Stefano Mancuso: The roots of plant intelligence
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 11 окт 2010
- www.ted.com Plants behave in some oddly intelligent ways: fighting predators, maximizing food opportunities ... But can we think of them as actually having a form of intelligence of their own? Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso presents intriguing evidence.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10 
Наука
Ultimate ... There were no snails harmed to make this representation... Brilliantly superb. The animated video is not a creation, it's our behavior we need to improve and evolve for our society . Hats off to you TED .
One of the best TEDTalk I've listened recently... It was a true "consciousness riser". Thank you, Professor Mancuso!
This is amazing! I never thought of this before in my life!
Loved the ending haha, awesome TED talk
Excellent talk! Mind opening..
Merci pour cette présentation Dr Mancuso, travaillant aussi sur les plantes, votre démonstration est passionnante et éthiquement appréciable. Bravo
Great! I would love this in 1080p :)
These are great talks! Thanks TED
This guy has the perfect accent! I love how i can understand him and i can laugh at his accent!!! Awesome vid. learned a lot!
Italian
audio transcription is friggin hilarious!
@TerminalSulcus Well, you have a very valid point. Thank you.
Love the time lapse of the sunflowers -- they're like a litter of puppies!
But what the heck is that animated film doing, stuck on the end? Talk about a non sequitor!
His accent reminds me of those online text-to-voice readers. Not a bad thing. :p Great video.
Incredible
Good morning Prof. Mancuso.
I appreciated with great interest the speech you published. I believe it has considerable implications and concrete possibilities.
It is always a pleasure to admire Italian creativity and intelligence on the international scene.
Some phonetic tricks would have given greater impact to the contents you have illustrated (above all, where they refer to well-known British naturalists).
I also express the desire that you strongly support the possibilities that plants provide for the elimination of cruelty to animals.
Thank you.
Antonello De Bellis
Buongiorno Prof. Mancuso.
Ho apprezzato con molto interesse il discorso da Lei pubblicato. Ritengo abbia notevoli implicazioni e possibilità concrete.
È sempre un piacere ammirare la creatività e l'intelligenza italiana sulla scena internazionale.
Alcuni accorgimenti fonetici avrebbero conferito maggiore impatto ai contenuti da Lei illustrati (soprattutto, laddove si riferiscono a noti naturalisti britannici).
Esprimo inoltre il desiderio che Lei supporti con vigore le possibilità che le piante forniscono alla eliminazione della crudeltà nei confronti degli animali.
Ringrazio.
Antonello De Bellis
I like his ideas and investigations. I think he probably jumps into conclusions and asserts certain things without a visible reasoning. The part that I think is the most relevant of the talk is that where he shows that there are action potentials in the tip of the root of plants. He does not show, however, how these action potentials make an actual network with the rest of the plant (how does the information form one tip reach another and for what use).
Molto bello! Bravo !
@Prytanus
You are right, Mancusco is certainly anthropomorphising. He often looks at evolved traits and attributes this to intent (though calling something a 'clever adaptation' is still fairly common in biology). But plants are underestimated and discounted: They do move, they do sense, they do communicate and monitor their environment and respond to it.
one of the best TED of late. Although, Paul Stamets made the connection between the internet and mycelia a while back
I love this video -- but what is animated short doing at the end of this?! Non sequitur, ahoy!
It's a very charming little cartoon. But it confuses me, in this context.
Awesome~
@Prytanus I don't know the name for the phenomenon. I was reading about it in a book about plant interaction. It's somewhere among my books, but I honestly don't know where it is. I have way too many books and they are presently in disarray. If I see the book, I'll try to find the section.
brilliant
Watch the short movie at the end it is cool I've seen it before somewhere tho.
@Prytanus Plants communicate with other plants. This happens for example when one plant is being eaten. The plant will send chemicals into the soil where roots of other plants will pick up what is being communicated and will go in defense mode. This doesn't by itself prove intelligence or consciousness, but it makes it extremely more probable.
Excellent :)
Kept thinking of old sci-fi movie, "Day of the Triffids".
@Chimerathon I made my statement with a bit tongue in cheek. I agree with your assessment.
02:05 pyramaaaajd :D
Great video and great accent :D
@Saktoth Agreed, intelligence arises out of physical interactions, be they chemical, electrical, or mechanical.
Conciousness makes more sense in a physiological description of a biological entity, like differentiating between states of (sleep, awake), or thought location (concious or subconcious thought).
Sentience makes more sense as describing if an entity is self-aware, be it biological or mechanical (computer).
An example for observing self-awareness is behaviour when looking in a mirror.
@DanHipp I only read the paper "Root apices as plant command centres: the unique ‘brain-like’ status of the root apex transition zone" by František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso, Dieter Volkmann, and Peter Barlow. They make the strong case for plant's intelligence, but do not mention anything like nociceptors in plants.
I commend this paper to you (for its own sake, not to prove my point).
This guy has the best accent ever. I dont care for his constant anthropomorphication of plant life, but the idea of growing machines is an interesting one.
