Plants can sense the sound of rain, a new study finds
news.mit.eduIt's awesome, but usual caveats apply that what sense means in the context of plants is something more like automatic biological reflexes, whereas the same language in the context of creatures with subjectivity has connotations that imply consciousness.
We're learning everyday that the complexity of plants is spectacular and it only deepens our appreciation for them and rightly so. But it's easy to get lost in language and think appreciating plants necessitates attributing consciousness to them, or attributing an open-ended possibility, which even in it's more measured form still dramatically overshoots what can responsibly be said about their capabilities.
Biomimicry is amazing, canopy patterns are amazing, optimizations to take advantage of water are amazing, signal exchanging in the face of disease or fire are amazing, and should be celebrated, and surely there is more we will yet learn. But nothing we have yet learned points to anything like consciousness, either in our form or in some possible alternative form.
Cool study. Not too surprising though given how much time plants have had to optimize growth.
Kind of similarly, you don't need to swallow high energy drinks to get the performance benefits.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/apr/15/high-energy-...
Could this not be the sublingual absorbtion of sugar rather than seemingly random "brain signals" the article suggests?
I was thinking along similar lines. If this was purely due to brain signals, I would think the artificial sweetener would also work.
They did better drinking a placebo than swishing and spitting a beverage with real sugar, so no.
A lot of people talk to their plants. I never judge them.
The amount of things that plants can sense without a brain or nervous system is incredible.
Plants are living things
funding revoked
I would frame this completely differently: plants evolved around sensing the low level vibration created by rain as a signaling technique for the timing of sprouting.
:shrug: Makes sense to me and doesn't try to turn this into some baffling mystery.