The Joy And Pain Of Plants

I saw this and thought it was kind of interesting. Who knew plants were so potentially sentient? Lol, there go half the arguments for vegetarianism! It hurts that potato just as much as it hurts that cow!

In a room near Maida Vale, a journalist for The Nation wrote around 1914, an unfortunate creature is strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector. When the subject is pinched with a pair of forceps, it winces. It is so strapped that its electric shudder of pain pulls the long arm of a very delicate lever that actuates a tiny mirror. This casts a beam of light on the frieze at the other end of the room, and thus enormously exaggerates the tremor of the creature. “Thus,” the journalist concluded, “can science reveal the feelings of even so stolid a vegetable as the carrot.”

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the aforementioned carrot vivisector, was a serious man of science. Born in what is today Bangladesh in 1858, Bose was a quintessential polymath: physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist. He was the first person from the Indian subcontinent to receive a U.S. patent, and is considered one of the fathers of radio science, alongside such notables as Tesla, Marconi, and Popov. And, like many scientists of weight, he has become popularly known for his more controversial pursuits — in Bose’s case, his experiments in plant physiology

In all seriousness it is a pretty interesting article. Check it out!

Bose is long dead, but plant physiology has become a well-respected scientific pursuit. There are now plenty of scientists who, over the decades, have given further weight to Bose’s theories that plants may not be as different from animals as previously thought. Elizabeth Haswell, assistant professor of biology at Washington University in Saint Louis, along with colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, recently wrote a review article about mechanosensitive channels in plants for the journal Structure. The article was called “Mechanosensitive Channels: What Can They Do and How Do They Do It?” In it, Haswell writes about how she has been experimenting on Arabidopsis plants to understand plants’ responses to gravity, and touch, and us. This fact alone is, admittedly, of little interest to the average person. But one wonders why Haswell’s rather scholarly article got picked up by press around the world. Why, in March of this year, The New York Times published a piece called “No Face, but Plants Like Life Too?” Why a big science news story last year was a BBC News report titled “Plants can think and remember.” Why, nearly 100 years since the publication of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose’s “Researches on irritability of plants,” plant physiology is news.

The Joy and Pain of Plants

reply to post by InvaderSkich


Reminds me of a great episode of MythBusters where they attached EKG machines to plants (plants that were isolated) and verbally and physically abused them. The plants responded uniquely to each result. They even tried playing music for the plants over an extended period of time and found that the plants that listened to high-tempo metal (genre) grew faster than the others!

Reminds me of this movie "the Day of the Triffids'
Almost the whole world suffers a massblindness after watching a beautiful light from a meteor shower that also has transformed a strange greed of carnevores plants known as Triffids into flash-eating, man-killing monsters. While Triffids appearing all over the world are an american sailor and an alcoholic sientist trying to save the man-kind.''http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3RdRc9uOAk&feature=related

whoa, interesting stuff OP.

s&f

I remember watching a documentary about music and how it can influence the plants do be healthy and more vigorous. They played rock music and found the plants grew away from the sound. Like they're trying to get away from it.

When they played softer music the plants grew towards the sound.

(I think it was that way round)



They say you should talk to your plants, they need a stimulating convo from time to time.

reply to post by InvaderSkich


I remember (it's been a looong time ago) seeing a report on TV about how plants respond to stimuli.

There were two groups of plants in different rooms.

One was in an environment with classical music.

The other group was in the same environment, but WITHOUT the classical music.

The group with the classical music grew Much larger and leaned toward the speakers.

The group of plants without the music was small and unhealthy...

just a memory that seared itself into my brain...

So if that means that all plants and such things are alive and conscious, what will our 'beloved' friends the vegetarians und vegans do now? Surely they don't want to kill the lovely plants to eat them because it's inhuman.

I asked a Vegan once if they thought about the carrots as they scream when being pulled from the Earth as She was attacking me calling me a corpse muncher and damning me to hell for being an ominivore ... s&f ... good post

Though I was aware of this, it was good to read about it again. I think more people should be aware of such fascinating findings. Yeah vegans what do you say now?

Right about now I am craving a steak cooked over very high heat to about 135 degrees (medium rare) over a wood fired grill.

Yeah, there is a book called "the Secret life of plants" which is one of the coolest books I ever read. This topic -- including Bose -- is in there, I really recommend it.

There's some interesting stuff in there like the experiment where they have a guy chop down a tree, then take the guy and others in a bus to somewhere else and have them one by one walk past a row of trees, and the trees have a major reaction to the chopper, compared to the other men. There's lots of totally different stuff too... really interesting stuff.

By the way, the current Dalai Lama was once asked about this topic. He has such a great sense of humor. The question was something like, but aren't plants alive too? When we pluck a carrot, does it not also scream? He says: "Yes. But not so loudly."

Quote for the day: I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.

RC

Originally posted by SilentE
whoa, interesting stuff OP.

s&f

I remember watching a documentary about music and how it can influence the plants do be healthy and more vigorous. They played rock music and found the plants grew away from the sound. Like they're trying to get away from it.

When they played softer music the plants grew towards the sound.

(I think it was that way round)

They say you should talk to your plants, they need a stimulating convo from time to time.

edit on 3-12-2011 by SilentE because: (no reason given)

I did that as a science fair project in 7th grade. For one group, I played AC/DC and the other heavy metal and acid rock groups that were around at the time. (My mother wanted to kill me!) For the other group, I played classical.

They liked Handel's Water Music and really tried to get away from the metal. They obviously didn't like it.