One of the most controversial aspects of the work of plant neuroscientist Stefano Mancuso is the concept of plant consciousness. Last summer, a team of eight plant scientists wrote in Trends in Plant Science that Mancuso and his colleagues “have been ignoring the unique and remarkable degree of structure, organization, and organization that animal brains must develop before consciousness can arise. Functional Complexity.”
Trees cannot think, because they lack brains. However, electrical signals travel throughout a tree, and the tree is able to detect aspects of its environment and alter its cellular behavior on a microscopic level in response. In this sense, trees have something similar to a diffuse nervous system.
In a February article for Massive Science titled “Plants are not conscious, whether you can reassure them or not,” he strongly disagreed with the idea that plants can be conscious or sentient.
Behavioral experiments on plants by evolutionary ecologist Monica Galliano show that although plants do not have a central nervous system or brain, they behave like sentient beings. Polish plant biologists believe that plants can use an internal communication system that acts like the central nervous system of animals. The researchers found that plants are highly aware of their environment and each other and can communicate their feelings.
Plants Can Detect Disturbances in Their Environment
Although plants may appear passive in their environment, they can sense their environment, make decisions and respond to threats to a certain extent. For example, in addition to hearing, taste, they can also sense gravity, the presence of water, and even sense obstacles in the roots of water before it even touches it. Trees can sense different types of light, assess chemicals in the air, including those emitted by other plants, differentiate between different types of contact with their leaves, and determine gravity.
Plants may not recognize ladder killers, but trees share their nutrients and water through underground networks of fungi through which they can send chemical signals to other trees that warn them of danger. When a tree is attacked by insects, we can measure the electrical signal that travels through the bark and roots, and from there into a network of fungi underground, warning nearby trees of danger.
To communicate over the web, trees emit slow pulses of chemical, hormonal and electrical signals that scientists are only just beginning to decipher. This is speculative, but we have seen that plants can use complex signaling networks to gather and communicate information.
Trees Release Electrical Signals When Distressed
It has long been known that electrical signals very similar to the information-carrying signals in nerve cells can also be observed in plants. Maybe plants can use neural-type signals like animals do when they need them, but often what they do doesn’t seem obvious to us.
They don’t have nerve cells like humans do, but they do have a system that sends electrical signals and even produces neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals that the human brain uses to send signals. Scientists don’t want to say that plants respond to pain.
Trees don’t have a nervous system, but they can still sense what’s going on and feel something like pain. They remember that spring is coming, and when it comes, they will be ready to feel the weather and make responsive decisions. We know that these old trees change their behavior for the benefit of their relatives. Probably the best evidence we have – and keep in mind that scientists have been observing humans and animals for much longer than plants – is the recognition of relatives among trees and seedlings that are their relatives.
Trees Can Detect Root Variations
Research by Professor Massimo Maffei from the University of Turin has shown that trees can distinguish the roots of their own species from those of other plants, and even their relationship to other trees. If plants could “learn” and “remember,” as Galliano believed, humans would have misunderstood plants and themselves throughout history.
We can also say that a tree can learn and remember drought throughout its life and act on this memory to be more careful when using water. Different plants have different abilities to divide, but the memory is contained in the tree rings.
Some may doubt that plants made up of roots, stems, and leaves can be sentient or conscious. Can a plant be smart? A Some plant scientists insist that they are A because they can perceive, learn, remember, and even respond in ways that would be familiar to humans. Let’s say plants are the lowest caste, outcasts, because they don’t have brains, they don’t move, they don’t have big brown eyes.
Philosophical Ponderings on the Sentience of Trees
Perhaps we create these artificial barriers between man and animal, between animals and plants, in order to use them indiscriminately and without care, regardless of the suffering we subject them to. We are prisoners of our own Western science; Indigenous peoples have known for a long time that plants can communicate with each other. Applying science to this raises our awareness that these plants communicate in exactly the same way as we do.
“Mancuso is like a laboratory studying how plants can solve problems, how they remember, how they communicate, how they have a social life, and the like.” Because plant physiologists have certain tools and skills, and behavioral ecologists can see plants and their behavior, and together we can really prove it convincingly.
Dr. Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver has found that trees can also send out alarms using chemical signals and electrical impulses through fungal networks that extend under the soil between sets of roots – networks known as tree webs.