| MadSci Network: Botany |
No, as far as we can tell. Plants do sense the environment in many ways and respond to it so some botanists, or plant scientists, consider plants to be intelligent: Trewavas, A. 2003. Aspects of plant intelligence. Annals of Botany 92: 1-20 There are some nonscientists who believe plants grow better with certain kinds of music, when they are talked to nicely or when they are prayed to. However, this is considered pseudoscience by real botanists. The bestselling book "The Secret Life of Plants" contains a lot of plant pseudoscience such as Cleve Backster's experiments on hooking plants up to lie detectors. Of course, lie detectors were not designed for plants, and plants have no brains. Ask yourself, would a brain-dead person feel emotions? References Science Projects on Music and Sound Pseudoscience Plant perception (a.k.a. the Backster effect)
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