--- title: What did Monica Gagliano’s experiments suggest about plants learning? description: The ecologist Monica Gagliano found in 2014 that mimosa plants, dropped again and again without harm, learnt to stop folding their leaves and remembered the lesson for a month, learning faster when light was scarce. In 2016 she reported that… url: "https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/wiki/what-did-monica-gaglianos-experiments-suggest-about-plants-learning/" updated: "2026-11-10" category: People tags: - associative learning - grokking - habituation - Kasey Markel - Lincoln Taiz - mimosa - Mimosa pudica - Monica Gagliano - Paco Calvo - Pavlovian conditioning - pea plants - plant bioacoustics - plant learning - plant memory - Plant People - plants as teachers - replication - Thus Spoke the Plant --- # What did Monica Gagliano’s experiments suggest about plants learning? The ecologist Monica Gagliano found in 2014 that mimosa plants, dropped again and again without harm, learnt to stop folding their leaves and remembered the lesson for a month, learning faster when light was scarce. In 2016 she reported that pea seedlings could learn to link a fan's breeze with light, as Pavlov's dogs linked a bell with food, a result that a later, larger attempt did not reproduce and that is still argued over. Together with her book *Thus Spoke the Plant*, her work suggests to many that plants learn and remember; Therapeutic Shamanism already treats plants as conscious beings and great teachers. ## Who is Monica Gagliano? An evolutionary ecologist, born in 1976, who grew up in northern Italy and trained as a marine ecologist before turning from animals to plants. She is a research associate professor of evolutionary ecology at Southern Cross University in Australia, where she directs the Biological Intelligence lab, and earlier did her best-known plant experiments at the University of Western Australia.^[1](#note-1) Her book *Thus Spoke the Plant* (2018) tells the story of her research alongside her own encounters with plants.^[1](#note-1) She has also co-edited collections on plants in science, philosophy and literature. Her approach was to bring the methods used to study learning in animals into botany, designing experiments, in the words of one report, as if the plant were an animal.^[2](#note-2) 1. "Monica Gagliano", *Wikipedia* (read 8 November 2026); "Monica Gagliano", Harvard Divinity School (web page, read 8 November 2026). 2. "Clever plants learn behaviour", University of Western Australia news release, 28 April 2014. ## What did the mimosa experiment show? That a plant can learn to ignore something harmless and remember it. The sensitive plant, *Mimosa pudica*, folds its leaves when disturbed, a defence that costs it time it could spend catching light. Gagliano's team dropped potted mimosas fifteen centimetres down a rail onto a foam base, sixty times in a row, several times in a day. The plants soon stopped folding their leaves at the drop, whilst plants dropped only occasionally went on folding. Plants kept in low light learnt faster than those in bright light, which makes sense, since folding up costs more when light is scarce. And when the plants were tested again twenty-eight days later, they still did not fold.^[3](#note-3) Habituation, a falling-off of response to a repeated, harmless stimulus, is counted in animals as a simple form of learning. Some plant scientists, amongst them the plant physiologist Lincoln Taiz, would rather call what the mimosa does 'habituation' or 'desensitisation' than learning. The philosopher [Paco Calvo](/wiki/what-does-paco-calvo-argue-in-planta-sapiens/) answers that psychology's own dictionaries define habituation as a form of learning.^[4](#note-4) The study was published as "Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters".^[3](#note-3) 1. Monica Gagliano and others, "Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters", *Oecologia* 175(1), 2014, pp. 63-72; "Clever plants learn behaviour", University of Western Australia news release, 28 April 2014. 2. Paco Calvo, with Natalie Lawrence, *Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence* (Bridge Street Press, 2022), Chapter Three, "Smart Plant Behaviour". ## What did the pea experiment claim, and has it been confirmed? Something bolder, and it is not settled. In 2016 Gagliano and colleagues grew pea seedlings in Y-shaped mazes, where they could grow towards one arm or the other, and paired blue light, which young peas grow towards, with a gentle breeze from a small fan. After training, they reported, the seedlings grew towards the breeze even when no light came, as if the fan had come to mean light, in the way Pavlov's dogs came to salivate at the bell.^[5](#note-5) In 2020 the plant scientist Kasey Markel repeated the experiment with more plants and with scoring done blind, and found no evidence of this kind of learning, nor the near-perfect steering by light that the original study had reported, though he did not rule it out, noting that he had used a different variety of pea and calling for further attempts. Gagliano and her colleagues replied that his set-up let in stray light and that light did not reliably steer his plants, so it could not test the question. Calvo, who works in the same field and is sympathetic to it, writes that his own laboratory "has not yet replicated" the pea result.