Scientific Evidence Demonstrating the Cognitive Abilities, Emotional Responses, Sensory Perception, and More of Plants

Recent scientific findings confirm that plants possess intelligence and consciousness. They are able to sense, feel, and even communicate with their neighbors. Plants are also capable of mounting a defense when under siege, and they may even retain memory. The notion that plants possess intelligence has been explored by many notable individuals throughout history, including Goethe, Luther Burbank, George Washington Carver, Masanobu Fukuoka, Jagadis Bose, and Nobel Prize-winner Barbara McClintock. In fact, plants are highly conscious and intelligent beings, and they do have a brain, albeit not in the way that we traditionally think of it.

Recent research indicates that plants’ brain capacity is larger than previously believed, and their neural systems are highly developed, sometimes as much as that of humans. Furthermore, plants produce and utilize neurotransmitters similar to those found in humans. It appears that plants are highly intelligent, feeling beings, and they may even be more intelligent than humans in some ways. For example, some plants can perform complex mathematical computations and plan their growth based on weather patterns up to two years in advance, among other remarkable abilities.

There is a growing body of research across various fields that recognizes intelligence as an intrinsic aspect of all self-organized systems. This understanding challenges the notion of “brain chauvinism” and acknowledges that sophisticated neural networks are characteristic of life. Cyberneticist Kevin Warwick points out that comparisons of intelligence are often biased and subjective, as they are based on characteristics that humans deem important. Rationalists who have long rejected the concept of plant intelligence and consciousness are themselves limited by their subjective biases, and tend to find the world lacking when it does not conform to their preconceived notions. This is especially true when dealing with organisms that appear to lack a brain, such as bacteria, viruses, and plants.

The common belief that plants are passive and unconscious entities solely focused on photosynthetic accumulation is an outdated paradigm. Researchers such as Baluska et al. highlight the fact that plants are dynamic and sensitive organisms that actively and competitively forage for resources, process information, and communicate with their environment, including other living systems. This new understanding recognizes plants as conscious and intelligent beings with complex communication systems, including feelings and perception of pain, on a timescale much longer than that of animals.

The latest perspective is that plants are highly dynamic and sensitive organisms that actively and competitively forage for limited resources above and below ground. They accurately compute their circumstances and use sophisticated cost-benefit analysis, taking defined actions to mitigate and control diffuse environmental conditions. Plants possess a refined recognition of self and non-self, leading to territorial behavior. This view considers plants as conscious, information-processing organisms with complex communication, including feelings and perception of pain. Plants behave with intelligence and sophistication, similar to animals, but their potential is often hidden as it operates on much longer time scales. Due to their lifestyle, plants ahve developed a robust communication, signaling, and information processing system, and interact with a variety of other living systems.

Plants sense and monitor their internal and external worlds for informational or functional shifts, and they choose the optimum response from numerous alternatives, rejecting other potential responses. According to Trewavas, these conscious plant responses are highly intelligent and involve complex computation to fashion the optimal fitness response in the face of an almost infinite number of different environments that wihld plants encounter.

Plants like sundew are incredibly sensitive to touch, able to detect a single strand of hair weighing less than one microgram and respond accordingly. However, what’s truly remarkable is their ability to discern what is touching them and make sense of their environment. Despite being thought of as passive beings, plants have a highly developed form of mechanosensitivity that functions much like our own sense of touch. They analyze their environment, determine it’s meaning, and craft a response, often involviong rapid changes in genetics and physical form. This is all evidence of their sentience and communication with one another, as well as their capacity for pain and future planning. Despite not looking like our brains, plants possess a highly sophisticated neural system that can be considered a form of brain, challenging the idea of ”brain chauvinism”.

The plant brain

It is a common misconception to view plants, such as trees, as having a head and feet, with the head being the tree’s canopy and the feet being it’s root system. However, recent research has shown that this orientation is inaccurate.

In conscious and complex organisms, like humans and most animals, the head, or anterior pole, is responsible for processing information, while the posterior pole deals with sexual reproduction and wase excretion. Therefore, from this perspective, plants live with their heads in the soil and their posterior ends in the air.

When a plant cutting is transplanted to a new location, it’s highly developed neural system, which analyzes and senses it’s surroundings, adapts and alters the shape and structure of its neural network and physical form. This allows it to better fit into it’s new environment. In essence, plants possess a conscious root brain that functions similarly to our own, processing incoming data and generating sophisticated responses. Furthermore, the plant brain is highly adaptable, molding itself to fit the environment in which it grows.

The root apex, a unique component of plant roots, acts as a combination of a sensitive finger, sensory organ, and brain neuron. Each root hair, rootlet and root section has an apex, and a single rye plant, for instance, contains over 13 million rootlets, with a combined length of 680 miles, and more than 14 billion root hairs spanning a length of 6,600 miles. Every root apex serves as a neuronal organ within the root system, with plants possessing a considerable number of neurons, rivaling even the human brain in some cases. In contrast, the human brain has about 86 biliion neurons, with only around 16 billion in the cerebral cortex. When considering the interconnected network of plant roots and mycorrhizal mycelia in any given ecosystem, it becomes apparent that the neural network of plants is much larger than any individual human brain. Given this information it is puzzling that some still question wheter plants possess consiousness or exhibit intelligence.

