A scientist from the University of the West of England has said that mushrooms send out electrical impulses and it can be a form of communication they used to talk to each other previously.
Professor Andrew Adamatzky published his research yesterday in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Adamatzky put electrodes in soil that had mycelium, the “root” of the fungi along with the fruiting body of the mushrooms themselves, which is the part that grows above the ground. He used enoki, caterpillar, split gill, and ghost mushrooms, and analyzed the electrical activity each one gave off.
“We speculated that fungal electrical activity is a manifestation of the information communicated between distant parts of the fungal colonies,” Adamatzky wrote in the study.
This adds to Adamatzky’s hypothesis that states that the electric signals moving through the mushrooms could be them talking to each other. It could be that the whole organism used to communicate with various parts of itself.
Adamatzky is open to the idea that mushrooms don’t talk, too, and said the noises could simply mean nothing significant at all. The researchers are both skeptical and optimistic about it.
It was already known that mushrooms had electrical activity and that they can even be made to “sing.”