Plant neurobiology is a rapidly evolving field of science that explores the ways in which plants perceive their environment and change their morphology and physiology accordingly. This has caused some opposition, as there are those who believe that the way of growth is not similar to cognition or consciousness, but what about the unconscious?
Plants don't sleep like humans, but like humans, they are less active at night. They have their own biological clock that distinguishes day and night by environmental and chemical signals, and like some animals, they can wake up as the sun rises.
The sobriety of plants can even be seen from space, thanks to NASA's Ecosystem Space Thermal Radiometer (ECOSTRESS) on the International Space Station (ISS). ECOSTRESS CAN MONITOR THE HEALTH OF VEGETATION ON THE PLANET BY MEASURING VEGETATION TEMPERATURE AND TRACKING PROCESSES SUCH AS TRANSPIRATION TO "SWEAT" TO DISSIPATE HEAT.
Images taken from space in 2019 showed how plants near Lake Superior in the United States move after waking up in the morning, and scientists at ISS found that plants near the water's edge wake-up early and showed signs of activity earlier than plants farther away from the water.
So, if plants can wake up, can we also put them to sleep? That's exactly what Stefano Mancuso, a botanist at the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, has been working on.
The interesting observation of plant intelligence in this Xi is derived from the phenomenon of nodes bypassing obstacles to growth. It was observed that the plant did not need to touch an obstacle at all to start looking for a better direction to grow, so how did it know to move?
Plant movements sound strange, but much more common than most people realize, just happening at a seemingly boring rate (unless you look at the extremes of sensitive and insect-hunting plants). David Aidenborough's Green Planet shows what most of us have never seen before, showing how plants fight for sunlight, sometimes borrowing what humans might consider to be dirty tactics to eliminate competitors.
It was observations like this that drove Mancuso to raise the possibility of plant consciousness, stating that it would be very difficult to prove or refute plant consciousness without a clear definition of the term.
Actually, it's very hard to talk about consciousness, first of all, because we don't really know what consciousness is, even in our case. He told The Guardian. "But there is a theory about consciousness that it is a real biological trait: consciousness is something that we all have, not something that we do not have only when we are in a very deep sleep or under anesthesia. ”
"My approach to plant consciousness is similar. I first looked to see if they were sensitive to anesthetics and found that you can anesthetize all plants using the same anesthetics that work in humans. It's very fascinating. We've always thought of consciousness as having to do with the brain, but I think both consciousness and intelligence are more about the body and involve the whole body. ”
As for "putting plants to sleep", the Mancuso team believes it will be achieved by the end of 2023. Now, who's going to buy our Pixar "Sleeping Big Flower Carrion Flower" script?