Can You Outthink a Plant? Can a Human Think and React Faster than a Plant?
Plant Brains Remember and Forget
An international research team has uncovered the answer to a decades-old question - how do plants forget? Like humans, plants have memories too, although they do it differently. For example, many plants sense and remember prolonged cold during winter to ensure that they flower in spring. This "epigenetic memory" occurs by modifying specialized proteins called histones, which are important for packaging and indexing DNA in the cell.
One such histone modification called H3K27me3 marks genes that are turned off. In the case of flowering, cold conditions cause H3K27me3 to accumulate at genes that control flowering. Previous work has shown how H3K27me3 is faithfully transmitted from cell to cell so that in spring, plants remember that winter is over, allowing them to flower at the right time. Once they've flowered and made seeds, the seeds need to forget this ‘memory' of the cold so that they do not flower too soon when winter comes around again. Since H3K27me3 is faithfully copied from cell to cell, how do plants go about forgetting this memory in seeds?
Plants Can Count - Short Term Memory & Counting
The carnivorous Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) can count to five: A team led by biophysicist Rainer Hedrich, professor at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, proved this in 2016. This finding received worldwide attention in science and the media. In 2019, the JMU plant scientist was awarded the Koselleck Research Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) worth 1.5 million euros – and with it the opportunity to find out how the carnivorous plant counts. This is now shown by a Japanese research team, led by the developmental biologist Professor Mitsuyasu Hasebe from the University of Okazaki, and Rainer Hedrich's team in the journal Nature Plants.
If a prey touches one of the sensory hairs on the inner trap side of Dionaea, the mechanical stimulus is converted into an electrical signal. This so-called action potential spreads over the entire trap. As a reaction to this, nothing happens at first. But when within 30 seconds a second action potential electrically excites the trap, it snaps shut. If, on the other hand, the second stimulus takes longer, the first action potential is erased from the short-term memory of the Venus flytrap.
The Roots of a Plants True Brain
One important mistake that people usually make, is thinking that plants are just sessile organisms that are green and produce the oxygen we breath. They are right in part, plants do produce oxygen through photosynthesis. However, they also do grow constantly, breath, move and “talk” to each other. How can plants be able to do all these things? The answer is simple, and just like us, they have a brain. A plant with a brain you might ask? How is that possible? The answer is quite simple, plants indeed do have brains, just not in the shape that first comes to mind. The plant’s “brain” is their roots.
Plants Have IQ Intelligence
But researchers, says Pollan, have played a recording of a caterpillar munching on a leaf to plants — and the plants react. They begin to secrete defensive chemicals — even though the plant isn't really threatened, Pollan says. "It is somehow hearing what is, to it, a terrifying sound of a caterpillar munching on its leaves."
Pollan says plants have all the same senses as humans, and then some. In addition to hearing, taste, for example, they can sense gravity, the presence of water, or even feel that an obstruction is in the way of its roots, before coming into contact with it. Plant roots will shift direction, he says, to avoid obstacles. So what about pain? Do plants feel? Pollan says they do respond to anesthetics. "You can put a plant out with a human anesthetic. ... And not only that, plants produce their own compounds that are anesthetic to us."
Plants have Consciousness, Feelings, Pain and
Human Level Intelligence!
Depth analysis of plant consciousness since the turn of the (new) millennium is finding that their brain capacity is much larger than previously supposed, that their neural systems are highly developed—in many instances as much as that of humans, and that they make and utilize neurotransmitters identical to our own. It is beginning to seem that plants are highly intelligent, feeling beings—perhaps as much or even more so than humans in some instances. (They can even perform sophisticated mathematical computations and make future plans based on extrapolations of current conditions. The mayapple, for instance, plans its growth two years in advance based on weather patterns.)
Plant Cognition Gnosophysiology - I Think Therefore I Am
Plants have cognition: the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. Plant cognition or plant gnosophysiology is the study of the mental capacities of plants. It explores the idea that plants are capable of responding to and learning from stimuli in their surroundings in order to choose and make decisions that are most appropriate to ensure survival. Over recent years, experimental evidence for the cognitive nature of plants has grown rapidly and has revealed the extent to which plants can use senses and cognition to respond to their environments. Some researchers claim that plants process information in similar ways as animal nervous systems.