“Plants can think.” Is that really such a radical statement? According to the 2013 film The Mind of Plants, no. The film defines intelligence as the ability to perceive a particular environment and react to these perceptions, the ability to remember things, and the ability to communicate and form some sort of social relationships. The creator of the film, Jacques Mitsch, aims to lend support to the idea that plants can, in fact, do all these things.
The Mind of Plants begins with a visit to Northeast South Africa. Here, a group of university researchers demonstrate that select plants, including the acacia, can perceive areas which are overpopulated with grazing kudu and produce certain chemicals which are capable of literally killing the kudu—it’s like a biological war between plants and animals!
لقد جلبت dancing plant is also given centre stage in this documentary. This is a plant which responds to music and other noise and begins to move in a dance-like fashion. Most dancing plants are good dancers, but young ones or those who have been growing in fairly isolated areas are not as skilled. They can, however, be trained to dance better, which is just one of the examples given to support the idea that plants have memory. As for social relationships, the film highlights the fact that plants can communicate through chemical energy and some even protect their own kind; for example, the oak emits particular chemicals so other varieties of saplings have difficulty growing next to it.
The film introduces the idea that plants might have “brains.” In short, an area has been found within a plant’s roots which functions somewhat like a human brain and nervous system. The cells in this area function in the same way as our synapses, which allow us to perceive, think, remember and pass information from our brains to the rest of our bodies.
Plant neurobiology is a field in its infancy and many scientists have difficulty accepting the fact that plants are capable of anything close to human thought. Whatever the case, we must remember that plants aren’t just pretty, they’re pretty powerful and resilient life forms—with life expectancies of thousands of years, quite a few of them have been on the Earth way before any of us and will be here long after our deaths. We mustn’t be too quick to judge ourselves, along with our other animal cohorts, as the “upper class.”
Watch Mind of Plants here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeX6ST7rexs
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]by Erica Roberts
image: Thangaraj Kumaravel (Creative Commons BY—no changes)
