Peter M. Vishton

I don't know if your plants feel emotions towards you.

Nothing about any of the research that we're doing suggests they're conscious or aware.

I think it's hard to really nail down from a scientific perspective whether humans are conscious or aware.

We know they behave in a way that suggests they're conscious and aware.

Plants do behave in a way that suggests that they enumerate things.

I don't think they know numbers.

In fact, all we've done, if they can keep track of three events, they'd be able to succeed in our tasks.

But we have some decent evidence that plants enumerate the sequences of events that we present to them.

The Mimosa pudica.

So I have spent most of my career as a psychologist studying humans.

I've been really interested in infant development.

They can't talk either, kind of like plants.

But by observing their behaviors, you can infer the sorts of things that they do and don't know about the world around them.

During COVID, actually, is where a lot of this started.

We couldn't study infants.

There, near as I can tell, all the in-person research on human development ground to a halt there for a while.

Someone sent me a paper by a researcher named Monica Gagliano from Australia, where she did what looked very much like a study of infants, only the participants were these mimosa pudica plants.

And if they can do some of the things in terms of learning and memory that a human infant can do,

I found that idea fascinating because plants don't have neurons.

We assume that things like learning and memory in humans, that's all driven by stuff between your ears, by your nervous system.