Do Plants Have Minds? What the Science Actually Says

It's just before dawn in Manhattan in the winter of 1966, and there's a man alone in an office building who's been up all night working. His name is Cleve Baxter, and he's one of the best in the world at one very specific thing. He can tell when you're lying. Baxter is a polygraph examiner, and he's one of the best in the world. He even personally trained interrogators for the CIA. He spent his whole career learning to read the tiny electrical signals of the human body to pick out whether you're lying. And after a long night of work, kind of on a whim, he connected his electrodes to a plant. Now, there's a house plant by the door at Resina. You know that boring plant you've walked past in waiting rooms? Baxter just watered it. Now, he gets somewhat curious. He wants to see how long it takes the water to climb from the roots up into a leaf. So, he connects the electrodes he would usually put on a crime suspect, clips him to a leaf, turns on the machine, and watches the ink start dashing across the paper. And here's the thing. The pen does something he's seen 10,000 times before. It draws the same shape a person makes. A little jagged drawing of somebody feeling something. The same as a person would when they're happy or excited. So Baxter has a thought. He wonders, what would happen if I burned a leaf? So he pictures getting matches and burning a leaf. He doesn't move. He hasn't even reached for a match. So far, he's only imagined it. And then... Right at the split second that that imagery of fire entered my mind, the tracing reflecting the changes in the plant just went right off the top of the page. And the only thing that occurred at that time, no lighting of a match, nothing else, merely the imagery of fire. And I must say that as of 14 minutes along in that initial observation on the morning of February 2nd, 1966, my life just hasn't been the same. After the first experiment, Baxter wanted to run out into the street yelling, plants can think. He never let it go after that. And for the next 40 years, his experiments just got stranger as he went. In one case, he ran one experiment that plays out like a murder mystery. There are two plants and six of his students. One student drew a slip of paper in secret, telling them to go in and totally destroy one of the plants. Nobody else knew who did it. The surviving plant was the only witness. Then Baxter connected that plant to the light detector and had the students walk in front of it one at a time. Now, the first five students came in and nothing happened. Then the killer came up and the needle, he said, went wild, like the plant could recognize the culprit. He had a name for all of this. He called it primary perception. The idea that awareness doesn't start with brains or even with animals, that maybe it runs all the way down into a leaf, into the cell, and every living thing is tuned to the life around it. One caveat though is that Baxter's findings have never been reliably replicated. The most careful attempt, a Cornell team writing in Science in 1975, couldn't reproduce them. Now we'll come back to the disagreements in the field and what they mean. the same time as Baxter, he wasn't entirely alone in what he was seeing. An interesting Soviet experiment claimed that a connected cabbage showed a clear electrical spike when another cabbage in front of it was cut into pieces. And in a related anecdote, they reported an experiment very similar to Baxter's, in which they had two living cabbage plants. One subject destroyed one of the plants while the other watched. When the killer came back hours later, the plant that witnessed the event showed increased electrical activity. The thing is, these experiments and the field in general kind of vanished. Mainstream science backed away from the whole topic so hard that for decades, studying whether plants could sense or signal anything was basically a sure way to be called a pseudoscientist. But there's a whole story here worth telling. While the Wu version was being laughed out of the room, other careful scientists started finding things in their labs that are honestly, even stranger than what Baxter claimed. They just found them the hard way, with controls and microscopes and proof you can repeat. So that's where we'll go, out of the dark office and into the lab. And I think that by the end, the conclusions Baxter proposed will feel a lot less crazy than they did back then. Let's start with communication. When a caterpillar starts chewing on a leaf, the plant doesn't just sit there, it releases chemicals into the air, basically a scent, and the plants downwind pick up that scent and start prepping their own defenses. They can load their tissues with compounds and make them harder to eat before a caterpillar gets to them. Now, that happens internally too. When the caterpillar bites, the plant releases glutamate, a neurotransmitter, activating this amazing wave of calcium throughout the whole plant. Now, this is the same glutamate that is used in your nervous system, but plants don't have neurons. So what is this? Hold that thought because we'll get back to it. A researcher named David Rhodes first reported this airborne signaling in 1983. He was criticized for it and even shouted down at conferences, partly because it sounded too much like magical plant communication. But with time, it got tested and confirmed and confirmed again in more than 30 species. And in In 2023, a team in Japan actually filmed the receiving end. A healthy plant catches the smell of its damaged neighbor and lights up from the inside with a cascade of signals in seconds. Now, the damaged plant probably isn't being generous. The best evidence says it's really signaling to itself, sending an alarm from one leaf to the rest of its own body, and the neighbors are just picking up on a private broadcast. It's not magic, but it is, at least to me, magical. It's chemistry. And it's happening in every single garden on Earth, constantly, right under our noses. And other experiments have shown plants can communicate not just through chemicals, but also through electrical signaling. Now let's meet the plant that can count. The Venus flytrap doesn't snap the second you touch it. It's smarter than that, and also cheaper. There are little hairs inside the trap. If you touch it once, nothing happens, the plant ignores you, but touch it a second time within about 20 seconds and then it slams shut. And it also doesn't start digesting right away, because digestion