Plants can Think, Communicate, & Remember

[nivek]

This is something I've believed for years and have come to know without doubt, not all the details of how and why, but I've mentioned before about my experiences with trees, they remember, and communicate to others...

Research Reveals Plants can Think, Choose & Remember

Modern science is only beginning to catch up to the wisdom of the ancients: plants possess sentience and a rudimentary form of intelligence.

Plants are far more intelligent and capable than we given them credit. In fact, provocative research from 2010 published in Plant Signaling & Behavior proposes that since they cannot escape environmental stresses in the manner of animals, they have developed a “sophisticated, highly responsive and dynamic physiology,” which includes information processes such as “biological quantum computing” and “cellular light memory” which could be described as forms of plant intelligence. Titled, “Secret life of plants: from memory to intelligence,” the study highlights one particular “super power” of plants indicative of their success as intelligent beings:

“There are living trees that germinated long before Jesus Christ was born. What sort of life wisdom evolved in plants to make it possible to survive and propagate for so long a time in the same place they germinated?”

According to the researchers, “plants actually work as a biological quantum computing device that is capable to process quantum information encrypted in light intensity and in its energy.” This information processing includes a mechanism for processing memorized information. For example:

“Plants can store and use information from the spectral composition of light for several days or more to anticipate changes that might appear in the near future in the environment, for example, for anticipation of pathogen attack.”

According to the study, “plants can actually think and remember.”

Moreover, plant not only possess a mechanism for information gathering and processing, but appear to exercise agency or “choice” vis-à-vis different scenarios:

“Different group of chloroplasts and cells in the same leaf under identical constant and stable light, temperature and relative humidity condition have different opinion “what to do” in such conditions and tests different scenarios of possible future development.”

The study also offers an explanation for why plants absorb more light energy than is needed for photosynthesis alone:

“Another possible answer to the above question is a light training of young naïve leaves. Let’s imagine when young leaf or flower is emerging out of a plant, it would be nice for that leaf or flower to know about the conditions in which it is going to emerge. Older, more experienced leaves that actually are acclimated to outside conditions can train naïve emerging young leaves with the PEPS [photo electro physiological signaling ]and cellular light memory mechanisms. This explains why plants possess a natural capacity to absorb more light energy than that required for photosynthetic CO2 assimilation. They need this absorbed energy in excess for optimization and training of light acclimatory and immune defences.”

The authors leave us with the provocative conclusion:

“Our results suggest that plants are intelligent organisms capable of performing a sort of thinking process (understood as at the same time and non-stress conditions capable of performing several different scenarios of possible future definitive responses), and capable of memorizing this training.17 Indeed leaves in the dark are able to not only “see” the light,8,34 but also are able to differently remember its spectral composition and use this memorized information to increase their Darwinian fitness.”

Why Is This Discovery Important?
There are many reasons why recognizing the sentience and intelligence of plants may have positive implications for the future of humanity. For one, it helps us all to transcend the dominant worldview that non-human life forms are best defined in strictly mechanistic terms, and that attributing a “life essence” or consciousness to them is a form of magical thinking. French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pointy called this world view the “Great Object,” namely, that everything in the universe is compromised of material objects externally related to one another, and with consciousness merely an ephemeral subjectivity found only in humans.

To the contrary, if we open ourselves to the possibility that we are all participants in an interconnected web of life, as many indigenous peoples believed and actually experienced things to be, destroying the natural world simply to serve the essentially suicidal infinite economic growth model will be identified for the insanity that it is. If we recognize, as biologist James Lovelock proposed, the Earth as a whole should be looked upon more like a self-regulating organism (Gaia hypothesis), or as mycologist Paul Stamet envisions, that there is a fungi-based internet within the ground connecting all living things on the planet in an information-sharing network, we will be less likely to both perceive and to treat the natural world as “other” to be dominated. We’ve also been reporting on the role of exosomes as cross-kingdom messengers, which provides a plausible mechanism for how all of the Earth’s inhabitants — plant, fungal, bacteria, animal, etc. — are linked together in an open access, information sharing network.

