In this chapter Lanaza explores whether plant life has a consciousness or not
He starts out the chapter by sharing with us the movie Avatar and that famous scene where the main actor Jake communicates with the Tree of Souls through a neural connection .
He admits that at first he was very skeptical of this idea pf plants having consciousness but then he seems to have had an experience observing a tree outside of his kitchen window, where he observed the tree as it shot out new palm fronds and reached for the sky and when it was injured it sent out new air roots looking for new soil to re root itself. This led him to change his perspective .When we think of time and consciousness we define this in our experience as humans , but what he says is that plants have sophisticated intercellular systems that facilitate a degree of spatial temporal consciousness
What he says is that Neurobiologists have discovered that plants also have a basic neural net and the capacity for perception . As in the example of how some plants know when ants are coming their way to steal their nectar and then a mechanism kicks in where they close up before they approach , and in some plants they will send out a blast of a scent and it will detract the insects from approaching it and even send out signals to nearby plants of the impending danger. This was coined as the “ priming its defense response” . This idea is not necessarily new . This concept has been around seen the 60 ‘s which gave rise to the field of science now called “plant neurobiology”. Researchers such as Michael Pollen have written books and articles about how plant science is pointing more to a high degree of botanical intelligence. Now he admits that not everyone agrees with this , because plants do not have a brain or neurons. But what Pollen says is plants have similar structures as us . They take in the sensory information, process it and then behave in an appropriate way in response and they do this without a brain.
So what we see then is that neurons are not necessary in order to have cell to cell communication. He quotes an article in the Scientific American in 2012 that was titled Do Plants Think? In which the authors claim that plants can see, feel, and smell and remember.And the most significant finding was that researchers found that plants do produce and are affected by neuroactive chemicals. And a significant one is the glutamate receptor which in humans is responsible for memory and learning. They found that plants also have this receptor.. Pollen and some other researchers claim that plants have all the human senses and also have additional ones.
So by now you may be thinking well what about experience and cognition, do they really have consciousness? In response to this he cited an experiment where researchers played a recording to plants of a caterpillars munching on leaves and what they found was that the plants began to secrete defensive chemicals. Now that is by listening to it alone. That is pretty amazing.
Now he even quoted some researchers who have said plants also have memory just like us.
So if you look at the concept of memory it involves
- Forming the memory
- Retaining the memory
- Recalling the memory
These researchers said plants also have memory. Now I know these are concepts that stretch our minds but they are definitely very interesting to sit and ponder and look at the science he presents here in this chapter to back it up.
Plants also feel even though they don’t have eyes and the mechanism for this is a substance called melanopin discovered in 1998 in the skin of frogs . What this revealed is that there is a primitive non visual photoreceptive system in mammals.
An interesting fact that I did not know was that this sensing light in plants is essential in the production of chlorophyl , which is a molecule that particularly likes “blue light and red light “ but has no use for the green wavelengths . This explains why leaves and grass are green. The plant rejects this particular light photon away and that’s why we see green leaves and grass.
In conclusion.:
He says plants may have a consciousness however in a different form from us .
Maria Jacques