Plant Neurobiology Commentary The New Yorker

my name is Michael pollen and I've been writing about plants for long time and have been gardener for an even longer time and when learned about this new field called plant neurobiology was immediately intrigued because plants don't have brains and they don't have neurons so what could this possibly mean so much of our difficulty in understanding plants traces to the fact that they exist in completely other time Dimension than we do they seem still they seem inactive just because they're moving at different scale than we are and so time lapse is way to close the gap between the the plant's time scale and our own time scale but as soon as you do that you begin to see the plant for what it is which is an agent of its own fate and able to sense its environment and move in certain direction and as soon as you look at plants and time lapse you gain new respect for them and what they can do and that they are much more active this video of the single plant reaching for the pole is striking for couple things watch the leaves as the thing goes on the leaves look very kind of clenched and tight and they too are working hard to help the plant reach its goal but as soon as the hook of the of the tendril reaches the pole watch how they change their behavior instead of being looking so strained and strenuous they they look like they're relaxing they look very happy all of sudden and the other thing to look at is the the the nature of the motion and how effortful and striving it is basically the bean plant grows couple centimeters and throws itself over and over again with very good aim it reminded me of of someone with fly rod casting repeatedly to hit spot on river in the second video we see two plants bean plants and they're competing for the same pole and one of them gets the edge and is growing little bit more quickly and as soon as it makes contact the other one seems to lose heart and suddenly stops aiming at the pole which has been taken in some sense and starts reaching in other directions behind the pole you have to look carefully to see this but it's reaching back in space and does that repeatedly but there's nothing there it's very sad and there's nothing there for it to hold on to and eventually it just gives up in defeat but somehow this plant is aware of its environment and is working really hard mean striving to get to that pole now words like striving and looking and knowing and noticing all are metaphorical in the case of plants and we should be skeptical of this of mood and and attitude in Plants but it's it sure looks that way when you look at these videos