Not what I usually associate with talking mushrooms
April 7, 2022 6:37 AM   Subscribe

 
can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
Only 23 different words. The math checks out.
posted by Etrigan at 7:02 AM on April 7, 2022 [33 favorites]


Sauté is a curse word in mushroom.
posted by fairmettle at 7:08 AM on April 7, 2022 [13 favorites]


This comes as absolutely zero surprise to anyone who has ever confided in a toadstool whilst relaxing in the grass after eating a certain number and variety of mushroom.
posted by thivaia at 7:19 AM on April 7, 2022 [9 favorites]


The words, of course, would technically count as fungible tokens.
posted by acb at 7:21 AM on April 7, 2022 [88 favorites]


Every time I see a revelation like this, I have a set of feelings about the universe that make me feel uncomfortably like some weird all-are-one cosmic-love hippy, a complete break from my usual workaday sense of self, but between the idea that the consciousness of the observer matters in physics in some fundamental but not-at-all-understood way, and the fact that we never, ever seem to discover that anything is less smart, less sensate or communicative than we'd expected, I get this overwhelming sense of the universe's connectedness. It really seems like if enough matter just finds itself in one place and gets complex enough, eventually it wants somebody to talk to.

Maybe the question isn't "where is all the dark matter", it's "how does the matter we can see talk to itself, how can we listen and understand." Maybe the opposite of entropy is love.

Anyway, back to spreadsheets.
posted by mhoye at 7:24 AM on April 7, 2022 [53 favorites]


Note that another scientist quoted in the article calls the conclusion "overenthusiastic", which I assume is a British compliment.
posted by clawsoon at 7:25 AM on April 7, 2022 [16 favorites]


Oh sure, the talking cat was a hoax, but talking mushrooms are totally real.
posted by briank at 7:25 AM on April 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


which I assume is a British compliment

Let me consult the British-to-American translator for "With the greatest respect, while this is certainly a courageous experiment, the conclusions are somewhat overenthusiastic", and... oh no
posted by mhoye at 7:29 AM on April 7, 2022 [38 favorites]


Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

—Sylvia Plath, Mushrooms
posted by oulipian at 7:45 AM on April 7, 2022 [59 favorites]


Maybe the question isn't "where is all the dark matter", it's "how does the matter we can see talk to itself, how can we listen and understand."

My personal opinion is that those two questions are related.
posted by hypnogogue at 7:51 AM on April 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


can we note the time stamps (time of initial post, to time of acb's contribution)?

it took less than one hour for the best-worst thing to happen in this thread
posted by elkevelvet at 7:52 AM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.”
posted by glonous keming at 7:54 AM on April 7, 2022 [15 favorites]


Are most of the words variations on "Badger" and "Snake"?
posted by lalochezia at 8:14 AM on April 7, 2022 [9 favorites]




Calling Terence McKenna from beyond...
posted by symbioid at 8:27 AM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


I was feeling bad about eating octopus. Where does it stop?!!
posted by brachiopod at 8:34 AM on April 7, 2022 [8 favorites]


mhoye: "I get this overwhelming sense of the universe's connectedness. It really seems like if enough matter just finds itself in one place and gets complex enough, eventually it wants somebody to talk to."

I agree, but also feel like we (humans) are a walking cognitive bias, and science when done right lets us understand that not everything has to look or feel human to be of worth, and maybe mushrooms aren't talking in a sense we would easily recognize but that doesn't mean they're not talking. See also, the 'forest internet'.
posted by signal at 8:34 AM on April 7, 2022 [6 favorites]


All 50 of those words are just lyrics to Simon & Chantarelle's "Mycelia".
posted by cortex at 8:42 AM on April 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


I was feeling bad about eating octopus. Where does it stop?!!

you're only eating the genitals
posted by Dr. Twist at 8:49 AM on April 7, 2022 [9 favorites]


I was feeling bad about eating octopus. Where does it stop?!!

Don't worry, some mushrooms will be eating you sooner or later.
posted by clawsoon at 8:55 AM on April 7, 2022 [21 favorites]


Overheard by one technician: Our minds are just focused on these goals and plans, which in themselves are not reality.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:04 AM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


mhoye: Every time I see a revelation like this, I have a set of feelings about the universe that make me feel uncomfortably like some weird all-are-one cosmic-love hippy, a complete break from my usual workaday sense of self...
In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake makes the point that close study of mushrooms, fungi, and the way they fit into the world, tends to blur so many lines, to upend so many assumptions, that the ideas themselves can produce a state of mind not entirely unlike ingesting psychoactive mushrooms more directly.

