Intelligence Without Brains

[Music] good evening and welcome to this wonderful festival you may not notice it because you're in New York but plants actually dominate the Earth's environment they make up 80% of Earth's biomass and by comparison all animals including us amount to less than half a percent or as one plant biologist puts it just traces so we want to begin with the question how have plants managed to be so successful when they don't have any brains or do they can plants learn think abstractly even communicate to again let's start with the little film about the checkered history of the study of plant intelligence look let's be honest the idea of intelligent plants seems like a flashback to the 70s wouldn't many believe that plants enjoyed listening to music him having us talk to them those ideas had their roots in the work of this guy Cleve Backster welcome to the Badgers a former CI a lie-detector expert who claimed he could communicate with plants telepathically I have to get a certain distance away from my lab so that my consciousness won't affect the results Baxter's research was popularized in a book the secret life of plants published in 1973 which also claimed that plants prefer classical music to rock and roll and that they have emotions a plant attached to the instrument is able to feel the mutilation of its comrade secret life of plants it was insane but very popular was a huge bestseller it turned out to be full of pseudoscience and I think gave a bad name to the whole area of inquiry it was a major setback to a field pioneered by Charles Darwin in the late 1800s Darwin was convinced that plants had an intelligence he proposed that this intelligence resided in their root tips later in the early 20th century scientists Jagadish Chandra Bose demonstrated that plants were aware of their environment and responded to electrical stimulation and time-lapse photography offered a new perspective on their behavior time-lapse is amazing because it plans to operate in a different scale of time than we do we're continually being surprised by what they can do and how sophisticated they are to send signals to one another to trade information and trade goods this is to bean plants and they're sensing one another and competing over this pole and they're not both going to get it and you'll see that one of them gives up on that pole and starts looking elsewhere so how are they aware of each other in space I don't think we know yet there is growing evidence at plants that communicate learn new behaviors compete for resources and even respond to attack and it's not just plants fungi appear to share resources and information through a wood wide web a microscopic network of tree roots and mushroom fibers leading us to wonder if it's time to expand the definition of intelligence to include organisms with no brains at all how many people here talk to their plants well our first participant I don't know if she does but I wouldn't be surprised because she does amazing work and is willing to go out on the edge she's a professor of evolutionary ecology at the University of Sydney in Australia her work is raising profound questions about plants and their ability to communicate learn from experience and cooperate please welcome Monica Gagliano our next guest is a professor of forest ecology at the State University of New York's College of environmental science and forestry where he studies the wood wide web of fries I love a hidden network of underground fungi that connect plants and trees please welcome Tom Horton rounding out our first group of guests is a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology where he directs the swarm lab he is a biologist who studies collective behaviors in slime molds army ants and verlox please welcome simona Garnier so let me start with you Monica your you've done pioneering work to help establish the field of what's called plants bio acoustics and one of your first experiments involved chili plants can you tell us about this and what you were trying to answer and what you found sure well first of all I that was was indeed my first experiment with plants because I used to work with animals and by training I'm an animal ecologist working with fishes on the coral reefs so I didn't really know anything and still don't know very much about plants but you know they are teaching means so that's good and so when I approached the question of communication in plants which of course in the animal fields is really an easy question to ask because we ask it all the time I started from ok so what do we know if we know anything about communication in plants and there were three main channels plants we knew they use light to tell who is growing next to them and whether you know it's a problem or not they use of course chemicals and touch basically if they bump into each other they know that that's no good and depending who they're bumping into they will change their behavior too so ok so what happen if I shut down those possibilities of communicate would they still know who is growing next to them so I used chillies just because they seemed easy to grow that was a very deep and meaningful reason and and then I used basil plants as the good companions and the fennel which is known in companion planting for anyone that is got a garden families can be quite aggressive and so usually is not planted in the veggie patch with everyone else and so okay so fennel is gonna be my bad guy and basil is the good guy and I wonder if the chili now is who is inside the box and so I created these matryoshka boxes that would you know look up the plants into like okay I can't see you I can't smell you I can't touch you would I know as a baby chilli who is there and they did and so there's I oh no and now so then of course as often is the case and and when you you stumble in those places like oh no now is you I think you know you're you are onto something even if you don't know what it is and so basically okay okay so obviously they know and obviously they must use some other way of knowing that is not what we already know about them and so I kind of because of my animal background I kind of went into like oh maybe sound because sound in animal ecology is used everywhere we've looked maybe there are other