Inside the Vegetal Mind: On the Cognitive Abilities of Plants

Abstract

Across all species, individuals thrive in complex ecological systems, which they rarely have complete knowledge of. To cope with this uncertainty and still make good choices while avoiding costly errors, organisms have developed the ability to exploit key features associated with their environment. That through experience, humans and other animals are quick at learning to associate specific cues with particular places, events and circumstances has long been known; the idea that plants are also capable of learning by association had never been proven until recently. These recent findings that experimentally demonstrated associative learning in plants not only qualify them as proper subjects of cognitive research, but in so doing, they officially open the door for the empirical exploration of cognitive processes like learning, decision-making and awareness in plants. This brief closing chapter considers the wider implications of this research by concluding that the current fundamental premise in cognitive science—that we must understand the precise neural underpinning of a given cognitive feature in order to understand the evolution of cognition and behaviour—needs to be reimagined.

We can never see beyond a choice we don’t understand

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

An earlier version of this essay was published in the journal Communicative & Integrative Biology (DOI: 10.1080/19420889.2017.1288333).