Can my plant feel or perceive things?

Ever wonder if your houseplant, the one that is just sitting there on your window sill or in your cubicle, is a sentient being? Does it have thoughts? Excitement for when you walk into the room carrying fresh water? Distaste for when you play Britney Spears? Or fear when you put a pair of pruning shears next to it?

In short… No. (But we had you going for a minute there, didn’t we?)

Plant’s are not sentient beings like you and me. They can’t feel or perceive things around them, and they don’t exhibit higher level processing. What your plants can do, however, is sense and respond in very complex ways to hundreds of stimuli, including light, sound, touch, smells, and gravity.

There was a time, however, when many Americans believed that plants had brains…

In 1973, The Secret Life of Plants graced the New York Times bestseller list. This book was an interesting take on plants, focused mainly on their more fantastical aspects. While much of the book is no longer considered accurate, it’s responsible for many of our folk notions about plants: plants preferring classical music over rock music, their enjoyment of casual conversation, and finally, their sentient existence.

The book detailed an experiment run by an ex-CIA agent and polygraph expert. He attached a galvanometer (lie detector) to a Dracaena plant. He allegedly then found that the plant would react to different stimuli by pulsing electric waves that were read by the galvanometer. He claimed that the Dracaena plant would react when he pulled the leaf off a nearby plant, when he dropped a shrimp into boiling water, and even if he thought bad thoughts about the plant. He even claimed that from a lineup the Dracaena had a memory able to identify a human it had witnessed harming a plant.

While whimsical and definitely fun to read about, these experiments were never able to be repeated by any scientist and are regarded as fiction by the scientific community.

However, this notion that plants have a brain never went away. Scientists found that plants do use many of the same neurotransmitters as humans do (chemicals generated by neurons to make our brains work) and react to anesthesia in similar ways too (getting knocked out).

While interesting, recently scientists have discovered that plants use their complex chemistry, including many neurotransmitters, to respond to and adapt to their environment. Making it seem like plants have brains when they actually don’t. This is incredible, because we need brains to react to our environment and plants have figured out how to do it without them!

For anyone interested in learning more about this topic, do check out the this great long read. And thanks for getting technical with us this Friday PM!