{"id":202923,"date":"2025-01-01T12:44:09","date_gmt":"2025-01-01T18:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/the-mysteries-of-plant-intelligence"},"modified":"2025-01-01T12:44:09","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T18:44:09","slug":"the-mysteries-of-plant-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/the-mysteries-of-plant-intelligence","title":{"rendered":"The Mysteries of Plant \u2018Intelligence\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-mysteries-of-plant-intelligence2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists are debating whether concepts such as memory, consciousness, and communication can be applied beyond the animal kingdom, Zo\u00eb Schlanger wrote in our June 2024 issue.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cConsciousness was once seen as belonging solely to humans and a short list of nonhuman animals that clearly act with intention,\u201d Schlanger wrote in an article adapted from her book, \u201cThe Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYet seemingly everywhere researchers look, they are finding that there is more to the inner lives of animals than we ever thought possible. Scientists now talk regularly about animal cognition; they study the behaviors of individual animals, and occasionally ascribe personalities to them. Some scientists now posit that plants should likewise be considered intelligent.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNot so long ago, treading even lightly in this domain could upend a scientist\u2019s career,\u201d Schlanger continued. The popular 1973 book \u201cThe Secret Life of Plants\u201d included real science, but also featured wildly unscientific projection; many scientists were unable to reproduce its claims, Schlanger wrote, causing a decades-long avoidance of plant-behavior studies.<\/p>\n<p>A decade later, a paper by David Rhoades, a zoologist and chemist at the University of Washington, proposed that trees were communicating with one another to defend against a caterpillar infestation. Rhoades was ridiculed by peers; his discovery ended up buried, even as it opened new lines of inquiry. \u201cFour decades on, the idea that plants might communicate intentionally with one another remains a controversial concept in botany,\u201d Schlanger wrote. Definitions of communication are slippery; intentionality is even harder to show.<\/p>\n<p>The essential question of plant intelligence is \u201cHow does something without a brain coordinate a response to stimuli?\u201d Schlanger continued. \u201cHow does information about the world get translated into action that benefits the plant? How can the plant sense its world without a centralized place to parse that information?\u201d To learn more, she spoke with scientists studying plant agency, memory, and other avenues of research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists are debating whether concepts such as memory, consciousness, and communication can be applied beyond the animal kingdom, Zo\u00eb Schlanger wrote in our June 2024 issue. \u201cConsciousness was once seen as belonging solely to humans and a short list of nonhuman animals that clearly act with intention,\u201d Schlanger wrote in an article adapted from her [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202923","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\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}