is very expensive and it needs to be sure it got something alive. So it keeps counting. As the little insect struggles and keeps activating the hairs, the plant keeps up the count. And around 5 stimulations to the hair, it commits, switching on the enzymes that will digest dinner it's keeping a tally a real number used to make a real decision by a thing with no brain to count with and what else can you do once you know how to count gamble there's this great experiment with pea plants researchers divided a single plant's roots between two pots one pot had a steady reliable supply of nutrients the other had the same amount on average but it was all over the place. It would variably go from feast to famine. And the plant chose where to send its roots depending on the situation. When the steady pot was good enough to live on, well, the plant played it safe and grew toward the sure thing. But when the reliable option wasn't enough to survive, the plant changed its bet. It gambled, sending roots toward the unpredictable pot. Because taking the risk beat the guarantee of not enough. Okay, maybe it's not gambling, but that's the exact logic an investor uses, showing so-called risk sensitivity. And here's another crazy finding about plants. They scream. In 2023, in one of the most respected journals in science, researchers reported that plants whine, making crying sounds. Not poetically, but literally. A stressed plant, going thirsty or freshly cut, gives off a sound of clicks. Now, they're ultrasonic clicks. They're way too high for us to hear, but they're real. They travel through open air, and you can record them from across the room. A thirsty tomato plant, for example, clicks about 35 times an hour. A happy one is basically silent. And the clicks are specific enough that a machine learning model could listen to them and tell you whether a plant was dried or cut. Now, it's interesting that the leading explanation is purely physical. Columns of water snapping under tension inside the stem, like little air bubbles popping. Yet those clicks carry information about whether the plant is healthy or in trouble. And there's early evidence that other creatures can hear them. A moth deciding where to lay her eggs is actually listening, picking the healthy plant over the stressed clicking one. So a forest you walk through in total silence might, to the right ears, be loud. Everything I just told you is pretty solid ground. Now I want to walk you out toward the edge, where it gets a little contested. Now let's ask, can a plant learn? Can it remember? There's a scientist named Monica Gagliano who decided to find out, and she did so by treating plants as you would lab animals. She took the mimosa, the famous sensitive plant that folds its leaves the second you touch it, and she built a little rig that dropped the potted plant a short distance onto a cushion. It was a little jolt, but a harmless one. And she dropped it again and again. At first, the mimosa folded up every single time. But after enough drops, something changed. The plant just stopped bothering. It seemed to figure out that this particular drop was no big deal, and it quit wasting energy. Now, that alone could be explained through exhaustion, except two things. When she hit the plants with a different, unfamiliar disturbance, they folded back up. So they weren't just tired out. And when she came back and tested them weeks later, they still remembered. They kept their memory for almost a month. The authors concluded that the process of remembering may not require the conventional neural networks and pathways of animals. Brains and neurons are just one possible, undeniably sophisticated solution, but they may not be a necessary requirement for learning. Then the team published another experiment, very similar to the famous Pavlov experiment, in which the dogs learned to drool when they heard a bell. They tried to train pea plants with a little fan and a light, teaching them that the breeze predicted which direction the light was coming from, and they reported that the plants learned it, growing toward the breeze in anticipation of light that hadn't even shown up yet. This is a frontier, and I'm going to be honest with you, the memory results have held up better than the learning by association ones, because when another lab tried to repeat the pea and fan experiment, they couldn't get it to work. And the thing is the two camps have been going back and forth in the journals ever since. So it's not settled. What you're looking at is a live scientific argument happening right now over whether the thing Baxter sensed in 1966 is real in some form we can finally measure. Now let's step back and look at the whole pile of evidence. Plants talk to each other. They count. They can take deliberate risks. they might remember, why not just call that intelligence? Why not go all the way and call it consciousness? Well, because those are two different words, and treating them like they're the same word is a trap that this whole subject is full of. Almost nobody argues that plants don't sense and signal and respond in flexible, clever-looking ways. The disagreements start the moment you reach for a bigger word. In 2006, a group of researchers tried to launch a whole field called plant neurobiology and the backlash was so intense that they ended up changing the name because the objection was obvious and it's hard to argue with. Plants truly have no neurons and by inference, argue some botanists, can have no intelligence or consciousness. The skeptic Lincoln Chase has an argument that goes something like this. Consciousness, as far as we can tell, takes a certain threshold of brain complexity. There are even animals simple enough that they probably don't have it. So a plant with no brain and no neurons at all almost certainly doesn't either. And he points out a real danger here, which is that when we really want a plant to have feelings, we start seeing feelings that maybe aren't there and we stop doing good science. His reasoning here is that anthropomorphizing plants undermines the objectivity of the researcher and he's not wrong to worry about it. The thing is, it really depends on how you define intelligence and consciousness. And because of the slippery definitions, some scientists argue that due to the subjectivity, the field of plant intelligence shouldn't even be considered a scientific study. As scientists, we must only deal with that which is testable and falsifiable. And intelligence with a subjective definition is neither, writes