Peter M. Vishton

But it might be that non-neuronal cells, maybe not just in plants, maybe even in humans as well, participate in those psychological processes.

So we're trying to open up this new channel of learning and characterize what it can and can't do.

So the thing the Mimosa pudica plant is most famous for, it's sometimes called the shy plant or the touch-me-not plant.

It has these green fern-like leaves, but if you touch them, they close up.

It's commonly thought of as a defense mechanism.

If there's something walking around eating the plants and they close their leaves, they're less likely to be noticed.

They also have these tiny little thorns on the tips of the leaves.

And if they're all

aimed in the same direction, it kind of hurts if you grab them.

It's good for helping them not get eaten, but it's in their interest to open up their leaves again because they can't photosynthesize very well with closed leaves.

That said, that's not the behavior of these plants that we study.

We were interested in, we were growing a bunch of them for an experiment that is a longer story that we could get into later.

But while we were growing them, we thought, let's see if we can teach them something.

We presented them with a, they grew in a tent that if the lights are out in the tent, it's very dark in there.

We would give them lights for half of the day.

The start of the day, the lights would go on, they'd stay on for 12 hours and then they would go off for 12 hours and that would repeat over and over again.

We added a wrinkle to this where we would give them a three day lighting cycle where for the first day and the second day they got light.

And then the third day, the lights didn't come on.

So we repeated that over and over again.

We made time-lapse movies of what the plants were doing, both when the lights were on and in the dark.