Ep. 37 – Monica Gagliano on plant intelligence and human imagination

Are plants intelligent? Can they think and feel? Can they communicate, learn, and solve problems? Throughout history, most Western philosophers and scientists answered these questions with a resounding “no.” Plants, despite having evolved so successfully that they account for about 80 percent of the world’s biomass, have long been treated as inanimate, silent, and unaware. In ancient Greece, Aristotle situated them below animals and just above minerals on his hierarchy of the perfection of living things. In this primitive yet still dominant view, plants are considered passive objects that form the backdrop to our active lives, rather than highly sensitive organisms with intelligence and agency of their own. 

 For centuries, indigenous healers and shamans around the world have learned from listening to plants. After conversing with plants in dreams and visions during a visit to the Peruvian rainforest, Dr. Monica Gagliano returned to her university inspired and began a series of groundbreaking and highly imaginative experiments on plant communication. “The plants themselves are the teacher,” she says. (Photo courtesy of North Atlantic Books)

But on the cutting edge of modern science, this orthodoxy is being questioned by scientists — including our guest Dr. Monica Gagliano — who think that plants are radically more sophisticated and sensitive than we’ve been giving them credit for. These plant researchers are willing to imagine the possibility that plants have senses like ours: the ability to hear, smell, see, taste, and feel; capabilities like learning, memory, and social networks; as well as entirely distinct ways of interacting with the world, such as detecting and responding to vibrations, electromagnetic fields, and chemical signals. Thanks to this growing body of work, we now know, for example, that some plants can hear the sounds of animal pollinators and react by sweetening their nectar; that plants can send airborne, chemical messages to warn each other of dangerous pests; and that plants can exchange carbon and signals through the fungal “wood wide web” connecting their roots. This new understanding of plants as active, information-processing organisms with complex communication strategies has led to the exciting and controversial field of “plant cognition.” 

Dr. Monica Gagliano is an evolutionary ecologist whose daring and imaginative research has expanded our perception of plants and animals. Persevering against the scientific establishment, she pioneered the field of “plant bioacoustics,” the study of sounds produced by and affecting plants. The results of her groundbreaking experiments suggest that plants may possess intelligence, memory and learning, via mechanisms that differ from our own. Gagliano is a research associate professor at the University of Western Australia, and is the author of Thus Spoke the Plant. Her work has been featured by Michael Pollan in The New Yorker and on the RadioLab episode, “Smarty Plants.” She is currently based at the University of Sydney.

The plants used in Gagliano’s experiments, such as pea seedlings, rescued the scientist in her. “I was prepared to do something else,” she tells us, “but the plants were like, ‘Oh, not so fast! We’ve got some work for you. And you can take a sample, you can take a leaf, you can take whatever you need and that doesn’t kill us. So why don’t you work with us.'”
Mimosa pudica, one of the species featured in Gagliano’s plant cognition experiments, famously folds up its leaves and droops in reaction to touch. Over the centuries, Mimosa pudica has captivated naturalists, leading to nicknames including the “sensitive plant,” the “modest plant,” the “puzzling plant,” and the “bashful plant.” “Personally, I have come to think of her as the ‘disobedient plant’ – one who has persisted in her defiant act of not conforming to our expectations of what it means to be a plant and, more generally, living,” writes Gagliano.
“It should be clear that unlearning distinctions doesn’t mean not seeing them; it doesn’t mean that differences are not useful,” Gagliano writes in Thus Spoke the Plant. “What it does mean is that we stop being obsessed with them to the point that we cannot see anything beyond them and thus miss the incredible richness of qualities and characters of both the human and the nonhuman world. It is through unlearning that we can take those first steps away from objectifying plants and realize that recognizing their subjectivity and inherent worth and dignity does not diminish our own but rather enriches it.”

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