Plants as electromic plastic interfaces: A mesological approach

Publication date: Available online 28 February 2019Source: Progress in Biophysics and Molecular BiologyAuthor(s): Marc-Williams Debono, Gustavo Maia SouzaAbstractIn this manuscript we propose the working hypothesis of plants as eco-plastic and electromic interfaces able to drive emergent intelligent behaviors from synchronized electrical networks. Behind the semantic and anthropocentric problems related by many authors to the extensive use of the terms cognition, intelligence or even ‘consciousness’ for plants, we preconize a more pragmatic point of view considering the vegetal world as a complex biosystemic entity able to co-build the world or a form of world or of significant reality via a set of reciprocal, emerging and confluent interactions. Speaking of adaptive sensory modalities involving perceptual binding or a global state of receptivity nonlinearly conducting to cognitive functions, learning capabilities and intelligent behaviors of plants seems to us to be the more realistic and operational model to describe how plants perceive and treat the environmental data. Herein we strongly suggest that the electrome, that mainly involves constant spontaneous emission of low voltage potentials, is an early marker and a unifying factor of the whole plant reactivity in a constantly changing environment and therefore the key to understand the cognitive nature of plants. This dynamical coupling allows plants to be knowledge accumulating systems used by evolution to progress a...
Source: Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology - Category: Molecular Biology Source Type: research