Gustav Theodor Fechner championed the idea that plants have souls – something we might call ‘consciousness’ 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. We found Fechner covered in the New York Times bestselling book by Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins titled The Secret Life of Plants (1973).
In 2006, 30 years after The Secret Life of Plants, a bold group of scientists published an article calling to establish the field of ‘plant neurobiology’ with the goal of ‘understanding how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion’. 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 – though, unlike Fechner, they often try to identify molecular-level functional similarities between animal and plant substrates. Like Fechner, they argue that plant behaviour is intelligent – ‘adaptive, flexible, anticipatory, and goal-oriented’ – rather than simply hardwired instinct, as evidenced by experiments that document plant learning, kin recognition, communication.
