Thread by @newscientist

Are plants conscious?
Radical new experiments hint at sentience and cognition throughout the botanical kingdom, which may provoke a rethink of our understanding of the human mind
newscientist.com/article/mg2553… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

You’ve probably seen the way a Mimosa pudica plant, also called the touch-me-not, folds its leaves when they are touched

But you may not have heard that if you put one into a sealed chamber with a dose of anaesthetic, it will eventually stop reacting to touch, as though it has been knocked out or put to sleep

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?

The idea that plants have consciousness is controversial, but Paco Calvo at @UMU in Spain and a small group of plant behaviour researchers take it seriously

People have traditionally assumed plants don’t do very much. But more recently, we’ve found that they can react to more aspects of their environments than we can and even maintain bustling social lives by communicating with each other

Some of these capabilities are evolved stock responses to particular situations – simple, hardwired reactions. Other behaviours, though, might be underpinned by some form of cognition

Plants don’t have brains, but they produce a lot of electrical activity.
Electrical signalling hints at a level of sentience throughout the whole tree of life, says Paco Calvo

Going further, Calvo believes that the flexible way in which plants grow, indicates that they have unique, subjective experiences. This, together with the electrical signalling, he says, hints that plants possess something that might be thought of as consciousness

🌱Do you think plants are conscious? 🌱

Exploring plant consciousness could help us probe and understand it in the human brain, and question whether humans are as special as we like to think

To learn more, read @the_manticore_‘s full feature as part of #consciousness week at New Scientist: newscientist.com/article/mg2553…