channels as well and so the by acoustic kind of developed from stumbling into like I don't know what's happening here but it's often the case in science I would say right so yeah so you discovered that they were tuning into the sound of they knew exactly who was growing next to them yeah and then you also discovered that plants not only respond to sound but also make sounds can you yeah yeah I guess that one was the more disturbing part for many of my colleagues because one thing is I our okay they they my respond to the sound surrounding them and they kind of it kind of makes sense but the fact that they might produce their own sound so they have their own voice which is different than plants singing or plant making music that's the clarify yeah and actually this work was done we colleagues in Bristol and they were also animal ecologist working with insects of all things and and they were looking at the antenna of certain insert including like tiny mosquitoes pick up vibrations and produced their own vibration so we use the same technology which is laser technology and and basically we we check plant roots instead of mosquitoes antennas and then of course there was the signal and it was I and what are we gonna do with this now and and this is the signal it's looped because we only had brief times but yeah this is our plant sound like when he's producing its own sound of course it's loud at this stage but the frequencies within our audio arrange as well and which means that potentially our ears actually could hear this it's just at the amplitude so the volume of that sound is is not very loud and you can imagine roots under the ground so you know when people are also just in it I could hear is that absolutely if you're ready to put your ear on the ground be super quiet and wait and most people's are okay I believe well I imagine that your colleagues were skeptical about this to say the least very kind so is the field of bio plant bioacoustics now you think consider wholly legitimate what are you laughing at laughing at the question that'd be well like is often the case in science in particular but I think in many spaces of human endeavor at the beginning is always tiny steps and hard and that kind of thing and then suddenly one person and then another group and then they start building and as knowledge builds we get more comfortable about the ideas and then it's kind of like are we it's no brainer we do that and philosophy hey you prepare that one yeah I did philosophers has told us this before and you know it's a it's a history of science and it may be not just science and so I guess we are at a point when I'm starting to see and even sent papers to review on this I know and so the fact that they even consider me a legible reviewer is amazing but yeah so the fact that there are these works coming through it's a great sign and and I remember earlier on when you know sometimes doing doing an interview in someone so would you hope out of these work and and of course often they think I also they I don't know I become famous so you know and you know sigh I hope he becomes totally redundant and it means that is so obvious and he's so acceptable accepted that we're not even gonna talk about this because it's just like a given he's like I of course oh yeah we all know the plants make noise so that still is my best wish to that science so C Mon you work in something else that mm-hmm maybe people are skeptical about that is intelligence of slime moles yeah always laughing [Laughter] but tell us what a slime mold is it's not a plant or an animal is it a fungus what is this not a plant it's none of anymore it's not a fungus it's not clear white Fitz and the Tree of Life it's little scientific name is Maximus it I guess that's the way you would pronounce it it's very weird organism there's no question about this it's actually a new unity the organism that can be pretty big all you see all the yellow mass you see is one single cell here and that can be several you know you can grow it on several square feet if you have enough time in food as a single cell but unlike the surgery up in your body that all have a single nucleus these can have millions and millions of nuclei inside it's called a syncytium name and yeah I mean a little bit like you write the eye I'm an animal behavior specialist to urgently and the reason I study slime all know is because I hired a guy a few years ago to work on ants and then he came and said I want to work on slime all instead I was like fine what you want to do is it and he was like what I want to have them play the casino and it was like all right the casino so we did in experiments where we had slime will play the casino and then the residents were like the slime was actually pretty good at it oh yeah it wins against the casino so slime mold is capable of solving this problem that seems to be typical problem that we normally ask to organism with brains I mean the this casino experiment is called the multi-armed bandit problem it's something that is studied in pigeons and humans and all sort of brain animal and then we show that it's actually can be solved by organisms that don't have brains don't even have neurons and that's how we started and then this summer we are very close to actually showing what other molecular mechanism allowing them to make these decisions if you allow me to talk about this I mean how do they do this what are they what are they doing this so they actually use their muscles for that huh which is kind of contrast yeah so this time'll if you have the video if we can show the video again and you you might see that you have this procession right this this is actually also sped up the disposition happens about every minute minute and a half and the slime mode and it's actually the membrane of the slime mold contracting expanding and choosing actin myosin which is the same type of proteins that are used by your muscles to contract that's why I call them muscles and that precession is essentially what helps the slime will redistribute its biomass throughout its entire body now what we seem to be happening is when the slime will hit something that is good it actually relaxes there and just by sheer physics right everywhere is this poor thing and so there is influx of material