In April 2022, a computer scientist named Andrew Adamatzky, who runs the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England in Bristol, published a paper in Royal Society Open Science with a title that sounded like a joke: “Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity.” It was not a joke. Adamatzky had spent years pushing thin electrode probes into the fruiting bodies and mycelial mats of four fungal species, oyster mushrooms, ghost fungi, enoki, and split gill mushrooms, and recording voltage fluctuations over days at a time. What came back looked less like static and more like conversation: trains of electrical spikes, clustered into “words,” some of which recurred often enough to resemble a working vocabulary of around fifty entries.
That is the headline. Here is why you should care even if you never touch a mushroom again: bioelectric signaling, the thing that makes your neurons fire and your heart beat, has always been studied almost exclusively in animals with actual nervous systems. Fungi have no neurons, no synapses, no brain of any kind. If something without a nervous system is generating organized, patterned voltage spikes that persist over hours, it means electrical signaling is a far older and more general biological tool than the textbook story about nerves and axons suggests. It also means the tidy line separating “things that think” from “things that don’t” is blurrier than it looks.
What Adamatzky actually measured, and what he didn’t
The method is unglamorous. Pairs of fine wire electrodes get inserted into fungal tissue, either the flesh of a mushroom cap or a block of substrate colonized by mycelium, the branching thread-like network fungi use to grow and absorb nutrients. A data logger records the voltage difference between electrode pairs, sampling once per second, sometimes for days. What emerges is not a flat line. It’s a jagged series of spikes, some sharp and brief, some slow and drawn out, arriving at irregular but not random intervals.
In Adamatzky’s earlier 2018 paper on oyster fungi, Pleurotus djamor, he reported spike amplitudes generally under a few millivolts and spike durations ranging from about an hour to well over a day, with the gaps between spikes averaging somewhere around ninety minutes to a few hours depending on the specimen. Compare that to a human neuron, where an action potential rises and falls in about a millisecond and carries roughly 100 millivolts of amplitude. Fungal spikes are slower by a factor of thousands, and weaker. The resemblance to a nerve impulse is real but coarse, more like comparing a foghorn to a whistle because both make noise on a schedule.
The resemblance to a nerve impulse is coarse, not precise. Slower by a thousandfold, and weaker.
The 2022 paper went further, grouping spikes into clusters separated by silence, the way words are separated by spaces, and then running statistical tests borrowed from linguistics on those clusters. The clusters showed a word-length distribution and a complexity score, measured using a compression method called Lempel-Ziv complexity, that fell within the range seen in human languages. Adamatzky was careful in his own paper to hedge this, noting explicitly that he was not claiming fungi possess language in any semantic sense. The word “language” in the title did the heavy lifting anyway, and it traveled through headlines around the world faster than the caveats did.
Nobody knows what the spikes are for
This is the part that gets glossed over in most coverage. Adamatzky can describe the shape, timing, and statistical structure of the spikes in exquisite detail. He cannot tell you what they mean, or whether “meaning” is even the right frame. A handful of hypotheses circulate. One is that spikes coordinate the transport of water and nutrients through the mycelial network, since fungi have no circulatory system and rely on internal pressure gradients and cytoplasmic streaming to move resources to where they’re needed, and electrical signals could help synchronize that flow across a network that might span acres underground. Another is that spikes are a stress response, triggered when a fungus contacts a new food source, an injury, a shift in humidity, or a rival organism, similar in spirit to how a plant’s leaf generates an electrical wave after being wounded. A third, less exciting possibility is that some fraction of the signal is closer to electrochemical noise, an incidental byproduct of ion movement across fungal cell membranes rather than a “signal” carrying any functional payload at all.
The precedent for genuine fungal electrical signaling is older than Adamatzky’s headline-grabbing papers. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden, Sara Olsson and Bertil Hansson, documented electrical potential changes propagating through fungal mycelium back in the 1990s, and follow-up work through the 2000s and 2010s from labs studying wood-decay fungi found that mechanical stimulation or nutrient encounters could trigger measurable, propagating voltage changes along hyphae, the individual filaments that make up mycelium. That earlier work is less flashy and got a fraction of the press, but it establishes something Adamatzky’s papers depend on: fungi really do carry electrical signals across distance, using ion channels and membrane potential shifts that are mechanistically distinct from an animal action potential but functionally in the same family.