^[5](#note-5) See [What does science say about plant intelligence?](/wiki/what-does-science-say-about-plant-intelligence/) 1. Monica Gagliano and others, "Learning by Association in Plants", *Scientific Reports* 6, 2016, article 38427; Kasey Markel, "Lack of evidence for associative learning in pea plants", *eLife* 9, 2020, e57614; Monica Gagliano and others, "Comment on 'Lack of evidence for associative learning in pea plants'", *eLife* 9, 2020, e61141; Paco Calvo, *Planta Sapiens* (Bridge Street Press, 2022), Chapter Three. ## Can plants hear? Her work suggests that, in their own way, they may. Gagliano has long studied sound in plants. In a 2017 study, pea roots in dry soil grew towards the sound of water running through a pipe, even when they could not reach the water itself. Where real moisture was also present, the roots followed the moisture, and background noise upset their response. Her team suggested that roots may use sound to find water at a distance and moisture to home in on it.^[6](#note-6) 1. Monica Gagliano, Mavra Grimonprez, Martial Depczynski and Michael Renton, "Tuned in: plant roots use sound to locate water", *Oecologia* 184(1), 2017, pp. 151-160. ## What is Thus Spoke the Plant about? Her research, and how she came to it. The publisher calls it a "phytobiography": first-hand accounts of her work on plant communication and learning, set beside her up-close encounters with the plants themselves and with plant shamans, indigenous elders and mystics, telling how she made her discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.^[7](#note-7) It was published in Berkeley by North Atlantic Books. The book sets personal experience and laboratory science side by side. 1. Monica Gagliano, *Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants* (North Atlantic Books, 2018), publisher's description. ## How does her work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? Most closely in taking plants seriously as beings that learn. Hunter-gatherers saw plants as "conscious beings with their own kind of intelligence", part of the Peoples**The 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](/wiki/who-are-the-animal-plant-and-stone-people/), with great teaching and healing gifts.^[8](#note-8) A plant that remembers a harmless shock for a month is hard to treat as a machine, and Gagliano's mimosas give that older recognition a laboratory form, though her claims are about learning, not consciousness. Her results also sit easily beside the teaching on plant nature. Plants live at a much slower pace than animals, free of worry and of the restless need to keep doing things, and to understand them from the inside a person has to slow right down.^[9](#note-9) A mimosa that learns, over a day, to stop reacting to a disturbance that does it no harm can be set beside that picture of a being that is not swept along by every alarm. The way she learns from plants, through relationship as well as experiment, has a cousin in shamanic practice. Shamans the world over have often revered the Plants as the greatest of teachers.^[10](#note-10) In Therapeutic Shamanism the Plant People are met in the shamanic journey, by slowing down enough to grok a plant, to resonate with it and almost become it, and a plant is met as the whole of its species, a vast being to which every single specimen is connected.^[9](#note-9) See [What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples?](/wiki/what-are-grokking-dieting-and-research-in-working-with-the-peoples/) and [What are Plant People, and what gifts do they bring?](/wiki/what-are-plant-people-and-what-gifts-do-they-bring/) 1. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter Eight, "Hunting and Gathering". 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Two, "The Plant People" and "A Different Kind of Consciousness". 3. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Two, "Plant Can Heal Our Deepest Wound". ## Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? In what a test can show. The pea and mimosa experiments ask whether a plant can do what an animal does, and Pavlov's dogs are the measure. Most tests of consciousness are built around the human kind, self-awareness, so they find other beings lacking; the bias is built into the experiment, and the result then seems to prove us right.^[11](#note-11) Plant consciousness is collective. Each plant is a small part of the consciousness of its whole species, much as a cell is part of a body.^[12](#note-12) A laboratory test of single seedlings may miss that altogether. And in where certainty comes from. Science asks for replication, and the pea result is still open. Animism does not wait on it. Animists experience the world as alive and conscious, and the aim is to experience this, not merely to believe it.^[13](#note-13) See [Is the living world intelligent?](/wiki/is-the-living-world-intelligent/) 1. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter One, "The Myth of Human Supremacy", and Chapter Two, "A Different Kind of Consciousness". 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Two, "A Different Kind of Consciousness". 3. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Shamanism Is Part of Animism". - [What does science say about plant intelligence?](/wiki/what-does-science-say-about-plant-intelligence/) - [What does Paco Calvo argue in Planta Sapiens?](/wiki/what-does-paco-calvo-argue-in-planta-sapiens/) - [What did František Baluška argue about cognition in cells and plants?](/wiki/what-did-frantisek-baluska-argue-about-cognition-in-cells-and-plants/) - [Is the living world intelligent?](/wiki/is-the-living-world-intelligent/) - [What are Plant People, and what gifts do they bring?](/wiki/what-are-plant-people-and-what-gifts-do-they-bring/) - [What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples?](/wiki/what-are-grokking-dieting-and-research-in-working-with-the-peoples/) - [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/) (Chapter Two, the Plant People and a different kind of consciousness) - [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/) (Chapter Eight, hunting and gathering) - [all courses](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/shamanic-courses/)