Plants Count Events, But Can They Think?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper.
Could my houseplant actually be counting sunrises and sunsets?
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
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.
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.
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. As 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. 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.
What makes this mimosa pudica plant such a curious candidate to study? And what is it doing that might resemble memory?
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 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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–0:13
2
Could my houseplant actually be counting sunrises and sunsets?
0:13–4:50
3
What evidence suggests plants can track the number of events they experience?
4:50–8:12
4
Which plant species did researchers study and why is Mimosa pudica special?
8:12–10:01
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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