At Last, Some Good News: Mushrooms Can Talk!

By far the most delectable news item to come across the transom Thursday was the revelation that mushrooms are magical indeed: the British journal Royal Society Open Science has published, according to the New York Post, a startling new study that claims that mushrooms can “talk to each other — and even have a bountiful vocabulary.” So if you’re looking for someone to lend a sympathetic ear, try some fungi. Hey, if men can be women and women men, and Joe Biden can pretend to be president of the United States, maybe those toadstools that sprung up after last week’s rain will turn out to be marvelous conversationalists.

The study was conducted by Andrew Adamatzky, a computer science professor at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Adamatzky asserted that his team of researchers “found that the ‘fungal language’ exceeds the European languages in morphological complexity.”

Now, I’ve never in my life had a mushroom say a single word to me, either with morphological complexity or morphological simplicity. If you haven’t, either, even if you’ve ingested a few, there are nonetheless plenty of reasons to restrain your skepticism. The Post noted that Adamatzky based his study on an analysis of the “electrical impulses of four species of mushrooms: enoki, split gill, ghost and caterpillar fungus.” He did this by “inserting tiny electrodes into the dirt colonized by the mushroom’s hyphae — the threads that compose the organism’s roots, known as mycelium.”

Human communication can be recorded as a trading of electrical impulses, you see, and for some of us that’s a considerable improvement. In a similar way, Adamatzky “found that the electrical spikes often occurred in clusters, mirroring human vocabularies and employing up to 50 words.” He explained in his study, “We demonstrate that distributions of fungal word lengths match that of human languages.” Split gills are the most articulate of the chatty fungi: the study found that “split gills — a species that resides in rotting wood — generated the most complex ‘sentences’ of the four fungi.”

But what on earth do mushrooms have to talk about? Their favorite salads to land into? What they’ll say to the mashed potato? Whether they belong on burgers or not? What’s gotten into their psychedelic brethren? The examiners of mushroom conversation suggest that they “‘chat’ in order to make their presence known to other members of their cluster — much like wolves howling to alert the pack.” They could also be “trying to tip off fellow fungi, both to potential threats — such as the weather — as well as sources of sustenance.”

The weather! So even the mushrooms are worried about climate change, and ready to abandon fossil fuels and embrace a green future! That’s mightily inspiring, but like the entirety of this study and the entire idea of climate change that is caused and controllable by human action, it is also likely to be entirely fictional. After telling us all about this wonderful study featuring talking mushrooms, the Post gives us yet another startling revelation: all this business about talking mushrooms “could all be in our heads.” No kidding, really?

Andrew Adamatzky admits it himself, saying: “There is also another option — they are saying nothing. Propagating mycelium tips are electrically charged and, therefore, when the charged tips pass in a pair of differential electrodes, a spike in the potential difference is recorded.” Accordingly, University of Exeter mycologist Dan Bebber adopted a skeptical stance: “Though interesting, the interpretation as language seems somewhat overenthusiastic, and would require far more research and testing of critical hypotheses before we see ‘Fungus’ on Google Translate.”

Yes, a bit more research and testing does appear to be in order. But nowadays, even if a team of respected international researchers published assured, peer-reviewed results establishing definitively that mushrooms were as chatty as Aunt Harriet, it would be wise to be skeptical. Nowadays “science” is telling us that gender is fluid, that higher taxes and an end to the internal combustion engine will save the planet from catastrophic flooding (while the political elites who engage the most in this fearmongering buy lavish waterfront mansions), that COVID can be stopped by a vaccine despite the increasing number of vaccinated people who come down with the virus, and on and on. The academic and research fields are so corrupted and politicized today that even when it comes to a topic that has no readily discernable political angle, such as talking mushrooms, you can’t be sure that someone isn’t pushing an agenda and skewering study results to reflect the desired conclusion.

So if you’re feeling lonely, leave the mushrooms in the salad. Or talk to them all you want, but don’t expect an answer.