The ones among us that are vegetarians quite often hear the observation:
"Plants can also feel, you know?"
Putting aside how obvious that is, it is worth considering what actually distinguishes us from plants. We look at ourselves as independent, discrete beings, separated from our surroundings with which we interact. Then we look at a tree and that is what we tend to see as well: a discrete being, with its definite separation from it's environment. We then compare these two discrete units -- the "me" and the "tree" -- and see 'obvious' differences, and the absence of a central nervous system is not the least of them. No one denies the complexity of the interactions between the cells in a plant, akin to the complexity we see in our own skin and other organs. But certainly this is not a match to the complexity of our brains and the whole nervous system!
But we are now starting to know better. Remember the simple model akin to a neural network. I say 'akin', of course, because it is not necessarily composed by neurones. Look back at the tree. It might seem to be a simple being when compared to ourselves, but they tend to live in large societies we usually call forests. And we are not talking about "autistic" individuals, living their own life without caring (or knowing) about their neighbours. They communicate with each other. Widening the scope of our analysis to this community we can see all sort of amazing dynamics. For instance: trees infested with bugs will signal the surrounding trees the event so that they can prepare, excreting chemicals that dissuade the same sort of insect attacks. They might even communicate with predatory insects to ask for protection from herbivores [1]. Furthermore, we are coming across with several ways of communicating [2]. We now know that the use of an intricate subterranean system of fungi to communicate chemical signals is fairly common. The roots themselves are obvious ways of communicating underground messages. And, as it has been known for a while now, chemicals can be emitted to the air and picked up by nearby trees, conveying messages as well. The dynamics of these systems are not that different from the dynamics of a nervous system, though with different temporal and spacial scales (we will come back to this in a later post).
We thus might have been letting the trees block our view of the forest. We just need to look to the right scale -- the forest, including other beings that interact with the trees -- and realize that we are not that different.
We leave you with an exercise. Observe the world today and consider: what other systems, subsets of the world around us, show this wonderful dynamic behaviour? Are you part of it? What would it (He? She?) think of you?
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