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