EdgeScienceNumber 44 December 2020 Current Research and Insights SPECIAL ISSUE Sentient Plants: A Product of Nature or A publication of the Human Imagination? By Krissy Eliot EdgeScience #44 December 2020 EdgeScience is a quarterly magazine. SPECIAL ISSUE Print copies are available from edgescience.magcloud.com. For further information, see edgescience.org. Email: edgescience@scientificexploration.org Why EdgeScience? Because, contrary to public perception, scientific knowledge is still full of unknowns. What remains to be discovered — what we don’t know — very likely dwarfs what we do know. And what we think we know may not be entirely correct or fully understood. Anomalies, which researchers tend to sweep under the rug, should be actively pursued as clues to potential breakthroughs and new directions in science. PUBLISHER: The Society for Scientific Exploration EDITOR: Patrick Huyghe ASSOCIATE EDITOR: P.D. Moncrief Jr. CONTRIBUTORS: Krissy Eliot DESIGN: Smythtype Design The Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) is a professional organization of scientists and scholars who study unusual and unexplained phenomena. The primary goal of the Society is to provide a professional forum for presentations, criticism, and debate concerning topics which are for various reasons ignored or studied inadequately within mainstream wildpixel/iStock science. A secondary goal is to promote improved understanding of those factors that unnecessarily limit Sentient Plants: the scope of scientific inquiry, such as sociological constraints, restrictive world views, hidden theoretical A Product of Nature or Human Imagination? assumptions, and the temptation to convert By Krissy Eliot prevailing theory into prevailing dogma. Topics under investigation cover a wide spectrum. At one end are apparent anomalies in well established disciplines. At the other, we find paradoxical phenomena that belong to no established discipline and therefore may offer the greatest potential for scientific advancement and the expansion of human knowledge. The SSE was founded in 1982 and has approximately 800 members in 45 countries worldwide. The Society also publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration, and holds annual meetings in the U.S. and biennial meetings in Europe. Associate and student memberships are available to the public. To join the Society, or for more information, visit the website at scientificexploration.org. PRESIDENT: William Bengston, St. Joseph’s College Cover: Trees at Plaza San Martín in Buenos VICE PRESIDENT: Garret Moddel, University of Colorado, Aires, Argentina. Boulder Credit: Dag Peak / Flickr/ CC by 2.0 SECRETARY: Mark Urban-Lurain, Michigan State University TREASURER: York Dobyns A phenomenon called crown shyness describes the gaps that trees—usu- EDUCATION OFFICER: Chantal Toporow ally of the same species—maintain between their top-most branches. This EUROPEAN COORDINATOR: Anders Rydberg is one strategy trees have adopted to protect themselves and the collective forest from pests, diseases, and severe winds and storms. (“Trees Have Their Copyright © 2020 Society for Scientific Exploration Own Way of Social Distancing,” by Zoe Baillargeon, Atlas Obscura, Sept. The authors, artists, and photographers retain copyright to their work. ISSN 2330-4545 (Print) 8, 2020) ISSN 2330-4553 (Online) EDGESCIENCE #44 • DECEMBER 2020 / 3 Krissy Eliot SENTIENT PLANTS: A Product of Nature or Human Imagination? onica Gagliano is lying in a hammock in the Amazon heard,” and that her role going forward would be to allow them Mjungle. She has been consuming nothing but rice, veg- to speak through her.1 etables, and mashed tree bark for weeks, and is having power- After this, Gagliano became a self-proclaimed “custodian ful dreams. She is on what the Shipibo people of the Amazon of the vegetal world,” with a purpose of communicating the lowlands of Peru call a dieta, a practice of communing with a complex, subjective experience of plants through her writ- plant by ingesting it in isolation without the distraction of sex, ing and scientific research. Her book is about plants and by friends, or tasty food. The bark is from the tropical Socoba plants. “It is a phytobiography—a collection of stories, each tree, more commonly known as Bellaco-caspi (Himatanthus written together with and on behalf of a plant person,” writes sucuuba), and through the dieta, the Socoba has been reveal- Gagliano. “As such, these stories emerge out of a human-plant ing powerful secrets to Gagliano—like how the plant is actu- collaborative endeavor and a mixed writing style, which I think ally a “she,” and how she can be used as a “blood cleanser.” we can fittingly call plant-writing. Through plant-writing, this In one of her dreams in the hammock, Socoba shows book transcends the view of plants as the