Peter M. Vishton

speaker

202 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 27 Mar

Peter M. Vishton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Last Show with David Cooper · Plants Count Events, But Can They Think? · 27 Mar 2026 podcast

Well, A, I don't know the answer to that.

And B, at some level, I hate to say it's not that I don't care about it, but it's just not the focus of the research right now.

So we know lots of things about what humans can and can't do.

We know lots of things about, I don't know, infant memory for different kinds of events.

We have no idea how they do that.

Right.

Eventually, I'd like to think we will.

I mean, it could be that there's a lot of other research suggesting that calcium and electrical currents, small electrical currents that plants produce, play a big role in regulating their movements and their behavior.

And we could someday test for that, right?

We could give the plant some sort of a, expose them to some chemical that inhibits those calcium ions and see if this goes away.

But for the moment, we're just trying to characterize the system as a whole.

And yeah, I like the way you say it, that it's an emergent property of the whole plant system.

In fact, I should add that this is another critique I get from other plant researchers.

Thus far, we've started looking at plants by themselves and as individuals.

But this study, we looked at a big group of plants that were all growing together.

They were bumping together into one another.

It could be in our study.

So we had about 50 plants that were all sort of together.

Sorry, it wasn't 50.

It was 18 in this first study.

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