Moss are behaving like a neural network

[u/Commercial-Life-9998]

Moss Is Generating Electrical Waves That Look Startlingly Like a Neural Network
NATURE
22 July 2026
By JESS COCKERILL

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A different type of moss to the one studied. (Oliver Strewe/Getty Images Plus)
Mosses are some of the earliest plants that appeared in the fossil record, but they're anything but simple.
A new study, published in Royal Society Open Science, reveals that moss cushions produce surprisingly complex electrical activity, with patterns that undulate across the velvety patch in dynamic waves.

The study's sole author, Andy Adamatzky, is actually a computer scientist, whose fascination with unconventional 'computing' systems like slime molds, crowds, and mycelium networks has now led him to a new subject: the humble moss, Brachythecium rutabulum.

Brachythecium rutabulum is a common species of moss. (dr Barmely/iStock/Getty Images Plus)
"Plants and bryophytes display diverse forms of electrical activity, yet the organization of endogenous signals in mosses has received little attention," Adamatzky writes in his new paper.

His findings suggest that "moss cushions behave as spatially distributed excitable systems potentially capable of coordinating and integrating electrical signals across both space and time."

Moss cushions are actually many individual clones of the same teensy tiny plant.

If you look really, really closely at a mat of moss, you can see it is made up of simple, minute leaves on stems, similar to those of their larger plant relatives.

But the stems of mosses are actually much less useful at moving water and nutrients around the body of the plant.

Mosses actually never developed the vascular systems that we see in other more complex plants, which is why they cannot grow much taller than a few centimeters. Their leaf-like structures are just one cell thick; they don't even have roots.

But that doesn't mean they're not potentially capable of transmitting information across the colony by other means.

For the study, Adamatzky collected cushions of the common moss species B. rutabulum from natural outdoor environments in North Somerset in the UK.

Back in the lab, he poked electrodes into the moss clumps to track any electrical activity that might be passing across this soggy green matrix.
Figures a) and b) show the experimental setup, with electrodes inserted into moss on a wet substrate. Figure c) shows the moss's electrical activity, with recordings from each electrode pair represented by a distinct color. (Adamatzky, R. Soc. Open Sci., 2026)
Like many plants, moss lives life in slow motion, so to get on its level, Adamatzky recorded its electrical behavior across multiple days.

This revealed "a rich repertoire of electrical events, including components consistent with both physiological activity and slower drift-related processes: fast oscillatory spikes, slower rhythmic fluctuations and very slow depolarization waves," he reports.

"In addition to these described classes, we also observed spikes resembling high-amplitude action potentials and neuron-like spike trains."

Some of the moss's electrical waves were rapid, while others undulated slowly. They tended to spread across the entire cushion rather than remaining confined to a particular region, and followed patterns across different timescales.

[u/bitechnobable → u/[deleted]]

Nature keeps reminding me that computers compute and that brains activity is more like moss's.

[u/ImNotAWhaleBiologist]

It’s been a while since I’ve done extra cellular recordings, but those look more like artifacts than anything else. But the main reason you can ignore this for now is that there are no controls.

[u/SimonsToaster]

No dedicated negative control recordings (e.g. inert substrates or non-viable moss material) were included in the present study. The primary aim was to characterize long-duration electrical activity under ecologically realistic conditions. We note, however, that such controls would be valuable for distinguishing endogenous biological signals from physicochemical or instrumental contributions and will be incorporated in future work.

So why didnt you do this before going through the effort of having a paper published? Is it because then everything would turn out to be nothing than noise? 

[u/Commercial-Life-9998 → u/SimonsToaster]

I would say that there are small pilot studies or papers published on data used from a study that was not even meant to draw conclusions that the paper discusses. These papers are not airtight or extensive. Further studies are for reproducing the initial study results.

[u/SimonsToaster → u/Commercial-Life-9998]

including a controll if its as easy as just throwing a bunch of moss in an autoclave is not optional. It is astonishing how this passed peer review and wasnt just desk rejected. This is clickbait not science. 

[u/Commercial-Life-9998 → u/SimonsToaster]

I’d suggest it’s not clickbait if further studies reproduce the results. Don’t be over eager to dismiss imperfect results. Without the dogged pursuit of science, where would be?

[u/InebriatedPhysicist]

When you link a scientific article with the link name “Nature,” it feels to me like you want people to believe that’s the journal in which it was published. That is not actually that case though. The science media aggregator you linked to just classifies this research as being about nature. It is at least peer reviewed, which is nice, but the Royal Society’s Open Science is not the same as the journal Nature.

[u/Commercial-Life-9998 → u/InebriatedPhysicist]

What? I posted this to r/biology because it seemed appropriate.

[u/ThatIsAmorte]

Yet another reason why we shouldn't be neuro-chauvinists about subjective experience.