All organisms in natural circumstances, animals, plants and bacteria, are aware of changes in their environment and respond by changing behaviour.
Plants can sense and react to more aspects of their environments than we can, and they maintain bustling social lives by communicating with each other above and below ground. They also interact with other species.
Do Plants Have Feelings (Or Emotions)? No – unlike humans and non-human animals, plants do not have feelings. It is undeniable that a plant can respond to environmental stimuli, like turning towards the light or closing over a fly. But that doesn't prove that they can have feelings, such as pain.
Given that plants do not have pain receptors, nerves, or a brain, they do not feel pain as we members of the animal kingdom understand it. Uprooting a carrot or trimming a hedge is not a form of botanical torture, and you can bite into that apple without worry.
Plants use groups of coordinated physiological activities to deal with defined environmental situations but currently have no known mental state to prioritise any order of response.
Evidence suggests that plants can behave intelligently by exhibiting the ability to learn, make associations between environmental cues, engage in complex decisions about resource acquisition, memorize, and adapt in flexible ways.
They cannot think like human beings either. They can, however, contain extremely complex mechanisms that allow them to do amazing things. Although plants don't have brains, they can tell time! Plants have time-sensitive genes that let them know when to suppress growth.
They conducted all sorts of experiments with plants – playing music, talking to plants, vibrations, etc. But their findings were discredited. Now fast forward nearly 50 years, and it has never been scientifically proven that plants have feelings.
If something hurts humans, we react instinctually to it—“fight or flight”—as do other animals. But plants don't have that ability—nor do they have nervous systems or brains—so they may have no biological need to feel pain.
No, plants cannot feel pain. There is no possible way for that to happen without a central nervous system.
It's True—You Really Should Talk to Your Plants. In a study performed by the Royal Horticultural Society, researchers discovered that talking to your plants really can help them grow faster. 1 They also found that plants grow faster to the sound of a female voice than to the sound of a male voice.
Plants can sense when they're being touched, according to a new study. The Washington State University-led study included a team of international researchers. PULLMAN, Wash. — A study out of Washington State University found plants can sense when they're being touched, even though they don't have nerves.
Plants can sense a lot about their environment and it can cause them stress. Unlike most humans and animals though, when plants face predation, damage, or environmental changes they can't run away and hide. Sessile – or stalkless – plants evolved to be incredibly sensitive to their environment in order to survive.
Even after a month left alone, the plants “remembered” the falls weren't harmful and ignored them. Dr. Gagliano, now at the University of Western Australia, concluded from the experiment that plants could “learn” long-lasting behaviors, sort of like memories.
Although they do it differently than humans, plants also have memories. This so-called "epigenetic memory" occurs by modifying specialized proteins called histones, which are important for packaging and indexing DNA in the cell. One such histone modification, called H3K27me3, tends to mark genes that are turned off.
Plants, the book revealed, can make their own trace elements through fusion, just like the sun. More, they can recognize people. If someone committed a crime in front of them — plants' fear could be measured with a simple lie detector test. And the book took it one step further, claiming that plants are conscious.
Although plants do not sleep in the same way that humans do, they do have more and less active times and they have circadian rhythms—internal clocks that tell them when it is night and when it is day. And like many people, plants are less active at night. When the Sun comes up, however, they awake to the day.
While the scream of the mandrake is mere legend, scientists have now discovered that plants do indeed emit screams when they are cut or are dehydrated. And unlike the mandrake's scream, which was believed to be fatal, the sounds that come out of plants when they suffer can only be heard by some animals and insects.
Most Plants Don't Want to Be Eaten
But plants can't run, and their ability to fight is limited to the use of chemical weapons in the form of toxins, inflammatory proteins, enzyme inhibitors (also known as antinutrients) and (sometimes) thorns.
Touch Triggers A Genetic Defense Response In Houseplants
Professor Jim Whelan, who led the research, said that even the slightest touch activates a major genetic defense response which, if repeated, slows down plant growth.
Plants respond to the vibrations of nearby sound which turns on two key genes inside of them that influence their growth. Plants also increase photosynthesis production in response to carbon dioxide, which is a by-product of human speech.
They can also sense matter from the above ground parts of the plant that have been washed down by the rain into the ground. Above ground plants smell each other. If plants smell ethylene they know other plants are nearby.
Orchids are sometimes called "the smartest plants in the world" because of their ingenious ability to trick insects and people into helping with their pollination and transport.
The reason for this is that, despite the lack of any kind of cognition, plants have souls too, according to Aristotle's widely-accepted theory: trees and flowers nourish themselves, they grow, and propagate, and so they have what was usually called a vegetative soul.
Although most plants have flowers with both male and female sex organs, there are several thousands of plant species where male or female flowers form on different individuals. Surprisingly, the presence of well-established sex chromosomes in these dioecious plants is rare.