objects of scientific Gagliano a dark red image with thick black lines, and Gagliano materialism and empowers a new and yet timeless vision of the awakes to write upon her notepad: todas las cosas estan jun- world . ”2 tas (all things are connected). “I suddenly understood what While not every scientist is chewing the fat (or the bark, Socoba was saying—‘it is through the blood that everything is rather) with jungle trees, there is a scientific consensus that connected,’” Gagliano writes in her book Thus Spoke the Plant, plants can receive and process information from the environ- which chronicles her many plant dietas, as well as her scientific ment in complex ways. They have memory, are capable of deci- plant studies. “I knew without knowing that Socoba was a sion-making, and even possess their own versions of all five blood cleanser, the healer of conditions that affected the blood human senses. Considering these findings, some scientists say and the network of vessels that ensure the smooth flowing of that plants are not only intelligent—but even conscious—and blood inside the human body.” that this should change how we understand and interact with Upon Gagliano’s return to her life as a scientist in plants forever. Australia, she checked what she learned. The ideas Socoba had Stefano Mancuso, a professor at the University of Florence planted in her head are true according to the scientific litera- and founder of the controversially named International ture, with decades of pharmacological research showing the Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV), supports the idea benefits of Socoba for maintaining healthy blood pressure, that plants may be sentient. According to the LINV website, preventing anemia, and dealing with inflammation-related dis- plants are as sophisticated as animals. They are highly sensi- eases. Since Gagliano had no knowledge of this before meet- tive, intelligent, capable of cost-benefit analysis, and able to ing Socoba, this proved to her that “plants and nature can be recognize their separateness from other things—the difference Chaikuni Institute David Maurice Smith What does Bellaco-caspi (Himatanthus sucuuba) know about blood Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano cleansers? 4 / EDGESCIENCE #44 • DECEMBER 2020 between self and non-self.3 similar to what is more commonly known as extrasensory per- “In the last several ception (ESP).5 As the founder of New York’s Backster School decades science has been of Lie Detection, where he taught FBI agents and NYPD detec- showing that plants are tives how to sniff out the real story with polygraphs,6 he was endowed with feeling, confident that his conclusions were correct. “I like to think of weave complex social rela- the polygraph,” Backster once said, not as a lie detector, but “as tions and can commu- a truth detector.”7 nicate with themselves Backster’s experiment and a series of other controversial and with animals,” writes findings were featured in The Secret Life of Plants, a book that Mancuso and science jour- was eventually turned into a movie that was scored by Stevie nalist Alessandra Viola in Wonder. The book was written by author Christopher Bird and the book Brilliant Green, journalist Peter Tompkins, a former World War II Office of which champions the con- Strategic Services (OSS) spy.8 Many of the experiments in The cept of intelligent, sensitive Secret Life of Plants were eventually discredited due to inad- plants. “How these bril- equate methods or an inability to reproduce results. The film Plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso liant creatures get infor- version, for instance, suggested that plants are capable of learn- mation and process it in ing human language, perceiving electronic signals better than a way that results in consistent behavior is the focus of plant machines, communicating with the stars, and even identifying neurobiology.”4 which humans have hurt them in the past.9 Scientists like Mancuso and Gagliano have a habit of using Backster’s experiment has been the subject of much scien- anthropomorphic terms to describe plant life, and also suggest tific criticism, with plant scientists taking it upon themselves that plants can do things like “eat,” “sleep,” and “choose.” to do some “truth detecting” of their own. “The polygraph Many botanists find these comparisons problematic and con- experiment is a stupid experiment because even with inhuman fusing for the public, with the use of the term “plant neurobi- physiology, there’s not a complete consensus on how valid poly- ology” being a particularly thorny issue. graphs are,” says plant geneticist Daniel Chamovitz, president But before we scurry down the rabbit hole of plant con- of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He explains that poly- sciousness—let