Are Plants More Intelligent Than People?
Christina Sarich, Staff
Waking Times
“Even atoms possess a certain measure of intelligence.” ~ Thomas Edison
“To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.” ~ Diane Ackerman
Michal Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, has pointed out that for the longest time, even mentioning that plants could be intelligent was a quick way to being labeled a ‘whacko,’ but it turns out plants can learn, communicate, and even feel. They can also see, smell, and remember. This is definitely not news the biotechnology industry wants highlighted.
Do Plants Have ‘Brains’?
In an emerging field called plant neurobiology, a bit of a misnomer since plants don’t have neurons or brains, we learn that people who play music for their plants or understand that our actions can affect a plant’s nutrition, for example, are not ‘whackos’ at all.
Plants have analogue structures to our brains and neurons. They have a way of taking in information and even sharing it with other plants. Normally you need a brain to do that, but as we’re learning in our evolving understanding of consciousness – not necessarily.
Plants even ‘feel’ emotions like pain – as when a caterpillar is about to munch on its leaves – so no doubt, they know when they are about to be doused in toxic agrochemical poisons.
It is also a bit of a shocker considering that almost a million acres of the Amazon forest have been wiped out in recent years, killing all sorts of plant and animal life in the process, when you realize that trees in forests actually talk to each other. A network of mycelium mushrooms growing on the forest floor act like the Internet, providing an information superhighway to trees in forest systems. Trees share nutrients and information though this mutually beneficial relationship with a single organism.
With GMOs destroying the micro-biota and killing genetic diversity – this could mean we are literally gagging the trees, and flowers.
“The Gaian ecosystem, the self-organized system that we know as Earth, came into being with the emergence of the global bacterial community. That bacterial community still is the foundation of this world. It is Gaia. It is the interconnected network of millions of bacterial biofilms, individual bacteria, and symbiogenic, bacterially generated, complex life-forms that lies deep within the crust of the Earth (perhaps by as much as 5 kilometers), covers the entire surface of the planet, and extends at least 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The Earth itself is around 4.5 billion years old but sometime in its first half to one billion years of existence bacterial life emerged.” ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth
What the “powers that be” are doing to the plants is exactly what they are attempting to do to us – make a docile, information controlled, automated, robotic-like populace that is easy to control, and easy to sicken.
Only, plants are possibly even smarter than WE are.
In addition to having a sense of hearing, and taste, as well as the ability to learn and remember, feel pain, and communicate, they also sense gravity, the presence of water, and can feel when an obstruction is in the way of its root system, impeding its growth. A plant’s roots can even shift direction to try to avoid such obstacles.
Plants Learn from Experience, Why Can’t We?
Biologist Monica Gagliano from Western Australia presented research that suggested the mimosa pudica plant can learn from experience. Merely suggesting a plant could learn was so controversial that her paper was rejected by 10 scientific journals before it was finally published, but the proof is there for all to see.
In addition to creating compounds that are anesthetic to us, you can put a plant ‘out’ using anesthetics traditionally used in major surgeries. They don’t have nerve cells, but they can even produce neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. These are the neurochemicals of happiness.
Plants also even respond to our emotions. plants react to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance. She proved plants even remember information longer than bees do.
Plants have problem-solving ability, and remember stressful events, but they also exemplify an inter-connectivity with a surprisingly complex range of electrical activity and rhythms. They might even be able to predict when earthquakes are imminent. Trees may work with the earth as a dynamic body to communicate any number of important pieces of data.
The Intelligence of Plant Immunity
Taking all this into account, how can we ignore scientific work which suggests that biotech chemicals harm a plant’s immune system? (The shikimate pathway is involved with the plant’s synthesis of certain amino acids and is adversely affected by herbicides like Round Up).
It is, after all incredibly similar to how our own immune system works.
An initial experience with insects or bacteria can help plants defend themselves better in future attacks by the same predator. So while a mustard plant might not respond the first time it encounters a hungry caterpillar, the next time it will up the concentration of defense chemicals in its system that turn its once-delicious leaves into an unsavory, toxic meal.
University of Missouri scientists call this ‘priming,’ but it is just one of many hundred plant intelligence phenomenon we are just beginning to understand. If a plant responds to vibrations would it not respond to weed-inducing mono-cropping and copious use of pesticides and herbicides?
“We can imagine applications of this where plants could be treated with sound or genetically engineered to respond to certain sounds that would be useful for agriculture,” said study author and biologist Heidi Appel.
Yet again scientists are eager to tinker with something that is already much more sophisticated than they even know.
Plants Grow in Alignment with Fibonacci Code, Divine Geometry
Furthermore, plant growth is governed by the Fibonacci sequence. This is a form of divine geometry.
The Fibonacci sequence governs the placement of leaves along a stem, ensuring that each leaf has maximum access to sunlight and rain. If you look straight down along a stem, the leaves (or branches) emerging from it will spiral such that when you count from one leaf to the one that lines up directly below it, the number of leaves between them and the number of times that group of leaves spirals around the stem will both be Fibonacci numbers. When biotech companies start meddling with this Divine plan, they alter the perfect sequencing of leaves, the perfect number of flowers that appear on a stem, and so on. The Golden Ratio becomes warped by Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta. Et al.
The double spiral that appears in all plants from cacti to pineapples to pinecones is part of the Divine plan for creation. Biotechnology is not.
The Music of Creation
Some, however, do seem to get it.
The reason plants respond to human emotions, and even harmonious vibration, such as those found in certain musical pieces, is because they are part of a larger intelligence. In the creation story of the Vishnu Purana, the first thing to manifest at the beginning of our cosmic cycle is cosmic intelligence. From this cosmic intelligence emanates the individual intelligences of all existing entities in the universe – this means plants, too.
Elias Tempton, a grower of cannabis, plays Chopin for his plants for nearly ten hours a day. He says in comparison to plants he doesn’t play classical music for, his cannabis plants had, “thicker skins and were more turgid in their leaf structure.”
Matt Lopez, the master cultivator for Northern Lights, shares the same practice. “I constantly play music for my plants and even when I leave for the day I have music playing for them all night.” During the day, when Matt is in the growhouse, he plays everything from Johnny Cash to opera. But when he leaves for the day he leaves the marijuana plants with classical music, like Beethoven or Mozart. “I’ve read that plants respond to sound waves and vibrations, and that’s what makes them grow. It helps the plants grow faster.”
If plants are so intelligent, we owe it to ourselves to create a more hospitable environment in which they can grow.
Read more articles by Christina Sarich.