Recognizing that plants, for instance, have consciousness, or that their simple presence in our environment has healing effects, reintroduces an element of wonder and mystery back into the experience of the natural world. A perfect example of this can be found in the singing plants of the sacred forest of Damanhur. Damanhurian researchers in the mid-70’s reported using custom equipment to capture electromagnetic changes on the surface of leaves and roots and transforming them into audible signals. The researchers also observed that the plants learned to control their electrical responses, indicating they had some rudimentary awareness of the music they were creating. To learn more visit the Damanhur project website, and watch the video below.

 

[nivek]

The secret life of plants: how they memorise, communicate, problem solve and socialise
Stefano Mancuso studies what was once considered laughable – the intelligence and behaviour of plants. His work is contentious, he says, because it calls into question the superiority of humans.

I had hoped to interview the plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso at his laboratory at the University of Florence. I picture it as a botanical utopia: a place where flora is respected for its awareness and intelligence; where sensitive mimosa plants can demonstrate their long memories; and where humans are invited to learn how to be a better species by observing the behaviour of our verdant fellow organisms.

But because we are both on lockdown, we Skype from our homes. Instead of meeting his clever plants, I make do with admiring a pile of cannonball-like pods from an aquatic species, on the bookshelves behind him. “They’re used for propagation,” he says. “I am always collecting seeds.”

Before Mancuso’s lab started work in 2005, plant neurobiology was largely seen as a laughable concept. “We were interested in problems that were, until that moment, just related to animals, like intelligence and even behaviour,” he says. At the time, it was “almost forbidden” to talk about behaviour in plants. But “we study how plants are able to solve problems, how they memorise, how they communicate, how they have their social life and things like that”.

Mancuso and his colleagues have become experts in training plants, just like neuroscientists train lab rats. If you let a drop of water fall on a Mimosa pudica, its kneejerk response is to recoil its leaves, but, if you continue doing so, the plant will quickly cotton on that the water is harmless and stop reacting. The plants can hold on to this knowledge for weeks, even when their living conditions, such as lighting, are changed. “That was unexpected because we were thinking about very short memories, in the range of one or two days – the average memory of insects,” says Mancuso. “To find that plants were able to memorise for two months was a surprise.” Not least because they don’t have brains.

In a plant, a single brain would be a fatal flaw because they have evolved to be lunch. “Plants use a very different strategy,” says Mancuso. “They are very good at diffusing the same function all over the body.” You can remove 90% of a plant without killing it. “You need to imagine a plant as a huge brain. Maybe not as efficient as in the case of animals, but diffused everywhere.”

One of the most controversial aspects of Mancuso’s work is the idea of plant consciousness. As we learn more about animal and plant intelligence, not to mention human intelligence, the always-contentious term consciousness has become the subject of ever more heated scientific and philosophical debate. “Let’s use another term,” Mancuso suggests. “Consciousness is a little bit tricky in both our languages. Let’s talk about awareness. Plants are perfectly aware of themselves.” A simple example is when one plant overshadows another – the shaded plant will grow faster to reach the light. But when you look into the crown of a tree, all the shoots are heavily shaded. They do not grow fast because they know that they are shaded by part of themselves. “So they have a perfect image of themselves and of the outside,” says Mancuso.

Science struggles to view plants as active and motivated because its outlook is so humancentric, he argues. One test for self-awareness in animals is whether they can look in a mirror and understand that they are looking at themselves. “Very few animals are able to do this,” says Mancuso. “Humans, dolphins, a few apes and probably elephants. This has been taken in recent years as a kind of evidence that just these few groups of animals have self-awareness.” Mancuso believes this is wrong. “My personal opinion is that there is no life that is not aware of itself. For me, it’s impossible to imagine any form of life that is not able to be intelligent, to solve problems.”

Another misconception is that plants are the definition of a vegetative state – incommunicative and insensitive to what is around them. But Mancuso says plants are far more sensitive than animals. “And this is not an opinion. This is based on thousands of pieces of evidence. We know that a single root apex is able to detect at least 20 different chemical and physical parameters, many of which we are blind to.” There could be a tonne of cobalt or nickel under our feet, and we would have no idea, whereas “plants can sense a few milligrams in a huge amount of soil”, he says.

