{"id":144680,"date":"2022-08-23T23:24:29","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T04:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/planta-sapiens"},"modified":"2022-08-23T23:24:29","modified_gmt":"2022-08-24T04:24:29","slug":"planta-sapiens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/planta-sapiens","title":{"rendered":"Planta Sapiens"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/planta-sapiens2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Darwin has clearly been a guiding presence in Calvo\u2019s attempt to open up a new frontier in science: \u201cHe learned to think differently and clearly outside the frameworks in which most of his contemporaries happily confined themselves.\u201d The result of his confinement with the cucumbers was a 118-page monograph on The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants. Darwin realised before anyone else that these movements were in fact \u201cbehaviour\u201d, comparable to that of animals. And observing behaviour is the route to understanding intelligence. In plants, it reveals a range of faculties \u201cfrom learning and memory to competitive, risk-sensitive behaviours, and even numerical abilities\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>In the course of his book, Calvo describes many experiments that reveal plants\u2019 remarkable range, including the way they communicate with others nearby using \u201cchemical talk\u201d, a language encoded in about 1,700 volatile organic compounds. He also shows how, like animals, they can be anaesthetised. In lectures, he places a Venus flytrap under a glass bell jar with a cotton pad soaked in anaesthetic. After an hour the plant no longer responds to touch by closing its traps. Tests show the plant\u2019s electrical activity has stopped. It is effectively asleep, just as a cat would be. He also notes that the process of germination in seeds can be halted under anaesthetic. If plants can be put to sleep, does that imply they also have a waking state? Calvo thinks it does, for he argues that plants are not just \u201cphotosynthetic machines\u201d and that it\u2019s quite possible that they have an individual experience of the world: \u201cThey may be <em>aware<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Other studies show that some plants retain a memory of where the sun will rise, in order to turn their leaves towards the first rays. They store this knowledge \u2013 an internal model of what the sun is going to do \u2013 for several days, even when kept in total darkness. The conclusion must be that they constantly collect information, processing and retaining it in order to \u201cmake predictions, learn, and even plan ahead\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Darwin has clearly been a guiding presence in Calvo\u2019s attempt to open up a new frontier in science: \u201cHe learned to think differently and clearly outside the frameworks in which most of his contemporaries happily confined themselves.\u201d The result of his confinement with the cucumbers was a 118-page monograph on The Movements and Habits of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}