is going toward that location where that started relaxing so it makes decision by finding something nice and then relaxing there and it can also sort of solve mazes yes that's a very famous experiment we actually won the Nobel Prize back in 2001 if you don't know the ignoble prize is a price for science that first make you laugh and that make you think it's not my price I didn't win that but yes a group of Japanese and Japanese researchers they actually won for the research on slime were twice the ignoble price first for this experiments where they showed that if you put the slime mold on a maze it's capable of actually finding the shortest path between the entrance and the exit of the maze which is something that if you have a 3 or 4 year old at home isn't they not capable of doing this yet they will at some point if they don't then you have a problem and then the second experiments that they dip down in which I think we have sort of a video of that with the map of the u.s. yeah so that's sort of a recreation of that experiment but this team worked on the Tokyo subway network so they reproduce the Tokyo subway network using pieces of food pallets of oat flake which for some reason the slammer gloves and they showed that this diamond will create a network connecting all these different palates and network the property of the network very close to a perfect network that engineers were designed to connect different train station in the Tokyo area and that one also the ignoble price but these two experiments sort of kick-started this field in biology of the intelligence of slime mold and all the capable of solving this problem that was just about 15 years ago now do you see this is some kind of Intel I mean would you define this as intelligence I try to not use the word intelligence when I can I use what problem-solving because I can define this as a problem the problem in this case is the case of the network for instance is balancing things like the cost of building the networks but also the robustness of the network's to perturbation and so that's a problem a trade-off that they need to be able to solve the question whether that is something that we consider intelligent it depends on how I mean we can backtrack a little bit but in a history of testing intelligence on measuring intelligence we have created a battery of tests and some of these tests are about optimizing this trade-off and so the question is now either we have to discard all this test because simulpast it and decide that this test actually don't test intelligence or we have to admit that they are intelligent but I will not pronounce on exam I want to know I want to be reviewed - essentially it's a question of the past test that we have given to brain animal then we have considered this test of intelligence I'm guessing the word itself just the actual root of the word basically means choice between so you know if you choose to go that way instead of this way and then you choose again and then you choose again and you're directing that choice to resolve a problem then by that definition you will be intelligent but again I agree with you it's like a problem solving decision making seems to be more appropriate but not just for the slime mold of the plants or whatever but even for even for us you know and the problem exactly where that can be testable yeah so Tom you you're working on sort of another part of this biological Kingdom looking at the interact between fungi and trees what is this wood wide web and what is that the root of these networks of these networks the roots so the wood wide web I guess I could think of my own history through this I was a plant ecologist first and watching how certain trees could a seed would land and get established here but not over there and find out that there were very different fungal networks underground that would support the tree here but as a different group over there and I was fascinated by that and I started to dig in a little bit ok I [Laughter] gotta up my game because I'm not very good at it what I discovered is that plant ecology has largely worked in the absence of understanding what's going on below ground other than the roots and so when we've tried to figure out how to nutrients get to plants we either use a hydroponic system in the absence of the fungi or we use something like a rabid OPS's the lab rat of plants that is in a family that doesn't form mycorrhizal associations but here is a single seedling associated with one fungus if any of you know your fungi that SAS Willis you wouldn't know because it's not making a mushroom on top but that Network is very much analogous to the mix of my seat's Network thus I'm old they're going after resources you could see nodules with the root tips they're getting all the carbon so that primary resource is carbon from the plant that's the sugar and then the that fan of hyphy are very actively searching for other nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus and so you see this beauty and you could put a little plug of nitrogen in one spot in that little microcosm and the hyphy will hone in on that spot and if you label that phosphorus it shows up in the plants very quickly the fungi harvest it and it gets back up into the plane I was fascinated by that I thought my gosh let's read more about this I looked in the botany tasks text books I had there's a paragraph on mycorrhizae I looked in the ecology and probably the word occurred often spilled right I was fascinated this was and this was back in you know not long ago for some of us 1990 or so it started to get into the ecology textbooks sorry I was too in high school oh listen son so I and I thought what am I going to do for my career other than I get to study fungi which I was I had already had a fascination with this I realized that plant ecology needed to go to I could get in there and understand the fungi and bring my ecology into plant ecology jumping ahead so that was a paper published in that journal by Suzanne Simard which some of you may have heard and if you haven't you should really look up her work she was showing with isotopes that is labeled bits of carbon that Douglas fir was communicating with birch in Mick stands like you're seeing here the birch is in fall colors the Douglas firs