I have done neither of these so YMMV.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:05 AM on April 7, 2022 [15 favorites]


that close study of mushrooms, fungi, and the way they fit into the world, tends to blur so many lines, to upend so many assumptions

Isn't there some fungi with a bajillion reproductive sexes, or something like that?
posted by clawsoon at 9:07 AM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Language is a virus fungus from outer space underground

-William S. Burroughs burrows
posted by otherchaz at 9:09 AM on April 7, 2022 [16 favorites]


50 Words to Say to Mushrooms

-Simon and Garfungal
posted by otherchaz at 9:19 AM on April 7, 2022 [6 favorites]


The idea that trees might be using fungus to communicate isn't new as we saw here on Metafilter:
The Wood Wide Web In 2019 and
The Social life of forests In 2020.
It seems more likely to me than unlikely.
When I was little I would refuse to eat mushrooms because the texture to me suggested something that was still alive and was therefore disrespectful to eat. I felt the same way about yogurt because of the commercials talking about "Live active cultures!!" I couldn't really explain this with my five year old vocabulary so I got labeled as a picky eater. Im not though, I've always been willing to try things. But that just didn't sit right with me.
posted by bleep at 9:27 AM on April 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


They didn't mention the 'words', but they are:
bro
party
brewski
dude!
brah!
hey!
rad!
go!
Yo!
Si amigo!
grub
snacks
rock!
jam!
b-dubs!
shots!
yasss!
woah!

because mushrooms are fungi.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:31 AM on April 7, 2022 [27 favorites]


Just wait til Beard Meets Food finds out about this.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 9:52 AM on April 7, 2022


Holy shiitake!
posted by argonauta at 10:11 AM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Simon and Garfungal

dammit that's way better
posted by cortex at 10:21 AM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


I definitely use more than 50 words but I try to keep the typos under that number.
posted by cendawanita at 10:29 AM on April 7, 2022


Simon and Garfungal

Mycelia, you're breaking my heart
You're shaking my confidence daily
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:29 AM on April 7, 2022 [9 favorites]


So as not to abuse the edit window:

All 50 of those words are just lyrics to Simon & Chantarelle's "Mycelia".

Crap. I was not first to that pun. Sorry!
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:29 AM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Amanita goes walking
And when she passes
Each one she passes goes, "Ah"
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:39 AM on April 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


Oooohhh man this is bonkers. I am an electrophysiologist, and from a quick glance at the recordings from this paper I'm like 70% sure we're looking at some noise and then analyzing it to death. And the analyses here have a strong flavor of something produced by someone extremely bright with very little guidance who's smart enough to understand how to run a pretty sophisticated analysis but doesn't quite understand its limitations. Maybe I'm wrong but...

I want someone to help this guy do intracellular recordings in fungi, because I think it's a wild and fun idea and could be pretty interesting. But extracellular recordings from the mycelial network, looking at events occurring on timescales of minutes? I suspect he's recording the electrophysiological correlates of his building's air handling system or something. It's easy to do that sort of thing by accident.

This thread is gold, though.
posted by biogeo at 12:00 PM on April 7, 2022 [23 favorites]


This Is Just To Say

I have eaten the 'shrooms
That were
In the icebox.

And which you
Were probably saving
For Hecatefest.

Aaaggghh save me,
They say I'm not sweet,
Not worth my mold.
posted by Oyéah at 12:21 PM on April 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


timescales of minutes?

Why would you think that fungi think at animal time scales? I agree it's not the soundest research, but timescale of minutes is not high on my list of concerns.

Isn't there some fungi with a bajillion reproductive sexes…?

Yeah, it's as system to ensure self incompatibility while essentially ensuring anyone else is fair game.

Sometimes two bits will start to have sex, then eventually figure out "oops, we are actually the same individual! Ha! Well… that's a bit awkward isn't it? How about we go have lunch and forget about it?"

It works combinatorially, where you get a handful of different tokens that go into handful of different slots, and all of a sudden there's 50k sexes, because the ordered string is what matters.

Here's a popular article, here's a fun science article: Tetrapolar fungal mating types: Sexes by the thousands
posted by SaltySalticid at 12:27 PM on April 7, 2022 [9 favorites]


I saw a documentary about mushrooms called Fantastic Fungi, which I have forgotten most of the content of, but have a strong memory that many of the experts pronounced it fun-ji rather than fun-guy. On googling there are those who claim it is etymologically correct, but I really got the sense it was mostly them being roughly 1 billion percent done with Fun Guy! Jokes.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:43 PM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


How trees communicate
posted by bitteschoen at 12:43 PM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


I mean, "Help, our Princess has been kidnapped by Bowser! Again!" is nine words right there.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 12:48 PM on April 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


Sometimes two bits will start to have sex, then eventually figure out "oops, we are actually the same individual! Ha! Well…

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover (Who is Actually Also You)

-Simon and Garfungal
posted by otherchaz at 1:02 PM on April 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


I have it on good authority* that mushrooms are a superintelligent life form from another galaxy (or possibly another plane of reality) that came here hundreds of millions of years ago to help life on Earth evolve toward a higher level of consciousness, and that psilocybin hallucinations are actually this life form's attempts to communicate with us. I'm pretty sure they don't need words.

