Meme #7 - Integration

In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake explores the mystery of how a fungus coordinates behavior along its mycelial web. He states, 

Hyphal tips may be the places where data streams come together to determine the speed and direction of growth, but how do tips in one part of the network “know” what tips are doing in other, more distant parts of the network? (p.60) 

He discusses the possibilities of hydraulic pressure and chemical signaling as potential answers but determines they are too slow of processes to explain what is witnessed in mycelium’s behavior. He then settles on the likelihood of electronic flow, explaining: 

It has long been known that animals use electrical impulses, or “action potentials” to communicate between different parts of their bodies. Neurons - the long, electrically excitable nerve cells that coordinate animal behavior - have their own field of study: neuroscience. Although electrical signaling is normally thought of as an animal talent, animals aren’t alone in producing action potentials. Plants and algae produce them, and it has been known since the 1970s that some types of fungi do also. (p.60) 

Sheldrake then details the work of Swedish mycologist, Stefan Olsson, who according to the author, “has spent decades trying to understand how mycelial networks coordinate themselves and behave as integrated wholes.” Olsson approached a research group working on insect neurobiology to see if they would allow him to train their instruments on mycelium instead of insects to determine: 1) Is electrical flow produced in his targeted mycelium and 2) Is it responsive to environmental conditions? The answers to both questions turned out to be “yes.” Sheldrake relates:

[1] When Olsson inserted the microelectrodes into Armillaria’s (Honey Fungus) hyphal strands, he detected regular action potential-like impulses, firing at a rate very close to that of animals’ sensory neurons - around four impulses per second, which traveled along hyphae at a speed of at least half a millimeter per second, some ten times faster than the fastest rate of fluid flow measured in a fungal hypha. (p.61) 

[2] Olsson [then] set up the rig and placed a block of wood onto the mycelium several centimeters from the electrodes. What he found was extraordinary. When the wood came into contact with the mycelium, the firing rate of the impulses doubled. When he removed the block of wood, the firing rate returned to normal. To make sure that the fungi weren’t responding to the weight of the wooden block, he placed an inedible plastic block of the same size and weight onto the mycelium. The fungus didn’t respond. (pp.60-61) 

These electronic impulses travel to all parts of the mycelium to cue the entire organism that a source of food has been detected. Other hyphal strands then change direction and move toward the food. But this was in a lab setting. In an article in Research Outreach on the theory of cellular consciousness, mycologist Nik Money explains how it looks in a natural environment:

To deepen our understanding of fungal growth we need to look at mycelia in their natural habitats, where the fungal “brain” has the opportunity to respond to the richness of the forest floor rather than the featureless surface of a lab culture. As the mycelium expands, it detects the physical structure of its surroundings and responds to the availability of food and the presence of plants and other organisms. The overall pattern of branching is determined by the genetic code of the fungus, but the exact positions of each branch are dictated by the microscopic character of the environment. For this reason, the precise shape of each fungal colony is never reproduced. The individual fungus is unique, much like how no two humans are exactly alike. Although the fungus does not process information the same way a human does, the individual mycelium responds to environmental stimuli in a similar fashion. 

Stefan Olsson’s experiments showed that a primary method of detection, cueing, and response for mycelium is through electronic impulses and Nik Money’s work demonstrated how this works in a natural environment. Next, mycologist Adam Adamatsky, who is interested in the computing potential of fungi, went further and discussed how mycelium may have a type of “language” that contains up to 50 “words.” He published an article in Royal Society Open Science that supports this claim. According to the abstract of Adamatsky’s article: 

Fungi exhibit oscillations of extracellular electrical potential recorded via differential electrodes inserted into a substrate colonized by mycelium or directly into sporocarps. We analysed electrical activity of ghost fungi (Omphalotus nidiformis), Enoki fungi (Flammulina velutipes), split gill fungi (Schizophyllum commune) and caterpillar fungi (Cordyceps militaris). The spiking characteristics are species specific: a spike duration varies from 1 to 21 h and an amplitude from 0.03 to 2.1 mV. We found that spikes are often clustered into trains. Assuming that spikes of electrical activity are used by fungi to communicate and process information in mycelium networks, we group spikes into words and provide a linguistic and information complexity analysis of the fungal spiking activity. We demonstrate that distributions of fungal word lengths match that of human languages. We also construct algorithmic and Liz-Zempel complexity hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that species S. commune generate the most complex sentences. 

Mycologists working in the area of fungi integration and communication seem united in their belief that mycelium are not some sort of giant brain - at least not in the way we usually understand the term, but they are becoming more convinced that mycelium exhibit brain-like behavior and that the electrical impulses responding to environmental conditions may go beyond the simple release of cues that trigger reactions and may be more like signals that intentionally communicate information. This developing understanding of how fungi operate in an integrated way over sometimes long distances - a single Honey Fungus may be up to 10 square kilometers - demonstrates that real-time, coordinated action does not need to be restricted to a limited locality. Rather, a fungus deploys an intricate, web-like structure that uses electrical impulses to communicate large amounts of localized information to the rest of the network. This then triggers responses along other points on its web - very much like our own vast, electronic web: the internet. Thus, fungi have a lot to teach us about this omnipresent feature of our lives. And as the emerging field of AI fine-tunes the internet so that the remotest parts of the world are tied even more intimately together, it might be a good idea to start seeing the communities it connects as one entity - a living, fungi-like network that ensures its own survival by promoting the good health of all the living things connected to it.