a spike duration varies from 1 to 21 h and an amplitude from 0.03 to 2.1 mV. We found that spikes are often clustered into trains. Assuming that spikes of electrical activity are used by fungi to communicate and process information in mycelium networks, we group spikes into words and provide a linguistic and information complexity analysis of the fungal spiking activity. We demonstrate that distributions of fungal word lengths match that of human languages. We also construct algorithmic and Liz-Zempel complexity hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that speciesS. commune generate the most complex sentences.