Your Houseplant is Smarter Than It Looks

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There has been a sweeping reevaluation of animal intelligence over the last decade as we’ve realized that all kinds of organisms are smarter than we thought. A similar movement is occurring in the study of plants. Botanists have been discovering that plants have remarkable abilities to communicate, adapt, behave socially, act on stored memories and trick animals among other intelligent behaviors. We talk with author Zoë Schlanger about her new book, “The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth”. Guests: Zoë Schlanger, staff writer, The Atlantic; author, "The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:32.2	From KQED.
0:37.2	Music From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:49.2	Botany can feel like the mustiest of sciences, huddled back there next to agronomy and just a few places
0:55.8	away from alchemy.
0:57.6	Don't we know everything we need to know about plants presumably limited capacities?
1:03.9	Zoe Schlanger's new book, The Light Eaters, argues that botany is undergoing a slow revolution,
1:09.8	a classic paradigm shift, as scientists come
1:12.6	to understand that plants process many types of information. No one yet really knows the limits
1:19.1	of what a plant can do, Schlangor writes, and we're only now developing the tools to find out.
1:24.4	We'll take a tour of some of this astounding new science right after this news.
1:35.3	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrill. It's so good to be back with you.
1:40.5	Plants and animals diverged evolutionarily so long ago that maybe it's helpful to think of these green organisms as aliens, or perhaps vice versa.
1:51.0	Plants form the bulk of life on Earth after all and are responsible for maintaining the atmosphere that we animals require for our lives and creating the sugar from sunlight that ultimately powers us all.
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