t that some very recent research hints that plants may respond to sounds. Not to music mind you, which is irrelevant for a plant, but to certain vibrations. It will be very interesting to see how this pans out.
4. Do plants communicate with each other?
At a basic level, yes. But I guess it centers around how you define communication. There is no doubt that plants respond to cues from other plants. For example, if a maple tree is attacked by bugs, it releases a pheromone into the air that is picked up by the neighboring trees. This induces the receiving trees to start making chemicals that will help it fight off the impending bug attack. So on the face of it, this is definitely communication.
But I think we also have to ask the question of intent (if we can even use that word when describing plants, but humor me while I anthropomorphize). Are the trees communicating, meaning is that attacked tree warning its surrounding ones? Or could it be more subtle? Maybe it makes more sense that the attacked branch is communicating to the other branches of the same tree in an effort for self survival, while the neighboring trees, well theyâre just eavesdropping and benefiting from the signal.
There are also other examples of this type of communication. For example a very recent study showed that plants also communicate through signals passed from root to root. In this case the “talkingâ plant had been stressed by drought, and it “toldâ its neighboring plants to prepare for a lack of water. We know the signal went through the roots because this never happened if the two plants were simply in neighboring pots. They had to have neighboring roots.
5. Do plants have a memory?
Plants definitely have several different forms of memory, just like people do. They have short term memory, immune memory and even transgenerational memory! I know this is a hard concept to grasp for some people, but if memory entails forming the memory (encoding information), retaining the memory (storing information), and recalling the memory (retrieving information), then plants definitely remember.
For example a Venus Fly Trap needs to have two of the hairs on its leaves touched by a bug in order to shut, so it remembers that the first one has been touched. But this only lasts about 20 seconds, and then it forgets. Wheat seedlings remember that theyâve gone through winter before they start to flower and make seeds. And some stressed plants give rise to progeny that are more resistant to the same stress, a type of transgenerational memory thatâs also been recently shown also in animals.
While the short term memory in the venus fly trap is electricity-based, much like neural activity, the longer term memories are based in epigenetics â changes in gene activity that donât require alterations in the DNA code, as mutations do, which are still passed down from parent to offspring.
6. Would you say, then, that plants “thinkâ?
No I wouldnât, but maybe thatâs where Iâm still limited in my own thinking! To me thinking and information processing are two different constructs. I have to be careful here since this is really bordering on the philosophical, but I think purposeful thinking necessitates a highly developed brain and autonoetic, or at least noetic, consciousness. Plants exhibit elements of anoetic consciousness which doesnât include, in my understanding, the ability to think. Just as a plant canât suffer subjective pain in the absence of a brain, I also donât think that it thinks.
7. Do you see any analogy between what plants do and what the human brain does? Can there be a neuroscience of plants, minus the neurons?
First off, and at the risk of offending some of my closest friends, I think the term plant neurobiology is as ridiculous as say, human floral biology. Plants do not have neuron just as humans donât have flowers!
But you donât need neurons in order to have cell to cell communication and information storage and processing. Even in animals, not all information is processed or stored only in the brain. The brain is dominant in higher-order processing in more