Daniel Chamovitz > Quotes

“Think about this: plants see you.

In fact, plants monitor their visible environment all the time. Plants see if you come near them; they know when you stand over them. They even know if you've painted your house or if you've moved their pots from one side of the room to the other.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“My grandmother didn’t study plant biology or agriculture. She didn’t even finish high school. But she knew that she could get a hard avocado to soften by putting it in a brown paper bag with a ripe banana. She learned this magic from her mother,”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses: Updated and Expanded Edition

“To borrow terms from Freudian psychology: the plant psyche is devoid of an ego and a superego, though it may contain an id, the unconscious part of the psyche that gets sensory input and works according to instinct.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses: Updated and Expanded Edition

“A shared genetic past does not negate eons of separate evolution. While plants and humans maintain parallel abilities to sense and be aware of the physical world, the independent paths of evolution have led to a uniquely human capacity, beyond intelligence, that plants don't have: the ability to care.
So the next time you find yourself on a stroll through a park, take a second to ask yourself: What does the dandelion in the lawn see? What does the grass smell? Touch the leaves of an oak, knowing that the tree will remember it was touched. But it won't remember you. You, on the other hand, can remember this particular tree and carry the memory of it with you forever.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“While the mechanisms involved in electrochemical signaling are complex, the basic principles are simple. Just as a battery maintains its charge by housing different electrolytes in different compartments, a cell has a charge owing to different amounts of various salts in and outside the cell. There is more sodium on the outside of cells and more potassium inside. (That's why salt balances are so important in our diets.) When a mechanoreceptor is activated, let's say by your thumb touching the spacebar on a keyboard, specific channels open up near the point of contact in the cell membrane that allow sodium to pass into the cell. This movement of sodium changes the electric charge, which leads to the opening of additional channels and increased sodium flux. This results in the depolarization that propagates along the length of the neuron like a wave propagating across the ocean.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“In his phototropism experiment, he showed that the tip of a shoot sees the light and transfers this information to its midsection to tell it to bend toward the light. Here, Darwin and his son showed that the tip of the root feels the gravity, even though the bending occurs farther up the root. From this Darwin further hypothesized that the root tip somehow sent a signal up the rest of the root to tell it to grow down with the gravity vector.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“A recent (and provocative) study in Science showed that men who simply sniffed negative-emotion-related odorless tears obtained from women showed reduced levels of testosterone and reductions in sexual arousal. So subtle olfactory signals could potentially affect many aspects of our psyche.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“La Asociación Internacional para el Estudio del Dolor define el dolor como «una experiencia sensorial y emocional desagradable asociada con un daño de tejidos real o potencial o descrita en términos de tal daño».”
― Daniel Chamovitz, Lo que las plantas saben: Un estudio de los sentidos en el reino vegetal (Ariel)

“A plant can be pulled in many directions at once. Sunlight hitting a plant at an angle caises it to bend toward the rays, while the sinking statoliths within the plant's bending branches tell it to straighten up. These often conflicting signals enable a plant to situate itself in a position that is optimal for its environment. The tendrils of a vine, searching for a support to grab onto, will be attracted to the shade of the neighboring fence, and gravity will enable the vine to rapidly twirl around it. A plant on a windowsill will be pulled by the light and grow to one side, toward the sunny part of the sill, while the force of gravity will influence it to grow up at the same time. The smell of the tomato will pull Cuscuta to the side, while gravitropism will push it to keep growing upward. Just like Newtonian physics, the position of any part of the plant can be described as a sum of the force vectors acting upon it that tell a plant both where it is and which direction to grow.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“El siguiente experimento corroboró la idea de que el brote del amor seco recordaba cuál de sus hojas vecinas estaba dañada. En esta ocasión, Thellier clavó las agujas a uno de los cotiledones, tal como había hecho previamente, pero varios minutos después arrancó ambas hojas. Y descubrió que la planta retenía el recuerdo de los pinchazos: una vez cortada la yema central, el brote lateral opuesto al cotiledón dañado original crecía más que el situado en el lado de dicha hoja.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, Lo que las plantas saben: Un estudio de los sentidos en el reino vegetal (Ariel)

“De manera que la próxima vez que pasee por un parque, deténgase un segundo para preguntarse: «¿Qué ve el diente de león de ese parterre? ¿Qué huele la hierba?». Toque las hojas de un roble sabiendo que el árbol recordará que lo han acariciado, aunque no recuerde que ha sido usted quien lo ha hecho. En cambio, usted sí puede recordar ese árbol y atesorar ese recuerdo en su interior para siempre.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, Lo que las plantas saben: Un estudio de los sentidos en el reino vegetal (Ariel)