a conifer obviously and that communication is very active out in nature I'm very interested in how that impacts seedling establishment during succession say after a fire but she has been showing that there's this communication in these forests they are not static individuals there's this larger holistic thing going on below ground that we've been walking right over sorry I'm sorry these fungi are acting like little electrical wires or pipes I see them as highways and going back to the next slide again to the next use that one you can see the highways you know that's let's see I don't know my highway names here but it's a three-way and then there's city streets and then there's places you can walk and it just increasingly gets and finder which I which is question so when you talk about communication are you talking just like exchange of nutrients Oh actually like signals that modify the behavior of the other partner yes so I'm talking about sharing or movement of nutrients in my world I feel that nitrogen phosphorus are highly interacting throughout the networks in the in our bus cooler this is gonna get a little bit too much in the weeds but I'm gonna try in the are muscular mycorrhizal fungi which associate with seventy percent of the plants that you see out there so in a field they're all interconnected through these mycelial networks doesn't matter how many treat how many plants are this would be a meadow though not trees they are all one cell there are no septa oh like your side moles and there are thousands of nuclei and when they make a spore I've seen videos where the nuclei are moving along as the spore expands and they're delivering thousands of nuclei into the spore and sometimes the nucleus goes through the little branch and comes back out and decides not to there's a lot we don't know but if I can go to the next slide so this is remember one individual of fungus here are two species in the ecto mycorrhizal world where the trees are at least in North America the temperate forests they are not all one cell and nor do they really interconnect into one continuous stream they're all well to put it in a they're all in it for themselves maybe one way to look at this and you can see that these two hyphy are different species and they are not connected so they may be off the same tree the nutrients may be going from the tree into both but they're not interconnected they're not utilizing each other's resource base and and the same thing for the fungi thereafter the phosphorus and the nitrogen they're bringing it back to the tree but they're not doing it together they're not you doing it as a single unit did that answer your question yes thank you thank you she gave you a great so my question was about whether that communication affected the behavior of I gather I was just an exchange of if I if I poke a plant here will that modify them if you have the plants a great question is what I trying to get us so the the one data point I could bring in from the research I'm aware of is that if a plant gets chewed on by an insect and the experiment was elegantly done with all the controls in place that'll that plant can send signals that will go through the mycelial Network and the next plant will put up its defenses perpetual and if you break the - network by cutting them it doesn't happen and it's not going through the air that signal it's not going through the root it's going through the my Celia so there is communication yeah that's what you call so it's kind of using it like infrastructure it's really just taking advantage of it yep and published within the last five six years maybe so it's and I there's more there have been many more papers on that the chemical communication both below and above ground is crazy yes it's like it's happening at the the right and and it's mirrored in the literature in the scientific literature how many papers are coming out and how many different combination of studies and plants they've been looked at in that context specifically so it's pretty cool but but isn't it fascinating that we have the textbooks that are using in you know from high school up through the College of through graduate level books that people are using and they forget to mention the mycelial networks the fungi are you saying textbooks up behind no time they're a little yeah maybe it's time you write the next one well I have been involved but it doesn't get fair play and I've stopped being no sorry sorry kind of symbiosis or somewhat like mutually exploiting each other and so that's great I love that so in my lab we often throw that question up and we say is this a mutual what is a mutualism reciprocal parasitism yes what do you mean by that so they're both one organism needs the carbon I mean the plants don't need carbon that's the number one resource that most of us need but plants don't they fix it and they make a lot of extra and they leak it down into the roots and support a microbial community but they do need nitrogen of phosphorous and it's the other way around for all the microbes they need the nitrogen excuse me they need the carbon but they can get with all that carbon from the plants they can go out and explore and absorb through extra cellular digestion the nitrogen and the phosphorus a lot of enzymatic activity movement of material through the hyphy through septa etc it's not like some guy at a communist well if I go back to you when I started my Master's that's I was in San Francisco and I was like man this is the 60s all over again just like that film only jumped back one decade I was like wow so cool but then things started to get a little harder during my degree and if you came a little more competitive shall we say so you did some experiments with living the most plant that I guess was also sending ripples through the field of plant biology because it did suggest that there was learning and actually remembering at first surprising amount of time can you talk about these experiments well I should clarify it wasn't a suggestion it was data-driven so it was demonstrating which is different and and I'm clarifying this because one of the typical comment that I would get about that study was don't believe you and I'm like okay you don't have to but can we talk about my data I mean we philosopher