Plants do not have a specific organ, like the brain, to house their neuronal system. Instead they use the soil as the stratum for their neural net, which consists of numerous synchronized root apices acting as a whole self-organized system, much like neurons in our brains. While our brain matter is the soil that contains the neural nets, allowing their root system to continue to expand outward as long as the plant grows. The leaf canopy also acts as synchronized, self-organized perceptual organ, highly attuned to electromagnetic fields, which can be considered a subcortical portion of the plant brain.

Plants utilize virtually the same neurotransmitters as humans, including glutamate and GABA, acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, melatonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, levodopa, indole-3-acetic acid, 5-hydroxyindole acetic acid, testosterone, and estradiol among others. They also use their plant-specific neurotransmitter, auxin, which is synthesized from tryptophan, much like serotonin. These neuroactive compounds are used for communication within the plant organism and to enhance brain function, just as they are in humans.

The existence of the same chemical messengers in human and plant neural systems suggests that the effects of certain substances, such as porhine, cocaine, and alcohol, on our neural nets can also affect plant consciousness. In the early 1900’s, Jagadis Bose conducted experiments treating plants with various chemicals to observe their reactions. For instance, he covered mature trees with a tent and administered chloroform, which anesthetized the plants and reduced their pain perception. Similarly, morphine reduced plant pain perception and pulse, while excessive dosages led to death, but administration of atropine revived them, as it would in humans. Bose also found that plants could get druk from alcohol, inducing a state of high excitation initially, followed by depression and eventual unconsciousness with excessive intake, similar to the effects on humans. Thus, the plant’s nervous system and consciousness appear to respond to chemicals similarly to humans.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the same neurochemicals found in humans have been used by all life forms on earth for millions of years. Plants have been using these chemicals to feel, perceive, and sense pain long before humans existed. The vascular strands that give plants their structure also act as the peripheral nervous system, carrying neurotransmitters to the periphery, similar to how it works in our bodies. The root system engages in detailed analysis of the environment and communicates with the rest of the plant via neurotransmitters, while the leaf canopy takes in information from the exterior world for analysis by the root brain system. The neuronal plant cells in the root apex are in the transition zone and free to focus on acquiring, processing, and storing information, which means memory. Intelligent plants can memorize stressful environmental experiences and use that information to make decisions about future activities. This demonstrates the sophisticated plant intelligence.

The social communication of plants

Plant’s roots exhibit a remarkable level of concsciousness and self-awareness, actively engaging in complex interactions with a variety of living organisms. They form symbiotic relationshops with bacteria and fungi and are capable of sophisticated communication with other plants.

Bacteria colonize the roots and produce nitrogen nodules, which the plant can then use as a nitrogen source, while the bacteria gain nutrients they need to survive. Roots also form intimate associations with fungal mycelia, resulting in a sophisticated root/fungus network that can extend for miles. This mycelial/plant root system connects all the plants in a given eco-system giving rise to a self-organized neural network where plant-to-plant communication is both abundant and robust. Each ecosystem has a unique identity reflecting the mass plant consciousness at work.

Within self-organized ecoranges, plants communicate with each other using chemical and auditory signals through the mycelial network that connects them. If a plant detects that another in the network is ill, it can generate unique compounds that are sent through the network to aid in healing. These medicinal compounds have been used by plants for millennia to heal themselves, other plants in the ecorange, and the insects and animals that inhabit it. This kind of conscious plant cooperation leads to a more adaptable ecorange, as opposed to constant competition and fighting between organisms. The idea that nature is a constant struggle for survival is a fallacy, as life-forms also help each other throughout their lifetimes. The difference is that plants are conscious and intelligent beings.

Ecoranges facilitate the exchange of information through complex chemical communication between plants via volatile compounds that travel through the air, soil, and mycelial network. Each plant entity generates these intelligent interactions and responds accordingly, exhibiting self-awareness and engaging in social activities similar to bacteria. Like humans, plants display a range of complex behaviors such as language, sentience, intelligence, creating cities, group cooperation, adapting to their environment, protecting offspring, and transmitting species memory. Additionally, plants have the capacity for intelligent tool-making through the creation of chemicals designed to produce specific environmental effects.

Mature plants intentionally emit volatiles containing information about chemical responses to predation to younger plants. For instance, when a spider mite feeds on a bean plant, the plant can identify the specific type of mite through its saliva and generate a tailored pheromone that is released into the air through its leaf stomata. This pheromone attracts the exact predator that feeds on that particular spider mite. This acquired knowledge is stored as cultural learning by older plants, which is passed down to younger generations. Cultural learning is prevalent throughout the Gaian system, as evidenced by the teaching of termite collection techniques to young chimpanzees.

The world comprises a series of nested self-organized systems, each highly conscious and intelligent, nested within larger systems, culminating in Earth, a living, self-organized biological entity known as Gaia. Stephen Harrod Buhner, the author of numerous works on herbal medicine, emerging diseases, ecosystems, and Gaian dynamics, speaks internationally on these subjects, including musical/sound patterns in plant and ecosystem functioning.

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