Far from being silent and passive, plants are social and communicative, above ground and beneath, through their roots and fungal networks. They are adept at detecting subtle electromagnetic fields generated by other life forms. They use chemicals and scents to warn each other of danger, deter predators and attract pollinating insects. When corn is nibbled by caterpillars, for example, the plant emits a chemical distress signal that lures parasitic wasps to exterminate the caterpillars.

Plants respond to sound, too, “feeling” vibrations all over. “Plants are extremely good at detecting specific kinds of sounds, for example at 200hz or 300hz … because they are seeking the sound of running water.” If you put a source of 200hz sound close to the roots of a plant, he says, they will follow it. There is no evidence that the human voice benefits plants, although talking to plants may soothe the humans doing it.

Another reason we overlook plants’ intelligence is their vastly slower pace of life. In Mancuso’s new book, The Incredible Journey of Plants, we meet the world’s oldest plant – Old Tjikko – a red fir tree whose roots have writhed in the Swedish earth for about 9,560 years. We are also introduced to the ingenious seeds of crimson fountain grass, which choose not to germinate until the conditions are perfect – and can survive for six years while waiting.

The main thrust of the book is that plants were the original pioneers and have been forever exploring the planet. Mancuso eschews the notion of “native species” and prizes so-called invasive species above all else. “The more invasive they are, the more I like them, because they are the most brilliant example of the ability to solve problems,” he says. “Invasive species are the most beautiful plants that I can imagine.” For Mancuso, “migration is one of the most important forces of nature. All living organisms migrate. We are the only species that is not allowed to, and this is completely unnatural.”

Although new generations of botanists are increasingly embracing plant neurobiology, Mancuso still has his detractors. Last summer, a group of eight plant scientists wrote in the journal Trends in Plant Science that Mancuso and his colleagues “have consistently glossed over the unique and remarkable degree of structural, organisational and functional complexity that the animal brain had to evolve before consciousness could emerge”. Mancuso says that almost all of these botanists are retired. “It’s an older generation of plant scientists that is completely against any notion of a plant as intelligent or behaving. For them, plants are kind of a semi-living organic machine.”

The notion that humans are the apex of life on Earth is one of the most dangerous ideas around, says Mancuso: “When you feel yourself better than all the other humans or other living organisms, you start to use them. This is exactly what we’ve been doing. We felt ourselves as outside nature.” The average lifespan of a species on Earth is between 2m and 5m years. “Homo sapiens have lived just 300,000 years,” he says – and already “we have been able to almost destroy our environment. From this point of view, how can we say that we are better organisms?”

Perhaps we should try – ahem – taking a leaf out of the plant kingdom’s book. Human societies and organisations are structured like our bodies – with a brain, or a top-level control centre, and various different organs governing specific functions. “We use this in our universities, our companies, even our class divisions,” says Mancuso. This structure enables us to move fast, physically and organisationally, but it also leaves us vulnerable. If a major organ fails, it could scupper everything, and top-down leadership rarely serves the whole.

Plants, by contrast, “are kind of horizontal, diffusive, decentralised organisations that are much more in line with modernity”. Take the internet, the ultimate decentralised root system. “Look at the ability of Wikipedia to produce a wonderful amount of good-quality information by using a decentralised, diffused organisation. I’m claiming that, by studying plant networks, we can find wonderful solutions for us,” Or take the ethos of cooperation. Plants, say Mancuso, “are masters of starting symbiotic relationships with other organisms: bacteria, mushrooms, insects, even us. Just look at the way they use us to be transported all around the world.” We may think we have the upper hand, but plants may beg to differ.

The Incredible Journey of Plants by Stefano Mancuso is published by Penguin Random House USA

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[nivek]

View: https://twitter.com/Craigweiler/status/1641815211425550337


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[Rick Hunter]

I do a bit of farming, and I take a very hands on approach to my plants. Kind of ironic though to treat something so lovingly for months and then dig it up and eat it. When we had cows I was very careful not to name any of them, can't be sending your pets to the slaughterhouse!