* some old hippie I met by the side of the road
posted by Gerald Bostock at 1:07 PM on April 7, 2022 [8 favorites]


biogeo: the analyses here have a strong flavor of something produced by someone extremely bright with very little guidance who's smart enough to understand how to run a pretty sophisticated analysis but doesn't quite understand its limitations. Maybe I'm wrong but...

I'm with you here. I could scatter a few water sensors along the beach, and probably get signals like this as the waves and tides come in and out, do a language complexity analysis, and conclude that the sand is talking to itself, at the same level of rigor.

I've encountered this guy's work for decades, and they all have this flavor... something interesting, maybe, if you don't look too close or ask too many questions. Maybe serves a purpose to stimulate creative thinking, maybe not.
posted by brambleboy at 1:14 PM on April 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


"the University of the West of England’s unconventional computing laboratory in Bristol"

Seems a little weird for a newspaper to call a laboratory "unconventional" with no other explanation.

[googles]

Oh... it's supposed to be capitalized. That's the name of the lab. He is "Director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory and Professor in Unconventional Computing".
posted by clawsoon at 1:22 PM on April 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


we never, ever seem to discover that anything is less smart, less sensate or communicative than we'd expected

I invite you to visit the Human Relations tag on AskMe.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 1:26 PM on April 7, 2022 [13 favorites]


Regarding my "timescale of minutes" statement, I should clarify. You're right, SaltySalticid, that fungi could, and probably do, operate on much slower timescales than animals. My concern there isn't so much about whether that's physiologically plausible for fungi, as it is about that being methodologically challenging.

So for example, if I am trying to record the electrical activity of individual neurons, I know some things about the relevant timescales that make my job a lot easier. The action potential ("spike") of a neuron takes roughly 1 millisecond, give or take a bit. If I want to record neuronal action potentials, I know that I don't need to sample any faster than about 50 kHz (fifty thousand times per second) to capture all the information I need to measure its waveform (depending on how much detail I care about, there may be cases where I need to go higher but let's set that aside). I also know that anything that happens slower than about 500 Hz (that is, takes longer than about 2 ms) isn't a spike. This means that I can build a filter into my recording system that rejects anything faster than 50 kHz and slower than 500 Hz. This is great news, because I know there are certain sources of electrical artifact (what we call signals caused by something other than what we want to measure) that fall outside that range, which I can ignore. A really big one is the electrical mains frequency, either 60 Hz or 50 Hz depending on where in the world you live. Audio technicians will be familiar with this as "hum." Although it's not actually a very strong signal, it's huge compared to the tiny electrical signals we're trying to measure with electrophysiological recordings. If I can build a filter that rejects everything below 500 Hz, that will also reject the 60 Hz mains frequency that would otherwise swamp out my spikes.

On the other hand, if I'm recording EEG signals, those occur over a range of about 0.5-250 Hz (depending a bit on who you ask). This means I have a challenge, because that 50/60 Hz artifact is right in the middle of what I want to record, and I have to deal with it somehow. I can try to set up my recording equipment to do a better job of rejecting it specifically, or I can analyze around it, or I can set up a specialized "notch filter" that knocks out just signals in that very narrow range. Fortunately, it's a very reliable, easily-identifiable signal.

If you're recording very slow electrical activity, on a scale slower than seconds, you get into a whole world of potentially complex sources of artifacts. For example, when I was a student almost 20 years ago (god that hurt to type) I ran a project measuring the pressure inside of lizard eggs under various conditions, over time. I discovered that my pressure measurements had a strange "ripple" with a frequency of approximately 1 minute, and after chasing it down for quite some time I eventually discovered that the source was the incubators in the room cycling on and off, slightly changing the ambient air pressure in the room. This wasn't an electrical artifact per se, but electrophysiology measurements are if anything even more sensitive to things like electrical equipment cycling on and off, which tends to happen on that timescale.

If you don't know a priori what timescale you're interested in, you have to consider a really wide band, and the wider your band the more opportunities there are for sources of noise or artifact to creep in. In theory if you know what these things are and how they behave, you can control them to some extent and clean your signal up, but if you're going on a fishing expedition, it's very easy to see something that looks vaguely like a very slow spike and conclude that you've found something physiological, when in fact it was something like your air handling system turning on and off.

There are things you can do to limit your exposure to these sources of artifacts, including recording intracellularly instead of extracellularly, but the kind of recording that was done here is really challenging to get right. I think it's absolutely a really interesting thing to have attempted, and maybe once I get a chance to read it in more detail I'll be convinced that those are all real signals and fungi really do have spike-like electrical activity. But at the moment it looks a lot more like noise and artifacts to me. (Also, if you want to send messages between cells at timescales as slow as minutes, I don't think electrical activity is the best way to do it. Fungal cells are perfectly capable of exchanging cytoplasm, and I think you could send much more information-dense messages at the same speed or even faster just by using signalling molecules.)

