Do Fungi Communicate? The Science Behind Their Electrical Signals
- Gauri Khanna
- Apr 13
- 3 min read
Too long to read? Go for the highlights below.
Fungi produce electrical spike patterns that statistically resemble a vocabulary of up to 50 "words"
Through their underground networks, fungi physically connect to plant roots, enabling the transfer of nutrients and chemical signals between trees: a system some ecologists call the "Wood Wide Web."
Current measurement methods are not yet refined enough to distinguish true information transfer from background metabolic activity, and the field calls for better tools before firm conclusions can be drawn
Underground fungal networks generate electrical patterns that bear structural similarities to human language. Researchers are cautious about what that means; but the question itself is reshaping how we think about biological intelligence.
Electrical Spikes in the Soil
The experiment was deceptively straightforward. Professor Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England's unconventional computing laboratory in Bristol inserted tiny microelectrodes into substrates colonised by fungal mycelium and recorded what happened electrically. He studied four species: enoki, split gill, ghost, and caterpillar fungi.
What he found, published in Royal Society Open Science, was that fungi produce bursts of electrical spikes, called "spike trains", that cluster into patterns. When analysed statistically, the lengths and distributions of these patterns showed similarities to those found in human language, with something resembling a vocabulary of up to 50 distinct units. The parallel was structural rather than semantic: the point was not that fungi were saying anything in particular, but that their electrical output was organised in a way that rhymes with how information is structured in language.
Adamatzky himself is cautious. The signals might carry meaningful information: coordinating growth, signalling damage, or relaying news of available nutrients across the network. Or they might be a mechanical artefact: mycelium tips carry electrical charge, and as they pass near measurement electrodes, they produce a recordable spike with no informational content at all. Both remain live possibilities.
What Fungal Signalling Might Actually Be Doing
Previous research has established that fungi transmit electrical impulses through hyphae in a way that parallels, at a basic level, how nerve cells work in animals. Crucially, this activity increases when wood-decomposing fungi come into contact with wood: suggesting the signals may be functionally linked to foraging and resource acquisition rather than being random noise.
That functional interpretation connects to a wider body of ecological research. Through their mycelial networks, fungi form physical connections with plant roots, creating what some ecologists call the "Wood Wide Web." Carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients can move through these connections between trees; chemical signals that alert plants to pest attack or stress have also been documented travelling through fungal networks. None of this requires consciousness or anything like deliberate communication; it is better understood as a distributed biological signalling system, broadly analogous to the way hormones coordinate activity across the human body without any single site being "in charge."
Why the Science Is Still Unsettled
A 2025 review in FEMS Microbiology Reviews put the current state of knowledge in useful perspective. While the capacity of hyphae to generate action potential-like spikes (brief, sharp changes in electrical charge across a membrane, the same basic mechanism used by neurons) is established, the review notes that it remains unclear whether these spikes reflect genuine information transfer or simply metabolic activity. The microscopic complexity of fungal networks makes reliable measurement technically demanding, and current evidence for coordinated signalling within or between organisms is still described as tentative.
The review calls for more refined experimental methods before the field can move from interesting pattern to confirmed function. Different species also appear to generate signals of varying complexity, suggesting that if electrical communication is real, it is not uniformly developed across the fungal kingdom. What looks like a richer vocabulary in one species may reflect a structural feature of its mycelial architecture rather than greater communicative capacity.
Where the Research Sits Today
Fungal electrical signalling occupies a genuinely uncertain position in biology. The patterns are real; their interpretation is not yet settled. The honest position is that fungi may use electrical activity to coordinate behaviour across their networks, or the signals may be a side-effect of growth with no information content at all: and current tools cannot reliably distinguish between these possibilities.
What makes the research worth tracking is less any single finding and more the methodological challenge it poses. Biological intelligence, in the broad sense of a system that processes information and responds adaptively to its environment, does not require a brain. Whether fungi cross even a minimal threshold of that definition is a question that measurement science, rather than theory, will eventually have to answer.
