Carmi Levy

Coming up, a scientist who says the humble houseplant might be able to count with no brain and no neurons, somehow still tracking things.

Are plants smarter than we think?

What if the plant in your living room isn't just sitting there minding its own business?

What if it's secretly counting things?

Stuff like sunrises, sunsets, events.

Well, a new study suggests plants may track numbers without a brain.

Does this mean plants are people?

I mean, I think so, but probably not.

However, they might be smarter than you'd

think smarter than they look i'm here with peter vishton a plant psychologist okay he's not a plant psychologist he's a professor of psychological sciences at william and mary peter welcome to the show thanks david it's great to be here a little bit of an unsettling question here because i'm kind of cruel to my plants in my house and i don't often water them enough but i'm hearing they might be able to count uh maybe i should be kinder to plants tell me about what plants might possibly be counting

Well, let's go over that evidence.

I'm talking about, what are the plants I have?

Maybe Dracaenas, I think, is the one.

But you didn't look at those.

You looked at a different kind of plant.

What makes this Mimosa pudica plant such a curious candidate to study?

And what is it doing that might resemble memory?

But how do you differentiate between just responding to light and actually tracking events?

Yeah.

It almost forces us to rethink what we mean by intelligence and how intelligence emerges.