We see them every day, we love them, we appreciate them, we are proud of them, we admire them, we use them. And we arrogantly think that we know everything about them: when to sow, dive, what and when to feed, weed, remove excess shoots. We believe that it is in our power to decide their fate.
Most of them – almost 98 % of the total living mass on Earth, among them – the largest and oldest living creatures on our planet. They feel, see, hear, move, communicate, recognize enemies and friends, make deals, place bets, transmit and receive messages, manipulate others, sympathize, warn relatives of danger, and think. Only their intelligence is difficult to explain from a human point of view. So we just consider ourselves reasonable.
They are plants
Humans are inherently anthropocentric. And even with a chauvinistic bias. While we recognize the miracle of Creation behind God, we believe that He created us as the crown of Creation in his own image. We have arranged all life on the planet in a hierarchy in which we consider ourselves the measure of everyone and everything: we compare the brains of animals with the brains of humans, trying to prove that we are smarter.
And we have all denied the plants intelligence, because we have not found that they have this authority. That is, we are talking about a person who has received severe brain damage and is not capable of spontaneous mental activity, that he has fallen into a vegetative state, that is, he has become a “vegetable”.
Vegetarians, for ethical reasons, refuse to eat meat, but they are happy to eat plants. Even Noah in the Old Testament took “every creature in pairs” into his ark, but did not mention the plants.
Plant consciousness
One of the first to suggest that plants are intelligent, Charles Darwin: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the spine, endowed with the ability to direct the movements of neighboring parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals… perceiving the impressions of the senses and giving direction to various movements.”
Professor of the University of Florence neuroscientist Stefano Mancuso went further, because he, unlike the great English naturalist, knows modern computers and the Internet.
He found that in a small group of cells located at the tips of roots and shoots, between the cells of the apical meristem and the cells of the stretch zone, there are changes in the polarization of the cell membrane, similar to the potential difference of the neuronal membranes of the brain.
The number of these cells is negligible, but the root system of even a small plant can have millions of root tips, which means hundreds of millions of cells like neurons. Which is already quite a full-fledged “thinking” body, comparable to the brain of the average mammal. The” brain ” of a plant is like the Internet: just as computers connected to a network can perform complex calculations that are inaccessible to one of the most powerful computers, so cells from the tips of the roots and shoots of a single plant determine its “intelligence”.
Each plant is like the Internet, and in turn, individual plants are connected to larger networks with other plants – because scientists have already been able to prove that plants can transmit information to each other through the root system. Perhaps, given the number of plants, we are dealing with the greatest intelligence, the power of which is so great that plants simply do not consider it necessary to interrupt our self-admiration and admiration for their own intelligence.
Stefano Mancuso is the director of the unique International Laboratory of Plant Neuroscience in Florence and founded the International Society for Behavior and Signal Transmission among Plants. He also wrote the book “Diamond Green, Plant Consciousness”, in which he talks about the side of plant life that we have not noticed for a long time.
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