I’ve heard it said that trees are upside down people, with a “head” buried in the earth. It’s a flawed metaphor of course but it gets people thinking. There’s

I’ve heard it said that trees are upside down people, with a “head” buried in the earth. It’s a flawed metaphor of course but it gets people thinking. There’s been some interesting experimental research on how certain plants respond to stimuli and taproot lobotomies. These seem to be evidence for the equivalent of a brain-like computational center in plants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_cognition is a good jumping-off point. For a long time, people thought that applying terms like cognition and intelligence to plants and mold was anthropomorphizing, but nowadays it might be seen as animal-centrism, to proclaim that cognition and intelligence are exclusively within the domain of the animal kingdom. Similar to what you find interesting here, plants seem to have evolved computational structures that are similar to our neural system, in that they have stimuli responses that are biased genetically, but that can also adapt to lived experience via hormonal feedback loops that serve as a kind of memory.