or are we doing science just you know because you know if we're talking about philosophy then maybe yeah you're right you depending on what is your vision of learning and memory and whatever then maybe there is something that to discuss but if we're talking just about the science of and this is experimental science so here is my experiment here is my data let's talk about that and and yeah and there wasn't much of a willingness to talk about the data but the experiments was very clear and it was mimosa pudica or the sensitive plant which of course as you saw as well in the little video the beginning is you know it was a plant that was used from Darwin to Bose and many others and actually is a plant even from the ancient times it's always attracted our attention why because it moves at our timescale and so we can actually see it doing something and so oh yeah mimosa does behave everyone else is just static and seen as a kind of object in the background and that actually does have a term any scope plant blindness and it comes from the education research which has demonstrated that humans are kind of blind to plants and since we when we are literal as well so I school kids find it very difficult to recognize plants but they are very good at recognizing animals that they would never ever meet like a lion but but you know if you show them a plant of like a tomato plant they'll be like I don't know so but anyway that aside and so mimosa was a choice because it was a good bridging point between you know learning and memory is naturally associated to something that any must do so using a plant or having a plant as a as a model for testing this kind of question would normally restricted to animals was you know applying the moves was a good start in place right and and the dis parent was very simple because of what I did I started looking at the most basic of learning and even that even within the animal literature we talk about this kind of learning which is the technical term is a [ __ ] ooh a tion and you're doing it right now because you're not paying attention to the lights to the smell to the temperature to these and they're like oh you are but you're kind of you have already decided that it's not gonna kill you right now so you can kind of ignore it but if the alarm was gonna go off right now your body would be ready to respond so the idea of a [ __ ] ooh Asian is that you are bombarded by all these information or signals and you know you are your body is detecting them and then kind of waiting but this happened mostly unconsciously waiting you not to decide whether this is gonna be a problem or not and if experience tells you look you can ignore it then you ignore it and you so that you can actually focus maybe on the person talking in front of you maybe not maybe you already you have a just a [ __ ] weight reduced you and why who knows but um so the idea is very simple like you can't pay attention to everything that is happening around you all the time because you wouldn't last very long so you cut out you removed the information that is irrelevant to you right now and but you want to be responsive in case some relevant bits of information arrives like alarm so I did the same experiment and I used mimosa and basically the question was the same is like if I do something that is kind of scary or disturbing at first but it's not deadly it looks like it could be potentially a problem but actually through experience the plant should realize that I'm nothing really happens so this plant closes the leaves quite rapidly when it's disturbed and so as you just saw I created this kind of torture thingy but no plants were hurt during the conduction of this experiment so basically I would drop the plant and the base of the structure is foam so the plant will be dropped from a set height and of course the first time that the plant is dropped the plant closes the leaves because it's like a bubble set then you do it again and then you do it again and this is Ali what we would do if it was an animal you don't you repeat and you repeat several times and mi mi what we call that repeat is the train and the train for this experiment was like 60 drops consecutively but what what happened as you can see from that cartoon is that the plants actually after two three of those supposed to be 60 drops there was no I got it I got it nothing is happening and I'm not bothering closing my leaves and he makes total sense because of course open leaves full photosynthetic capacity right when you close your leaves you might protect yourself from predators for example so that you look smaller or these plant is go spines they stick out when the leaves are closed so you know it's a you're defending but if there is actually no danger you defend it against nothing but by closing you are cutting away your opportunity to feed on light and for this plant when the leaves are closed it loses by 40% of photosynthetic capacity that's a lot especially if there is no reason and so in my experiment actually I had plants they were in environment where there was lots of light so making mistake is not that critical you can make an extra mistake it's okay but there was a group of plants sorry there was actually in environment with where there was sufficient light but not an abundance of light so making the wrong decision there could have been more critical and as you my can guess what the plants do is like when they are in good environments they take their time to learn they still learn but they are slower and yeah whatever I can drop another time well the one that are in low-light environments of course it's there is an urgency to get it right because that could be in a real scenario could be really dangerous thing to do if you don't get it and so those plants learn very quickly and so it's all excellent you know France you know it looks like learning the trick so then what you do is like I wonder how long they can remember this because because memory is not a separate thing memory is an intrinsic aspect of learning learning is a process and memory is one aspect of that process so you do not leave them alone for a while and then you come back and I'm gonna disturb you again and and the truth is that I and this has happened to me a lot with plants I don't know if