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.”
“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.
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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?”
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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.”
“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.
[---]
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?”
- More Here
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