The skeptics have a point worth sitting with
Nicholas Money, a mycologist at Miami University in Ohio who has written extensively and skeptically about claims of fungal cognition, has pushed back hard on the “fungal language” framing specifically. His argument isn’t that the electrical spikes are fabricated. It’s that treating spike clusters as “words” imports a linguistic structure onto data that may not warrant it, the same way you could find Zipf-like statistical patterns in almost any sufficiently complex, irregularly timed signal, including ones with no communicative function whatsoever. Random processes in nature routinely produce patterns that look meaningful under the right statistical lens. Finding a word-length distribution that resembles English doesn’t mean the thing producing it is saying anything.
Finding a pattern that resembles language doesn’t mean the thing producing it is saying anything.
This is the honest limitation, and it’s worth stating plainly rather than burying it: there is no confirmed decoding of fungal spikes into any specific referent, no demonstrated case where a particular spike pattern reliably correlates with a particular external event in a way that lets a researcher predict one from the other. Adamatzky’s data show structure. They don’t yet show reference. That gap, between “produces organized electrical patterns” and “communicates specific information,” is exactly the gap that separates a fascinating biophysical finding from the “mushrooms talk to each other” story that circulated on social media after the 2022 paper. Both things can be true at once: fungi generate genuinely nerve-like electrical activity, and calling it language is getting ahead of the evidence.
Why this fits a bigger pattern in bioelectricity
Step back from fungi specifically and the finding lands inside a trend that Bioletric has tracked across very different organisms. Plants generate action-potential-like signals in response to wounding, work traced back to research from Edward Farmer’s lab at the University of Lausanne showing electrical waves triggering defense gene expression within seconds of a leaf being bitten. Slime molds, which aren’t even fungi but are often mistaken for them, solve maze navigation problems using oscillating electrochemical signals studied extensively by Toshiyuki Nakagaki in Japan. Bacteria form electrically coupled biofilms that transmit potassium-based signals across colonies, a phenomenon documented by Gurol Suel’s lab at UC San Diego starting around 2015. None of these organisms have neurons. All of them move information using voltage.
The fungal case adds something the others don’t: fungi sit in a separate kingdom from plants, animals, and bacteria, closer on the evolutionary tree to animals than to plants, and yet they diverged from the animal lineage roughly a billion years before neurons existed in any recognizable form. If fungi are doing something electrically organized without a nervous system, it suggests that ion-based signaling isn’t a clever invention that evolution stumbled onto once, inside animal cells, and then perfected into a nervous system. It suggests the raw ingredient, voltage-based information transfer across membranes, was sitting around in the shared toolkit of eukaryotic life long before anything we’d call a brain showed up to make use of it.
| Organism | Signal type | Typical timescale | Key researcher |
|---|---|---|---|
| Human neuron | Sodium/potassium action potential | Milliseconds | Classical neurophysiology |
| Oyster fungus mycelium | Slow membrane voltage spikes | Hours | Andrew Adamatzky, UWE Bristol |
| Wounded plant leaf | Wound-induced electrical wave | Seconds | Edward Farmer, University of Lausanne |
| Bacterial biofilm | Potassium ion wave across colony | Minutes | Gurol Suel, UC San Diego |
What people actually want to build with this
Adamatzky’s interest in fungal spiking isn’t purely descriptive. His broader research program, “unconventional computing,” treats living substrates as potential computing hardware, and he has published proof-of-concept work on fungal biosensors, using mycelium’s electrical response to mechanical pressure, light, or chemical exposure as a living detector wired into a circuit board. The pitch is straightforward: mycelium networks are cheap to grow, self-repairing, and already wired for electrical signal propagation across large areas, which makes them a plausible substrate for environmental sensing, detecting soil contamination or moisture changes across a field without burying a grid of conventional sensors. Separate research groups have explored fungal materials as substrates for logic gates, exploiting the way a spike arriving at one point in a mycelial mat can influence whether a spike propagates elsewhere, a crude analog of how a transistor gates current.
None of this is close to a deployed product. It’s lab-bench proof of concept, the kind of work that shows a principle can function, not that it can compete with silicon or with existing environmental sensor networks on cost or reliability. The gap between “mycelium responds electrically to stimuli in a controlled lab setup” and “mycelium is a viable computing substrate in a field” is a large one, and it’s not clear yet whether it closes.
What’s not in question is that the spikes are real, that they resemble the shape and rhythm of a nerve impulse closely enough to have fooled a lot of casual readers into thinking fungi have brains, and that they don’t. Fungi appear to have built a version of the same electrical trick nervous systems use, running on a slower clock and without any of the architecture, neurons, synapses, a brain, that animals needed to make that trick meaningful. The open question isn’t whether the electricity is there. It’s whether anything is home to receive it.