Plants don’t have brains, at least not in the traditional sense, and yet they can exhibit complex behaviors such as bending themselves towards light. Such observations have sparked the budding field of Plant Cognition.
Of course, some controversy will arise as soon as anyone talks about “plant intelligence” – but experiments have revealed a number of plant behaviors that are hard not to categorize as such.
Take Monica Gagliano’s pea plants, for example. In a study conducted at the University of Sydney, Gagliano combined light with the breeze from a fan to make pea plants turn in expectation of light, even when only the fan was blowing. Over the course of just three days, the plants learned to associate the fan with light they craved – a Pavlovian type of conditioning that we often only attribute to humans or other animals. It also begs the question, where would the memory (or association between breeze and light) be stored in an organism without a brain? And, how does that association get communicated to leaves that grow later on?
Impressive stuff… Perhaps we needn’t take offense if anyone calls us a pea brain! Meanwhile, for those with neurons, we’re here to help you engage that big, beautiful brain of yours.