geneticist Daniel Chamovitz. On the other side is Stefano Mancuso, who argues for intelligence without a brain. He looks at a root system, thousands of growing tips, each one sensing moisture and gravity and chemistry and obstacles. All of it is coordinated and he sees a network solving problems. It may be a different hardware than ours, but it might be the same trick. The skeptics somewhat argue in a circle because they define consciousness as a thing that brains do and then they announce that things without brains can't have it. But that doesn't prove plants have no inner life. He just assumes it right from the start based on how we choose to define the word. The thing is, we don't have to define it from scratch. Let's look at the past. Let's go back 2,500 years ago to Aristotle. He didn't think plants were conscious, but he also refused to treat them as furniture. He gave them what he called the treptike psyche, which has later been translated as vegetative soul. It's not a mind, it's not feelings, but an inner principle, a kind of drive, a reaching toward their own growth and survival. And then somewhere along the line, we lost that middle category. We split the world into machines and then minds, with nothing allowed in between. And I think plants got dumped into the machine side of that line. And in classical Chinese thought, there's a concept called ziran, which usually flattens into English as nature, but it really means something closer to self. So, the way a thing unfolds straight out of its own being, on its own, without being forced and without someone pulling the strings like a root finding water or a leaf reaching for light. What I like about this frame is that you don't need to prove that there's a little conscious actor hiding inside the plant before you can say that the plant is really acting. The action is its own. The agency is right there in the unfolding. Now, I'm not telling you that the ancient philosophers proved plants are conscious. They weren't doing biology. I'm telling you something I think is more useful. Our gut sense that you need a brain before you're allowed to have an inner life is something we inherited, not something we ever actually confirmed. It can be questioned. And even with the little data we have, I think we already have some answers. I'm not asking you to believe that your basil has a soul or become a tree hugger, just to hold the possibility of other kinds of minds with a little humility instead of contempt. To go from obviously not to, I don't know, maybe. I'll leave you back where we started, in that dark office in 1966, with Baxter watching a needle do something unexpected. Baxter spent the rest of his life convinced that plants have a secret inner life. And the careful science that came after him would complicate it a little bit. But he got one thing exactly right. And it's the only thing that really matters here. He was right to be astonished. He looked at a houseplant nobody noticed and was curious enough to ask whether anyone was home. And the honest answer after everything is that we still don't know. Maybe plants have no minds at all or maybe they've got some kind we'll never understand. But it's interesting to think about it in this way. The line we drew around the word mind was drawn by the only minds in the room. And the plants are a pretty good reason to wonder if we drew that line way too small. If you got something out of this, a like helps way more than you think. It's the main way these videos find new people. And if you have a thought, a pushback, a story about your own plants, leave it in the comments. And let me know if you'd like to hear more about the topic. There's so much more interesting research I couldn't cover in a single video. So subscribe so you don't miss the next video. I'll see you next time. As a biologist and health journalist, I've spent a lot of time thinking about life. how the body works, what keeps us going, how fragile and incredible the whole thing is. And the more I learned about life, the more I wondered, what happens when it ends? I'm Akai, and I host a new documentary called Final Hours. This film is all about answering that question. I went looking for answers the way I was trained to, science first, then philosophy. Both gave me a lot, but neither gave me everything. So I wanted to make a film that doesn't choose. Final Hours is both science and philosophy. It's data and storytelling. It's contemplation and beauty. At the center of it are people who, by every definition, were dead. But then they came back. Something called a near-death experience. Something that is unexplainable, but as I found out, holds answers to our deepest questions. So I sat with them and I listened. I didn't shy away from the uncomfortable questions and they didn't shy away from the answers. And after long travels and even longer conversations, I'm honestly not the same person I was when I started filming. Why? Well, the things these people shared with me have made me think more carefully about how I spend my time and how I treat other people. The implications of what these people experienced on the other side are profound and they're profound for all of us, including you. It doesn't matter what background you have, where you live, or what you believe. I promise you, you will find something in this film that speaks to you. And I really hope you'll watch with curiosity, holding in your mind the questions humans have been asking forever. What is this life actually for? And what waits on the other side? Don't be afraid to ask the big questions. Watch Final Hours. The full documentary is linked below. We collided at very high speeds. What happens after death? There was really no way that you could muster a dream or hallucination out of that brain. As the surgical team kind of gets ready to operate on me, that energy in the room shifted. The next thing I knew, I had left my body. I looked up behind the surgeons, and there were these huge light beams. It's a place that was very kind of primitive, coarse. It was like being underground in dirty jello. I cried out, God help me. In the flash of just a second, it was a world of perfection. I was shuttled into this life review. I saw this vision of what I was meant to do. It says, I know that you died full of this regret. I'm here to offer you that second chance. But if I give you this offer, you have to make sure that the next time you die, you're ready for it. I heard my dad say to me, now that you know the truth, Go back and live your life fearlessly.