Monica Gagliano

Four, Inheritors of the Earth, How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction by Chris D. Thomas.

Five, Thus Spoke the Plant, A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants, Monica Gagliano.

Six, The Light Eaters, How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger.

Seven, The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby.

He even does bacteria.

But if you haven't listened to my podcast with Monica Gagliano, she's one of the world's leading plant consciousness researchers, and she's not only proven that plants learn and they can be taught, 'cause she did experiments where she specifically set up an experiment where the plants could learn, and they did, but she was also the first one to prove that plants, some plants communicate through sound, especially corn plants.

And she put highly sensitive microphones in the soil, and you can hear these like electronic clicking sounds, and it's the plants talking to each other.

And it's...

... my God, I'm hearing the plants talking to each other.

[laughs]

And, um, yeah, Monica Gagliano, and she's got a great book, um, Thus Spake the Plant, I believe it is, and it's, you can get it on audio as well.

Um, and she's the kind of girl you would love.

Um, I don't know if you ...

Have you ever read the book Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano?

No.

No.I think you'd really, like there were many, there, there was a whole section where I was like, "Oh, I think, I, I think Todd would like really get, get, uh, you know, like really enjoy it." I mean, she, she was doing, um, reductive science around plants' sensi- you know, sensit- sensitivities, uh-

So that becomes very hard to then try to define it to say whether something is or isn't.

But regardless, the, the experiments that Dr. Monica Gagliano has done, she's done TED Talks, are phenomenal.

She's basically done experiments similar to Pavlov with the dogs, giving plants this training to turn a neutral stimulus into a conditioned one whereby just like Pavlov's dogs started to salivate just at the ring of a bell, these plants learned to grow towards just fan wind, them associating wind with light, and that light being then taken away, and they started to grow towards just that wind.

So they've learnt that behavior.

And when he implemented those instructions, they worked.

Monica Gagliano is an Italian-Australian evolutionary ecologist trained in marine biology who left a successful career studying coral reef fish because she couldn't bear to kill any more of them in the name of science.

Instead, she traveled to the Peruvian Amazon to apprentice with indigenous healers.

Gagliano had been trying since twenty eleven, stubbornly as she puts it, to design an experiment that could test whether plants learn by association the way Pavlov's dogs did.

I thought I was just going to be making a simple comparison of the traits of human intelligence and what plant behaviors might be similar to And what I discovered was that we actually don't have a universally agreed upon definition of what intelligence is.

And the more I looked into that, you know, there's fascinating experiments that show how plants can learn and communicate, even experiments that really mimic the same things that Pavlov did with his dogs, where, you know, another researcher, Dr. Monica Gagliano, she trained some pea plants to respond to new stimuli in the same way that Pavlov did with his dogs where they salivated when they were just presented with the sound of the bell rather than just the sight of the meat.

And she did similar things with plants.

And yes, this is incredible.

You know? There's act- there's some things you could do to scientifically prove that.

There are people I know, is it Monica Gagliano? I think she's, she's an Italian researcher.

Okay.

She's done-- there's lots of all this research that, that, that goes to show that plants have consciousness.