Friday 26 August 2022

Plants may be concious

 

Image courtesy of  Sortino, 

Joel Kontinen 

Trees have made headlines in recent years. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, as they are full of self-assembling solar panels.

Some time ago we heard that trees 
sleep at night.

Then we got to know that 
trees communicate with other trees

it seems that the trees senses pertains to all plants so that they also can have senses. For instance, if one ,”touches Mimosa pudica plant, also called the touch-me-not, folds its leaves when they are touched. Fewer know that if you put one into a sealed chamber with a dose of anaesthetic, it will eventually stop doing this, as though it has been knocked out or put to sleep.

Paco Calvo at the University of Murcia in Spain has put plans to seep several times in front of audiences. It never fails to surprise onlookers, prompting them to ask the very questions he himself is trying to answer. If plants can be “put to sleep”, does this mean they exist in a state of awareness that is shut off by anaesthetics? Might we consider this state to be a kind of sentience, a subjective internal experience? If so, do plants have some form of consciousness? These are controversial ideas, but Calvo and a small group of plant behaviour researchers take them seriously. Their findings so far, though tentative, could disrupt our understanding of consciousness – not to mention our attitudes towards plants,"


Source:    

 Lawrence, Natali, 2022. 2022. The radical new experiments that hint at plant consciousness. New Scientist 24 August