Scientists Think One of Earth’s Simplest Organisms May Work like a Giant Brain

3 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:While moss form vital substrates that allow more complex plant and animal life to move into new ecological niches, the plants themselves are often seen as simple lifeforms.A new study complicates this picture with evidence of electrophysical communication in mats of Brachythecium rutabulum, a rough-stalked feather moss found throughout Great Britain. Although future studies will be needed, this research shows that one of the oldest types of plant life on Earth may have a secret means of communication.Andrew Adamatzky, a computer scientist at the University of the West of England Bristol, studies the surprisingly sophisticated inner lives of organisms most of us dismiss as primitive. In 2012, for example, Adamatzky—along with his colleague Andrew Ilachinski—penned a New York Times op-ed extolling the wisdom of slime molds and their ability to create optimal transport networks. A decade later, Adamatzky published a paper exploring the electricity-based language of fungi.“Fungi can sense everything humans sense and much more,” Adamatzky said at the time. “The findings might indicate that there is a somewhat universal grammar underpinning communication in all living substrates.”So it comes as no surprise that Adamatzky has now trained his electrodes on another organism that quietly underpins entire ecosystems: moss. Moss belongs to one of the oldest lineages of land plants, with relatives tracing back to the Ordovician period some 470 million years ago. It acts as a vital pioneering species, establishing itself on bare rock and eventually forming the necessary nutritional substrate for future plant species to flourish. While scientists don’t doubt its ecological importance, moss isn’t typically portrayed as immensely complex. But in a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Adamatzky argues that this basic assumption might be false.“Plants are increasingly recognized as capable of sophisticated information processing,” Adamatzky wrote. “They exhibit various forms of intelligence, distributed computation and advanced perceptual and adaptive behaviors […] despite significant research on electrical activity in higher plants, moss electrophysiology remains comparatively underexplored.”To correct for this understudied area of plant biology, Adamatzky designed an experiment focused on Brachythecium rutabulum, a rough-stalked feather moss. Forming in dense, green mats, this moss is one of the most common species in Great Britain and Ireland. Adamatzky collected samples of the moss from southwest England, placed them in a transparent container, simulated a humid environment, and then dimmed the lights. He inserted eight pairs of electrodes about one or two centimeters apart in the green clump and recorded roughly five million electrical observations across 178 hours—a little more than a week.“Our long-term macro-electrode recordings reveal that the common moss B. rutabulum expresses a rich and multi-layered electrophysiological repertoire,” Adamatzky wrote. “Across seven days of continuous monitoring, the moss exhibited three consistent spiking regimes (fast, intermediate and slow), propagating electrical activity, structured spike trains and long-term temporal organization in both baseline potential and spike rate.”This isn’t like a human brain’s neural network, which activates and operates much quicker than the impulses recorded in the moss, but it does suggest that there might be a deeper, electrophysical communication happening within the moss itself. The study confirmed that the signals weren’t just mere background noise and that they appeared to move along the electrodes placed in the sample. If these results can be confirmed in more controlled lab settings, it’s possible that moss could serve as a novel substrate for biohybrid sensing, such as a living facade on a building that can sense its environment.For now, the results are just another example that the lives of Earth’s simplest creatures might be more complex than we thought.Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.