 

[nivek]

View: https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1756305690761613722


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[J Randall Murphy]

This is something I've believed for years and have come to know without doubt, not all the details of how and why, but I've mentioned before about my experiences with trees, they remember, and communicate to others...

Research Reveals Plants can Think, Choose & Remember

Interesting — but IMO also misleading. There is no consensus on how the concepts of thinking, choosing, and remembering should be interpreted, except within specific contexts, and those contexts are not universal. For example, is thinking the same as computing? Can a calculator think? Is acting on instinct or reflex the same as making a choice? Is remembering the same as a stimulus response? I think that humans tend to anthropomorphize a little too indiscriminately sometimes.

 

[nivek]

Scientists Film Plant 'Talking' to Its Neighbor, And The Video Is Incredible​

Imperceptible to us, plants are surrounded by a fine mist of airborne compounds that they use to communicate and protect themselves. Kind of like smells, these compounds repel hungry herbivores and warn neighboring plants of incoming assailants.

Scientists have known about these plant defenses since the 1980s, detecting them in over 80 plant species since then. More recently, a team of Japanese researchers deployed real-time imaging techniques to reveal how plants receive and respond to these aerial alarms.

This was a big gap in our understanding of plant chatter: We knew how plants send messages, but not how they receive them.

In the study, published last year, Yuri Aratani and Takuya Uemura, molecular biologists at Saitama University in Japan, and colleagues rigged up a pump to transfer compounds emitted by injured and insect-riddled plants onto their undamaged neighbors, and a fluorescence microscope to watch what happened.

Caterpillars (Spodoptera litura) were set upon leaves cut from tomato plants and Arabidopsis thaliana, a common weed in the mustard family, and the researchers imaged the responses of a second, intact, insect-free Arabidopsis plant to those danger cues.

These plants weren't any ordinary weeds: They had been genetically altered so their cells contained a biosensor that fluoresced green when an influx of calcium ions was detected. Calcium signaling is something human cells use to communicate too.

The team used a similar technique to measure calcium signals in a study last year of fluorescent Mimosa pudica plants, which quickly move their leaves in response to touch, to avoid predators. This time, the team visualized how plants responded to being bathed in volatile compounds, which plants release within seconds of wounding.

The experimental set-up to visualize calcium signaling in Arabidopsis leaves. (Aratani et al. Nature Communications, 2023)

It wasn't a natural set-up; The compounds were concentrated in a plastic bottle and pumped onto the recipient plant at a constant rate, but this allowed the researchers to analyze what compounds were in the pungent mix.

As you can see in the video above, the undamaged plants received the messages of their injured neighbors loud and clear, responding with bursts of calcium signaling that rippled across their outstretched leaves.

Analyzing the airborne compounds, the researchers found that two compounds called Z-3-HAL and E-2-HAL induced calcium signals in Arabidopsis. They also identified which cells are the first to respond to the danger cues by engineering Arabidopsis plants with fluorescent sensors exclusively in guard, mesophyll, or epidermal cells.

Guard cells are bean-shaped cells on plant surfaces that form stomata, small pores that open up to the atmosphere when plants 'breathe' in CO2. Mesophyll cells are the inner tissue of leaves, and epidermal cells are the outermost layer or skin of plant leaves.

When Arabidopsis plants were exposed to Z-3-HAL, guard cells generated calcium signals within a minute or so, after which mesophyll cells picked up the message. What's more, pre-treating plants with a phytohormone that shuts stomata significantly reduced calcium signaling, suggesting stomata act as the 'nostrils' of the plant.

"We have finally unveiled the intricate story of when, where, and how plants respond to airborne 'warning messages' from their threatened neighbors," Masatsugu Toyota, a molecular biologist at Saitama University in Japan and senior author of the study, explained when the study was published.

"This ethereal communication network, hidden from our view, plays a pivotal role in safeguarding neighboring plants from imminent threats in a timely manner."

The study has been published in Nature Communications.

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