Do Plants Think?
Though they seem to lack arithmetic, plants can multiply and divide. They don’t know each other’s names, but they seek out the sun, send roots to find water, and speak the ultraviolet language of the birds and the bees.
Such innocent anthropomorphisms have always elicited the sneers of science teachers – the same teachers who told us that the squirrels who outsmart them every day have no intelligence – but now they have some tall explaining to do.
New research at the Warsaw Institute of Life Sciences shows that plants are able to remember and react to information contained in light –- information such as “What day is this?” Every day, every week in the year has a different balance of light qualities – color, strength, angle, etc. – which to a plant is a set of signals about the turning seasons, the likely weather, the amounts of moisture and nutrients to expect, thus the diseases that its immune system needs to resist.
And when a photon of light stimulates a chemical reaction in even one leaf cell, a cascade of signals carries the news throughout the plant via “bundle sheath cells” – a plant’s equivalent of a mammal’s neurons.
True, a rutabaga has no brain – no captain’s bridge with readouts from the engine room and a chain of command to make decisions and issue orders. But then, neither do we. Researchers have never discovered the nerve center with the sign on the door announcing, “Me.” Just networks networking with other networks of neurons and dendrites, some of them specialized but no one in charge.
So do plants think?
They don’t think about that. They’re too busy for words.