"That iz wrong"
Is this the guy that does the Group X Hashmir lyrics?
@thernr Mancuso admits in a published paper that although plants have complex synapse-like structures, "Plants clearly lack any centralised control site and resemble colonies of social insects, like ants. Their development is proposed to be driven more by a collective specification than by central planning." So plants do not "feel pain" in any way that is even remotely sentient or conscious. It is more accurate to say that have stimulus-response mechanisms for external injury.
Ah, 480p old friend
@DanHipp I`m not sure what you mean about John Searle. As far as needing a brain for intelligence I would agree in a limited sense, some form of high level information processing would appear to be required, not necessarily an animal like brain.
"Where are the plants?" That made me laugh with embarrassement, not sure if I've ever done that before, lol. Why have I never thought about that?
this guy is pretty cool, and w00t for the slug!!
that was cool
@steve0281
I would argue that nobody need feel guilty about eating any living organism. Especially with the intelligence of plants being called into question. The implication is that there would be little difference between choosing to eat one living thing with rudimentary intelligence over another. With no other alternatives, there is no moral dilemma.
@gulllars
Physical structure is what determines chemical reactions. Structure is complexity. Chemical or electrochemical my point is that intelligence arises out of physical interactions.
Really though, what do 'consciousness' or 'sentience' mean? How do you know them when you see them? Even from a broader, structural perspective, define how we know an organism has them? How would one expect such a thing to behave, which isnt dependant on other functions, like language or communication?
nice vid
@BlowDevilUp to point was people always foreget about plants
@WeatherManToBe I never knew Mario was a botanist too!
@DanHipp Ok, but do you disagree that plants are sentient or conscious in an ethically relevant sense (e.g., that they suffer from pain in the way humans or dogs suffer from pain)?
Love his accent, like mario is talking
I have to say I have a newfound respect for plants now
@DanHipp I agree the brain is a collective of modules, but this is not incompatible with it being a centralized planner. In people with, severed corpus callosum, for example, we see two "planners" in one body. See "Split-brain" on Wikipedia.
Besides this, no one has ever claimed that plants are remotely sentient or conscious. They simply do not "feel pain" in any ethically relevant sense. For our purpose, this is the crucial point.
I want TED in HD :(
J875
@Prytanus I'm relatively smart (depending who you compare me to). More importantly, I've done enough research on mind-body research and theory to know how complex it is and to know how little is known. There is just not enough known about this subject to fairly state accurate probabilities. I didn't make an argument that things are unknowable. My argument is simply that withholding conclusive opinion is the most intellectually honest position to take until further research clarifies it.
@nelsyeung We can test for intelligence such as to see if a plant can learn about and adapt to it's environment. That is how we'd test intelligence in humans or other animals. What we don't understand is consciousness which can't be measured. We can't even determine that another person is conscious. We just assume other humans and other higher animals are conscious because they have similar behavior as us.
plants may have systems similar to nerves but they probably work much much slower. maybe the more developed plants even have "thoughts" but again, each thought is created over a much longer period of time.
I like his accent.
10:59 Do plant roots form 'small world' networks?
no, they form a "world wide wood" (not mine, taken from another ted talk with a plant researcher)
finally some gud video on ted
The biggest organism (that we know of) is a honey fungus, not a plant. Fungi ALWAYS get the short end of the stick.
It is not a very new observation that plants have intelligence, it is just that Stefano Mancuso, is framing it for the science/rational worldview. In many indigenous and spiritual traditions around the world everything has spirit whether it is plants, trees, rocks, rivers, mountains etc. So everything is alive and is imbued with spirit/intelligence/feeling and if we disturb the spirits in nature, lets say a tree, the tree spirit will react by causing sickness or ill fate to the disturber.
@gspahr Well be fair to the guy. He spent his time in a botony lab and not a elocution lab. Brilliant mind. The quality of the thoughts and the passion for his work outweighed any small effort to understand him. There are a lot of native English speakers who're at the same level of diction but haven't near as many wonderful things to say.
I don't understand how someone can be fluent in a second language yet have such a strong accent...
I would love to hear your accent spesking Italian, you sausage head!
@thepianoaddict haha she said 'oh shit is he talking bout me?'
i remember thinking "how do trees feel, sitting there for thousands of years, doing nothing. Must be depressing to be a tree" XD
so youra favorita footaballa teama, theya maka a touch goal???
2:32 googly eyes
Read Michael Chricton book "Micro". Scary!!!!! But TRUE!!!!!
@thernr Well, I've contemplated this issue before. Regardless of whether a plant is able to feel or not (which is certainly an open question. Mind you, we do know animals feel), a vegetarian diet still significantly reduces the overall suffering. This is why: To breed animals you need a lot of plants, hence if you eat meat, you are indirectly harming way more plants (about 19 times more) than if you ate the plant directly.
Go deeper.
