Plants & fungi / Measurement, hypothesis & critique

Do fungi have a language? What electrical recordings show

Source year 2021–2025 · Note reviewed 2026-10-14

Adamatzky's peer-reviewed 2022 paper reports extracellular voltage recordings from four fungal species. It sampled one value per second from differential electrode pairs placed 1–2 cm apart, recorded up to eight pairs at once, and reports about 1.5 days for Schizophyllum commune and about five days for each other species. The analysis used species-specific thresholds to identify spikes, then grouped them into proposed “words” using one or two times each species' mean inter-spike interval. The resulting spike-count distribution was compared with human-language word lengths. This is a published pattern-analysis hypothesis, not a decoded fungal vocabulary or conversation.

What we reviewed · Full preprint methods and 2025 review; critique abstract/selected sections; dataset metadata only

Reviewed the full arXiv HTML text of Adamatzky's 2021 preprint, including recording methods, event detection, grouping rules, results and discussion; checked the published 2022 Royal Society article metadata and institutional article-rights record. Reviewed the 2024 critique's publisher abstract and visible selected sections, not its full text. Reviewed the full 2025 FEMS review sections on fungal electrophysiology, macroscopic mushroom recordings, the authors' method-replication attempt, caveats and future methods, plus its article license. Inspected the official Zenodo v1 record and file metadata only. No files were downloaded, no analysis was reproduced, and no independent specialist review was received.

Not yet independently reviewed by a scientific specialist.

What this does — and doesn’t — establish

The grouping threshold is an analyst-defined analogy, and similar word-length distributions do not identify a sender's message, a receiver, a referent or a semantic code. The 2024 Blatt et al. commentary argues that the language claim is premature and that non-biological voltage noise and artifacts may account for measured patterns; its full text was not accessible in this review. The 2025 FEMS review describes an attempted method replication in Pleurotus pulmonarius: it reports disturbance-associated spikes from opening the incubator, nearby footsteps and automatic window shades in both fungal and control recordings, and calls for stronger environmental shielding and measurement controls. That is a methods warning, not a definitive disproof of all fungal electrical physiology. The linked 2021 Zenodo dataset lists four archives totaling 84.6 MB, but no license was displayed in its Rights section. No archive, code or weights were acquired, and no benchmark or model was run.

What we can build on

Keep four questions separate: whether an electrode records a voltage; whether the voltage is biological; whether it reliably predicts a controlled physiological response; and whether a receiver uses it as information. The paper addresses the first and proposes analyses relevant to the latter questions, but does not establish a semantic language. A phone microphone cannot measure these electrical potentials.

The next reading task

Before any reproduction, resolve the Zenodo dataset's reuse terms and file provenance, then ask a mycologist and electrophysiologist to review a preregistered, lab-based replication. It should include independently grown cultures, colonized and sterile-medium controls, sham/reference-electrode checks, continuous environmental logs, blinded condition labels and frozen signal-processing rules. Only test a stimulus-response prediction after those measurement controls pass; no training or consumer translation feature is proposed.

Go to the sources

Fungal spike patterns and the language analogy ↗
Adamatzky, preprint (2021), subsequently published in Royal Society Open Science (2022). The analysis groups electrical spikes using a linguistic analogy.
Published fungal spike-pattern and language-analogy paper ↗
Adamatzky (2022), Royal Society Open Science 9:211926. Peer-reviewed analysis of extracellular voltage recordings from four fungal species; its language interpretation is a hypothesis, not a semantic decoding result.
Fungal language critique ↗
Blatt et al. Does electrical activity in fungi function as a language? Fungal Ecology (2024). Methodological commentary challenging linguistic claims.
Fungal electrical signaling methods review (FEMS, 2025) ↗
Schintke et al., Electrical signaling in fungi: past and present challenges. FEMS Microbiology Reviews 49 (2025), fuaf009, DOI 10.1093/femsre/fuaf009.
Recordings of electrical activity of four species of fungi (Zenodo v1) ↗
Adamatzky's Zenodo dataset linked from the fungal-spiking paper: four compressed recordings for Omphalotus nidiformis, Flammulina velutipes, Schizophyllum commune and Cordyceps militaris.

Original editorial note by Talk2Nature contributors. AI-assisted, source-grounded synthesis; not a peer review or an independent replication. Linked works retain their own rights.