What does it feel like to be a plant? To have the slightest idea, we'd first have to know how light tastes, and learn to recognize the smell of phosphorus in the soil. We'd have to know how it feels to vibrate, with our entire bodies, to the sound of a bumblebee's flight.

Plant Sensory Experience

The sensory experience of plants is not like ours, not in any way. Although recent research in plant physiology reveals that plants can hear, feel, taste, and see, these words are merely analogies. A plant "hears" by resonance. It "feels" in electrical signals conducted through a vascular system of water and mineral salts. It "tastes" bouquets of organic chemicals.

Plant "Sight"

Plant "sight" is more contested, but nobody disagrees that plants are phototropic: they always turn towards the light. Some plants have been shown to judge distance by sensing the quality of the light passing through their neighbors' leaves; others are such uncanny mimics that neurobiologists believe they must be seeing their subjects.

Hidden Plant Eyes?

A recent paper suggests that leaves might even have primitive eyes, or "occeli," hidden somewhere in their leaves. Even if they did have eyes, plants wouldn't "see" like we do. It's convenient to call that sensory pathway "sight," and it underlines a human-like intelligence in plants.

Anthropomorphizing Plants

A funny thing about humans, though: we often anthropomorphize things in order to give them value. It's almost as though we have to compare plants to ourselves in order to think of them as intelligent at all.

Unique Plant Senses

We can never know what it feels like to be a plant, because we'll never know what it's like to be a plant. In addition to "human-like" senses like touch, hearing, and sight, plants have at least fifteen other senses we don't, like the capacity to measure soil humidity and salinity, sense gravity and electromagnetic fields, and measure chemical gradients in the air and soil.

Plant Sensing vs. Human Sensing

Plant sight is not human sight at all, nor are any of the plant senses. Plant sensing is far more suited to a plant's place in the world. For one, they can't escape their problems. While mammals can always seek greener pastures, plants are sessile, or rooted in place.

Plant Adaption

Plants, as light eaters, never had an evolutionary imperative to travel: the sun's abundant buffet wasn't going anywhere. As a consequence, however, plants have no choice but to adapt to whatever's happening around them. Is it any wonder that they're so perceptive?