you guys have the same experience with your critters but my plants just you know totally embarrass me every time because you know the question would be like would you remember what you had for dinner three days ago no exactly me neither I don't even remember what I had this morning I had difficulty for breakfast so but so I thought like three days I come back in three days there should be enough they won't remember and they did just as if we just did that and then say okay then I come back in six days and again it was like yeah we know this trick and I was out finding so I left him for a month and and not only that but I divided my original groups low-light highlight enough some of the plants stayed in those groups where they general so the environment where they learned the trick became remained the same as when then I tested them a month later but the other half of the of each group got swapped so some plants learn in a lowlight environment but then they found himself tested in a high light environment and vice-versa and so did you know suddenly like okay so you learnt a trick but is context-dependent so would you change what you're doing and what was interesting many things were interesting one day after 28 days the plants were like yeah is the draft would you stop it I mean it's a be annoying actually if you don't mind we got it and so then was the first embarrassment since I okay great and but the other really interesting thing was that for of course the plants is stating in the environment they were they were trained they just performed as expected the plants they went from low light environment from a high light environment to a low light environments so they they learned in a comfy place but then they found himself in on oh so comfy place well those guys suddenly behave as I off the environments gone bad and so the response was very quick but the interesting part was for the other group the one that went from the low light environment to the high in your side now you can relax the environment is gone good right but they don't and once my suspicion is that what they are doing is I not only they are learning the trick and they remember but I also learn in another aspect of that context which is the environment changes the environment can change and he went from bad to good once so it can return to bad again so they remain on alert as if he's I okay any time now you could just go back that way and you know so we're ready and they do this and of course there is no brain or neurons and that is the part it's very disturbing to some it turns out though that they're using some of the the same sort of processes like calcium signals which is you know how the brain cells working us the real question is like we don't the real answer is that we don't really know that's that's the truth but then we can pretend and and we can look at some of the chemicals that yeah as you mentioning some of the chemical and some of the some of the substances that we have we have targeted as these are neuro transmitters and I suddenly by giving the name neuro transmitters means that if you don't have neurons you can't have the transmitter but in fact we actually share the same transmitters and if we didn't call them neuron we would have saved ourselves a big pain because they're exactly the same so a lot of things like the famous things like a dopamine serotonin and many other chemicals that you know we are quite familiar with and interact with our synapses and brain function and all of that are shared and but by calling them in opposite like so the language itself is already locking us up in certain corners we're then we need to come out of an and that's when we find it uncomfortable but so our tongues have calcium channels and that's what makes them hot with peppers the calcium channels open up so my tongue actually often has a brain that I wish it didn't have three things but I wonder if it's similar I mean calcium channels seem to be sort of in a lot of places right oh yeah and that's what I mean not always a neurotransmitter so exactly yeah yeah but that's the theme in what is pointing uh when we look at it without being too hung up to the language you know like who cares if that it's intelligent behavior or noise like what is he actually doing and what is the function you know what is it why is he doing that what is he doing that for and then even oh it's done becomes quite like oh yeah you know yeah this is how fast when a plant this is not my work but it's how fast that signals can move when opponent is under attack so it's just that we haven't been able to see some of these responses and because they are invisible literally to our eyes and this plant in particular which is the beautiful lovely a rabid OPS's not a plant because they don't more mycorrhizae but you know these are kind of responses that now by playing with technology we've been able to literally see but they've been occurring all the time and the speed at which they are occurring it might not be the same in all systems but it's pretty fast and relative to what it's useful in the context of their organisms like for plants which are know in a hurry that's really fast in slime mold they also seem to learn and do be also transmitted that learning to others right yeah so I mean that's what you're referring to is one of the most fascinating experiment of the past year in my opinion was done by who they do shoot on a team in Toulouse in France and I don't know if we have the picture that may be easier to explain but it's in - it's an experiment of habituation as well right you have slime all at the the yellow mass at the bottom and then the top path is actually a platform is food and in between there's this bridge that actually contains salt and slime wall doesn't like salt like most cells they don't like to move on salty things because that's pump out the water out of them and in this experiment or a manager essentially to train the slime or to learn cross that dangerous bridge to get to the food that's not even like the coolest part of the experiment here right this time or if you have a set of slime mold you cut it in half you have two slime molds and then you put them back together defuse and you're once nine mold again so that's what she did you essentially took