@JuriDee the ark and souls were simply to show that throughout human history and literature, we've assumed plants to be only somewhat alive, and only slightly above "rock" status
I wish he would've showed us some of the work on the "plantoid hybrids". Doesn't seem like he has done much...
yes basically - but not just birds also mammals (ie us). There is even a theory in evolutionary biology that certain grass species (eg wheat) have evolved hinges on their seeds (ears) so that they fall off easier and are easier to harvest by humans - clearly a successful strategy .
@gspahr Yeah but I think it was to show how long human thought has excluded plants when it considers life. It was more in the way of a secular look at bronze age literature by the proxy of a picture in a magazine than a statement for or against religion, like his review of that renaissance chart or of Darwin's book in 1880.
@Prytanus
Descartes was actually a substance dualist, he was a physicalist only in regards to non-human things. But i know what you mean.
Consciousness is the 'you', that perceives things. You cannot prove that anything has or does not have this thing.
Intelligence is complex reactions in response to stimuli, it is compiling a large range of information and reacting dependent on that stimuli. A thing can be more or less intelligent. Plants are not -that- intelligent, but they are intelligent.
I had to watch this twice because the first time I could only think of Peter Griffin speaking Italian and the Mario Brothers.
@TheLiberalSoup she's so memeable. xD
@Saktoth correct on the literal meanings, but i disagree that reaction to stimuli require a sensing of senses, and that the terms are not usefull. Also humans being only a complex chain of chemical reactions is a fallacy.
First; humans. We are made of of complex structures of chemicals, but the physical structure of the compounds play a major role. Also, our nervous system has an electrical component.
If you analyse it from a the perspective of reverse engineering, the terms are usefull IMO.
@TabuaGerenteDoItau no, hes a brilliance-ist
@ratholin You're right. Let me point out that I enjoyed the talk, even though quoting scripture troubled me.
not aplant but a fungi is the giggest creature
SUBTITLES PLEASE.
Dumb racistic ignorant comment
I think this guy might take up substantial part in planet terraformation with Plantoids.
@Prytanus
What, you think that it just magically divines the direction of the sun through some metaphysical means rather than being aware of it?
Good luck proving that YOU are conscious, by the way.
13:31 - The advantage of having no hard body parts.
IT'SA ME! MARIO!
LOL check out the blonde at the bottom left of the screen at 2:30
@Prytanus Actually, that isn't a good analogy. A muscle (such as an arm muscle) doesn't move unconsciously, although some muscle reactions happen faster than consciousness. However, the human heart does move unconsciously, but the heartbeat can be altered through conscious intent. Anyway, you were speaking of a muscle moving because of unnatural stimulus. A plant moves because of natural stimulus. Plants will chemically communicate with other plants such as when one plant is being eaten.
You haven't heard my italian, 'cause I don't appear speaking it on any of my videos. And I doubt you are right, you can achieve native speech in any foreign language, given enough time and effort. Check out Richard Simcott here on youtube. He does a great job at that. And he's English.
Side note: I make an active effort to sound as good as I can in my other languages, my first comment was about people's laziness to speak properly foreign languages, I just feel embarrassed when I hear them.
I'm hearing Mario speak a lot... where's Luigi?
@thernr Now we gonna eat light. =D
2:26 Women at the bottom left :D WTH!
@djindox3 he is Borat ..No?
@Saktoth Consciousness is a higher level of intelligence. Still higher you find sentience, which is self-aware concious intelligence. Human beings are scentient, and so the 'you' that percieve things may or may not require scentience. What's your thoughts on that?
I agree btw on your point on intelligence and plants.
Nice presentation. There is however one flaw in his speech. The biggest creature on the planet is a fungus, which spans almost 9 square kilometres.
@TheLiberalSoup I heard she killed him after the presentation
He forgot to mention that mushrooms are the only other living organism on the planet that can communicate with language.
@MarmaladeINFP intelligence is defined as the ability to solve problems... unfortunately intelligence and stupidity aren't mutually exclusive in our species but they might me in other species.
Hyperbolic... but not inaccurate.
@BlowDevilUp If you actually watch the video beyond the first 30 seconds, you'll notice he was making the point that plants are overlooked in importance. The bible reference was just a common reference point that most people would recognize, he wasn't saying there was actually a flood.
The 'roots' haha.
PyraMAID? BERRY NICE!
@GrudgyDiablo 800,000 years old? Is that the one the trolls live under? Of yeh, sorry completely forgot about that one.
@Prytanus
Oh, and if you are a physicalist, you should have no problem with the notion that plants (and computers) might be intelligent, or even conscious. These traits arise purely out of complex information gathering, comparing, storage, retrieval, and reaction. There is nothing else to it than that. If a plant has more complexly connected parts tasked with the gathering and interpretation of sense data, by what standard is it less intelligent?
@MarmaladeINFP Your idea of what intelligence is seem flawed (but you are not at all alone in it), but correct me if I am wrong. But it seem that you assume that intelligence is the ability to be able to react to a changing environment. At least that seems what Mancuso is arguing.
But it is not the ability to react to a changing environment that constitute intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to know how to react/and plan for it in case a change happens. watch?v=G6CVj5IQkzk from 10.15