Yes, plants remember things – they seem more like animals the more we learn

A big, less-heralded science finding of recent decades is that plants turn out to be more and more like animals. NOT like people but like animals:

Plants, we are learning, have internal means of remembering and keeping track of things:

In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers from Nara Institute of Science and Technology have revealed that a family of proteins that control small heat shock genes enables plants to ‘remember’ how to deal with heat stress…

“Heat stress is often repeating and changing,” says lead author of the study Nobutoshi Yamaguchi. “Once plants have undergone mild heat stress, they become tolerant and can adapt to further heat stress. This is referred to as heat stress ‘memory’ and has been reported to be correlated to epigenetic modifications.” Epigenetic modifications are inheritable changes in the way genes are expressed, and do not involve changes in the underlying DNA sequences. – Nara Institute of Science and Technology, “How to beat the heat: Memory mechanism allows plants to adapt to heat stress” at ScienceDaily (June 10, 2021) The paper is open access.

Of course, plants don’t have ideas, as such. What they may remember (have an internal record of) is physical things that happened to them. Epigenetics (the genetic changes that are not inherited but acquired from a life form’s experience and then passed on) may function as a sort of memory in the absence of a brain or mind.

Plants have other ways of remembering things that researchers have begun to learn about over the last decade or two. In some cases, they can transmit information through special cells.

–News, “If you do something to a plant, will it remember?” at Mind Matters News

Plants don’t have minds or brains. But minds and brains don’t turn out to be essential for just keeping track of things.

Takehome: People are becoming, more and more obviously outliers all the time. The pop science prediction had been “less and less.”

You may also wish to read:

Researchers: Yes, plants have nervous systems too. Not only that but, like mammals, they use glutamate to speed transmission (April 11, 2019)

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