Gustav Theodor Fechner championed the idea that plants have souls โ something we might call โconsciousnessโ today. I first learned of him in an interdisciplinary reading group on plant consciousness that I co-lead at Harvard University. We convene biologists, theologians, artists and ethologists to explore the burgeoning literature on plant life. ย We found Fechner covered in theย New York Timesย bestselling book by Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins titledย The Secret Life of Plantsย (1973).
In 2006,ย 30 yearsย afterย The Secret Life of Plants, a bold group of scientists published anย articleย calling to establish the field of โplant neurobiologyโ with the goal of โunderstanding how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashionโ. In other words, how plants might have something like minds.
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Many of the points Fechner makes… are now being made again, albeit with different evidence, by contemporary plant neurobiology researchers. Like Fechner, these scientists reject a fetishisation of neurons (despite their name). They carry on his claim that plants possess something analogous to animal brains โ though, unlike Fechner, they often try to identify molecular-level functional similarities between animal and plant substrates. Like Fechner, theyย argue that plant behaviour is intelligent โ โadaptive, flexible, anticipatory, and goal-orientedโ โ rather than simply hardwired instinct, as evidenced by experiments that document plant learning, kin recognition, communication.
