František Baluška is a plant cell biologist at the University of Bonn and one of the founders of plant neurobiology, the study of how plants sense, signal and act on what they sense. In his view cognition, the gathering, storing and use of information, is found throughout living things and not only in brains, pointing to plant cells that fire electrical signals much as nerve cells do, root tips that act like command centres, and plants that can be put to sleep by the same anaesthetics as animals. His critics say plants have no need of consciousness and that the nerve-and-brain language misleads; Therapeutic Shamanism goes further than either side, holding that plants are conscious beings with their own kind of intelligence.
Who is František Baluška? #
A biologist who has spent his working life on the inside of plant cells. He leads a research group in the Department of Plant Cell Biology at the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany of the University of Bonn in Germany.1 He was amongst the scientists who launched plant neurobiology. An initiative under that name was set up in Florence in 2005, and in 2006 a group including Baluška and the Italian plant physiologist Stefano Mancuso proposed it as a new field.2 He has written widely with Mancuso, with the plant scientist Ken Yokawa, and with the developmental biologist Michael Levin. Much of his own research has been on the root apex, the growing tip of the root.
What is the root-brain idea? #
That the growing tip of a root behaves something like the head of an animal. Charles Darwin, working with his son Francis, made the comparison in 1880, and Baluška has taken it into the laboratory. Just behind the very tip of a root lies a short stretch of cells he calls the transition zone, and these cells are unusually active electrically. On his account root apices act as “brain-like command centers”, steering the root through the soil towards water and minerals and away from salt, toxins and danger.3
Plant cells, he points out, share many features once thought to belong to nerve cells alone. Their membranes are excitable and carry action potentials, the electrical impulses that also travel along nerves, and in the root apex the places where neighbouring cells meet resemble the synapses between nerve cells, so he calls them plant synapses. Plant action potentials have been known for more than a hundred and fifty years and control many processes, from the snapping shut of a Venus flytrap to the folding of a mimosa leaf; yet, in his and Levin’s words, they are “still ignored by the mainstream”, with not a single mention in Lincoln Taiz’s textbook Plant Physiology, which they take as the most accepted view of plants in biology.3
What does he mean by cognition? #
Something much plainer than thinking in words. With Levin he takes a working definition from the philosopher Pamela Lyon: cognition is the whole set of processes by which a living thing takes in information, stores it, processes it and uses it, at any level of organisation. On that definition the question is no longer whether a being has a brain, but what it does with what it senses.4
Their joint paper, “On Having No Head” (2016), argues that “neural networks have no monopoly” on the signalling that makes memory, perception and decision possible. Nerve cells refined ways of signalling that cells were already using long before brains appeared, and the same building blocks are found right across the tree of life. So they gather examples of memory and choice without a brain, such as flatworms whose tail fragments, trained on a task, grow a new head and still recall what they learnt, yeast cells that keep a record of a failed mating, slime moulds that find the shortest path through a maze, and plants.4 Levin’s side of that work has an answer of its own; see What does Michael Levin’s work say about intelligence in cells and bodies? The wider field is described in What is basal cognition, and who argues that cells think?
Why does anaesthesia matter to his argument? #
Because it offers a test that crosses the line between plants and animals. In 1878 the French physiologist Claude Bernard put a mimosa under a bell jar of ether, the same vapour that knocked out mice, and found that its leaves stopped folding when touched. Bernard concluded that plants and animals share a common sensitivity, and Baluška and Yokawa open their 2021 paper with his words: “what is alive must sense and can be anaesthetised, the rest is dead.”5
Since then many plants have been shown to respond to anaesthetics. Baluška and Yokawa report that anaesthetics stop plant movements by blocking plant action potentials, much as they do in animals, and that in humans anaesthesia brings a loss of awareness, which “could also be hypothesised to occur for plants”.6 Plants also make anaesthetics themselves, especially when stressed and in ripening fruit. Ethylene, a plant hormone, was once a leading surgical anaesthetic, and plant-made menthol acts much like a modern one. Their conclusion is a broad one. “Plants emerge as truly living organisms with all related cognitive and behavioural consequences.”6 The philosopher Paco Calvo, a colleague, reports the loss-of-awareness argument as theirs and treats it as a possibility, not a finding.7
Baluška and Mancuso have also argued that the electrical signalling of a plant binds its whole body into a single individual. “Self-identities allow vascular plants to act as individuals”, they write, able to tell self from non-self and kin from stranger.8
Is his work disputed? #
Strongly. In 2007 thirty-six plant scientists signed a letter, “Plant neurobiology: no brain, no gain?”, objecting that the name implied nerves, synapses and a brain that plants do not have.9 More recently the plant physiologist Lincoln Taiz and colleagues argued that plants “neither possess nor require consciousness”, and Andreas Draguhn, Jon Mallatt and David Robinson replied to the anaesthesia argument directly: anaesthetics act on many molecules, and without a nervous system their effect on a plant says nothing about awareness.10
Baluška’s reply is that much of the quarrel is about words. It has never been claimed, he and Yokawa write, “that plants have true neurons or neuronal synapses”; the claim is that plant cells carry many of the features first found in nerve cells, and that terms coined for brains turn out to have wider use once similar structures are found in other living things.10 The research goes on. See What does science say about plant intelligence?
How does his work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely in refusing to see plants as lesser beings. Hunter-gatherers did not see plants as things lacking consciousness and awareness, but as “conscious beings with their own kind of intelligence”, part of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, with great teaching and healing gifts.11 Some scientists have come to recognise that plants are conscious too, though in a different way from us, and one reason it took so long is that we had not slowed down enough to notice.12 Baluška’s laboratory work is one of the roads by which science has come close to that recognition, though he himself speaks of cognition and stops short of claiming consciousness.
His concern for what follows from the old view also meets the teaching. Baluška and Yokawa end their paper by warning that treating plants as beings without senses or cognition “has serious consequences for our technology-based exploitation of trees and forests”.13 Therapeutic Shamanism traces that attitude further back, to the move from hunter-gathering to totalitarian agriculture, when humans stopped seeing themselves as part of the land and began to treat it as something they owned, deciding what lived on it and what died.14 See What are Taker and Leaver cultures? and What is the myth of human supremacy?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In two places. First, Bernard’s line, which Baluška chose to open his paper, draws the boundary of sensing at life itself, so that whatever cannot be anaesthetised is dead. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, rocks, rivers and mountains included; things very unlike us are conscious too, only in another way.15
Second, on what a plant is. Baluška and Mancuso stress the plant as an integrated individual with a self. Therapeutic Shamanism places plants far towards the collective end of a continuum that runs from self-awareness to collective-awareness. An individual grass plant has little or no self-awareness, much like one of the trillions of cells in a human body, and all the grass on the planet is part of one single consciousness.16 The two pictures start from different places, the laboratory and the shamanic journey, and can be set side by side. See What is an Oversoul? and What are Plant People, and what gifts do they bring?
