Can a Plant Remember? This One Seems to—Here’s the Evidence – Phenomena: Curiously Krulwich

Originally shared by Rob Jongschaap

Can a Plant Remember? This One Seems to—Here’s the Evidence – Phenomena: Curiously Krulwich

'... so what Gagliano wondered was: If she dropped 56 plants 60 times each, would these plants eventually realize nothing terrible was going to happen? Would any of them stop curling?

Or, to put it another way: Could a plant use memory to change its behavior?

To find out, she kept going with her experiment. And, as she writes in her paper, fairly quickly “observed that some individuals did not close their leaves fully when dropped.” In other words, plants seemed to figure out that falling this way wasn’t going to hurt, so more and more of them stopped protecting themselves—until, as she later told a room full of scientists, “By the end, they were completely open … They couldn’t care less anymore.”
...'

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/15/can-a-plant-remember-this-one-seems-to-heres-the-evidence/
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/15/can-a-plant-remember-this-one-seems-to-heres-the-evidence/