Anyway, that's a little window into what occupies a lot of my working life.
posted by biogeo at 1:31 PM on April 7, 2022 [31 favorites]


a new study suggests they may be champignon communicators
heh heh heh heh...
posted by biogeo at 1:39 PM on April 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


Wake me when a ship can skip across the universe on a highway made of mushrooms
posted by SansPoint at 1:43 PM on April 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


One day, I watched a small group of deer munch down on some beautiful fungi growing out of a tree stump in my yard. I was SO jealous! Wondered if I could have eaten it. It LOOKED good!
posted by Goofyy at 1:57 PM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Also, it's interesting to consider that there is an example of a non-animal with neuron-like electrical activity: the Venus Flytrap. Brushing one of their sensor hairs triggers an action potential that causes the trap to close, and this action potential behaves very similarly to that of animal neurons, even responding to anesthesia in a similar way. So plants can do this, but they mostly don't, because outside of highly specialized cases like the Venus Flytrap capturing insect prey, they don't need to. Plants have complex behaviors and communicate with each other and their animal symbiotes in sophisticated and interesting ways, but they don't do so using methods we can relate to easily, because their needs and strategies for living are very different from ours. Fungi live their lives on timescales more similar to plants, and communicate in similar ways. It's not impossible that they use things like action potentials for intercellular communication, but we shouldn't necessarily expect them to, either.

Acknowledging that other organisms are not like us is not the same as dismissing them. The biologist Robert Trivers claims a mentor of his, Bill Drury, once told him "Never assume an animal you're studying is as stupid as the person studying it." I think biology is in part a project of coming to understand other organisms on their own terms, rather than always in comparison to ourselves. Fungi are fascinating, marvelous organisms regardless of whether they use electrical signalling in the way that our own brains do. And if we find patterns in their signals that remind us of our own language, that teaches us a lesson about the mathematics of communication and the universality of patterns across nature, and perhaps about our ability to project ourselves into what may seem truly alien, but not that fungi are actually using language just like us.
posted by biogeo at 2:00 PM on April 7, 2022 [6 favorites]


One day, I watched a small group of deer munch down on some beautiful fungi growing out of a tree stump in my yard. I was SO jealous! Wondered if I could have eaten it. It LOOKED good!

Meanwhile, the fungus: ..-. ..- -.-. -.- .. -. --. -.. . . .-.
posted by clawsoon at 2:03 PM on April 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


Terence McKenna is gonna plotz.
posted by rhizome at 2:44 PM on April 7, 2022


Mycologist here. I am roughly 1 billion percent done with Fun Guy! Jokes.

The very first thing I did was check the date that article was published. Seriously.
posted by acrasis at 3:01 PM on April 7, 2022 [10 favorites]


Mycologist here. I am roughly 1 billion percent done with Fun Guy! Jokes.

You'll be sorry when the first words we translate from mushroom language are Fun Guy! puns.
posted by clawsoon at 3:04 PM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


“We too had our lives to live…” Denis MacMahon, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.
posted by progosk at 3:23 PM on April 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


Isn't there some fungi with a bajillion reproductive sexes…?

Yeah […]

Here's a popular article


No surprise they’re the very ones that “generated the most complex “sentences” of all”, humble yet ubiquitous split gills, Schizophyllum commune.
posted by progosk at 3:30 PM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Publish or produce spore-bearing structures
posted by polymodus at 3:49 PM on April 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


Mushrooms were a solution to the problem of too much coal. After the Great Dying the universe had pity on us.
posted by RuvaBlue at 3:57 PM on April 7, 2022


Sometimes two bits will start to have sex, then eventually figure out "oops, we are actually the same individual!

Boy, if I had a nickel...
posted by kirkaracha at 4:40 PM on April 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


Note that another scientist quoted in the article calls the conclusion "overenthusiastic", which I assume is a British compliment.

Mushrooms can communicate with each other but apparently Brits and Americans cannot.
posted by srboisvert at 7:42 PM on April 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


We eat fungus, give it new experiences, and then we die and return those experiences to the fungi collective.
posted by Bottlecap at 9:36 PM on April 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


Ben Wheatley's film from last year In the Earth has a plot that involves a scientific investigation into whether the mushrooms and plants in the forest are communicating. Because it's a Ben Wheatley movie, they are, but it's on behalf of the evil spirit/entity Parnag Fegg and then things get head-explodingly psychedelic and weird. If the idea of a malignant forest attacking people with spore clouds appeals, it's truly worth seeing.

Here's the trailer.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:01 AM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]


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