“Plants are acutely aware of the world around them. They are aware of their visual environment; they differentiate between red, blue, far red, and UV lights and respond accordingly. They are aware of aromas surrounding them and respond to minute quantities of volatile compounds wafting in the air. Plants know when they are being touched and can distinguish different touches. They are aware of gravity: they can change their shapes to ensure that shoots grow up and roots grow down. And plants are aware of their past: they remember past infections and the conditions they've weathered and then modify their current physiology based on these memories.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“These weightless plants were placed on a large rotating centrifuge that mimicked gravitation, much as Knight's waterwheel had years and years earlier. The plants could be continuously monitored by a camera while they rotated. Very soon after feeling the g-force, the plants started moving in more exaggerated circles. Both the size and the speed of the movements of the spinning plants were similar to those detected on the arabidopsis plants grown on Earth. This revealed that gravity is not necessary for the movements, but rather modulates and amplifies the endogenous movements in the plant. Darwin was correct: as far as we know, circumnutation is a built-in behavior of plants, but this behavior needs gravity to reach its full expression.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“In 1924, Frank E. Denny, a scientist from the US Department of Agriculture in Los Angeles, demonstrated that kerosene smoke contains minute amounts of a molecule called ethylene and that treating any fruit with pure ethylene gas is enough to enduce ripening.”
― Daniel Chamovitz

“Como hemos visto, las plantas son organismos sésiles anclados al suelo por las raíces. Si bien pueden crecer hacia el sol y combarse con la gravedad, no pueden huir. No pueden escapar. No migran con las estaciones. Permanecen quietas afrontando un entorno que cambia de continuo.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, Lo que las plantas saben: Un estudio de los sentidos en el reino vegetal (Ariel)

“Darwin, Julius von Sachs, descubrió que la luz azul es el color principal que induce el fototropismo en las plantas, mientras que estas suelen ser ciegas al resto de los colores, que apenas las afectan o las hacen cambiar de dirección.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, Lo que las plantas saben: Un estudio de los sentidos en el reino vegetal (Ariel)

“pregunta: ¿de qué nos sirve recordar algo si no nos ayuda a actuar de manera distinta en el futuro?”
― Daniel Chamovitz, Lo que las plantas saben: Un estudio de los sentidos en el reino vegetal (Ariel)

“Stefano Mancuso, de la Universidad de Florencia, Frantiöek Baluöka, de la Universidad de Bonn, y sus colegas han desarrollado aún más la hipótesis de Darwin que compara el cerebro con las raíces, hasta el punto de utilizar el término «neurobiología vegetal» para destacar las similitudes entre plantas y animales.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, Lo que las plantas saben: Un estudio de los sentidos en el reino vegetal (Ariel)

“Darwin found that all plants move in a recurring spiral oscillation, which he termed "circumnutation" (Latin for "circle" or "sway"). This spiral pattern varies between species and can range from a repeating circle to an ellipse to a trajectory of interlocking shapes much like the images from a Spirograph.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“With his makeshift centrifuge, Knight had applied a force on the seedlings that mimicked gravitation and demonstrated that the roots always grew in the direction of this centrifugal force-while the shoots grew in the opposite direction. Knight's work provided the first experimental corroboration for Duhamel's observations. He showed that roots and shoots respond not only to natural gravity, as Duhamel showed, but also to an artificial gravitational force supplied by his waterwheel-powered centrifuge. But this still didn't explain how a plant could sense gravity.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“Flying halfway around the world puts our circadian clock out of sync with the day-night signals, a phenomenon we call jet lag. The circadian clock can be reset by light, but this takes a few days. This is also why spending time outside in the light helps us recover from jet lag faster than spending time in a dark hotel room.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses: Updated and Expanded Edition

“Plants are not cognizant. When we cut a leaf, we assume that the plant is suffering. But that's our own anthropomorphism about what's going on.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“Las plantas no tienen ojos, de la misma manera que nosotros no tenemos hojas.*, 10 Pero ambos detectamos la luz.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, Lo que las plantas saben: Un estudio de los sentidos en el reino vegetal (Ariel)

“The idea that damage has to be pain is mistaken. We feel pain because we have specific types of receptors called nociceptors which are programmed to respond to pain, not to touch. People can have genetic malfunctions where they feel pressure but never feel pain because they don't have pain receptors.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“They compared the compounds emitted by leaves following bacterial infection with those emitted following an insect feeding. Both treatments resulted in the expression of similar volatile gases, except for two gases that discriminated between the two treatments. The leaves under bacterial attack emitted a gas called methyl salicylate, and those eaten by bugs did not; the latter produced a gas called methyl jasmonate.”
― Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

“¿podríamos pensar que lo que hacemos al contemplar las plantas es proyectar una imagen de nosotros mismos?”
― Daniel Chamovitz, Lo que las plantas saben: Un estudio de los sentidos en el reino vegetal (Ariel)