this train steinwald got a peter piece out of it and then fused it with this timer that wasn't trained and that new mix slime mold but that was trying the powder wasn't trained retain the memory retain the behavior of the slime wall that was trained and so that was this a fastening like sort of mind-blowing idea that you can train a part of the organism you cut it out and then you mix it with a part of another organism that's not been trained and then there is transmission of that memory between the two organisms as diffuse with each other where is that memory being stored we don't know right like it's you have to imagine this is a field that is we still at the behavioral level we're looking at the behavior of these organisms we're trying to understand their behavior and observe and quantify it but we have not looked much into the molecular mechanisms then and what are the molecules that are doing that memory there I think this is great and my work as well in the classes and my students there are so many times when I say we really don't know the answer they ask great questions we really don't know but it's a great time to be here because we're making incredible gains and we've got all these tools we just need enough people to ask the right questions and it's it's a fascinating time and I think in all of these the name of the person said that the tech science is a being at the forefront of ignorance and and I should find that quote like the person who said that but we're really there we don't know what's happening but we are we are starting to have the technology and the tools in all the molecular mechanism to make up molecular tools to be able to get into the mechanisms inside the cell and then try to figure out where the cells told that memory it's probably not going to be stored the same way it is told in neurons or maybe the thing is like what I find fascinating is that you know this system because they are basal so they're if you imagine the tree of life these guys are all pretty much sitting at the base of the tree and the roots of the tree and so in a way the tips well compared to us you know they are and and in a way is almost like well evolution likes to tinker with material and building blocks that are all available right so well if these guys are doing all of these things then the building blocks already there and so how we memorize things at the most you know fundamental level plays with the same bill is likely that it plays with the same building block and understanding in this system I actually helped us understand better what we are doing and with all the beauty of our brain and our neural system but and so it's it's a win-win situation because it's like we understand these organisms better and they might surely help us understand better what we're already trying to understand about the human itself or the higher animals so getting into our act 3 here which is collective intelligences and so we're gonna be talking about not just creatures that you wouldn't expect are intelligent but the idea of bringing things together and having an intelligence just through collective action and we're gonna take I'm gonna bring in the next two people one of them is a MacArthur Genius award winner and professor of engineering at Princeton where she studies collective intelligence in bird flocks fish schools ants honeybees zebra herds and robots so please welcome Naomi Leonard and our final guest is a tropical biologist author and photographer research associate in the Department of Entomology at the Smithsonian Institution and a visiting scholar at the Department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard please welcome mark Moffatt so speaking of swarm intelligence there are leaf cutter ants and I just actually was reading today that ants have the largest brain per body mass of anything is that true of anything well I would guess have larger but as Darwin said the brain of an ant is the most marvelous atom in the universe because of what it can do so and so can you talk a little bit about this amazing Society of leafcutter ants and how they function together well the message I always give to folks is that ants are really marvelous because some of them particularly ones with large societies like the leaf cutters how are really much more like humans than chimpanzees ants have to figure out all kinds of problems that no chimpanzee has to deal with and the leafcutter ants is an example there are lots of differences they are aliens compared to us but the similarities are marvelous and leafcutter ants for example we have the video of them carrying leaves build highways that are very marvelous things they build about three kilometers of highway a year in some colonies these are colonies these are pictures of mine from the air and Paraguay showing nests which are as big as this room and as as deep in this room so these nests are enormous and that white sand is just something they've brought up from deep below ground and those are highways going out in all directions and they're carrying back those leaves you just saw that previous video and so in the next picture we can see what what happens this is below ground as they say very complicated architecture all kinds of work going on there by the ants this we're excavating into this while these soldiers are ripping up our our skin and they have an air conditioning system that keeps everyone cool and oxygen into all those chambers and the next slide demonstrates what they're doing and you may not guess why they're doing it quite yet maybe you know but they cut up these leaves their jaws are about 40 percent zinc so they're literally can openers that cut the leaves like this they actually vibrate their bodies like electric carving knives and this is a certain kind of ant that's good at this task and it carries it back to the nest and it turns out I think it's shown in the next slide that they do not eat leaves it was thought for a while that they might but what they do is that their agricultural species that are raising a fully domesticated fungus thank you this is a fungus that was domesticated many year millions of years go and the ants have all the elements that you might think of as farming going on here first will they have special problems they have to reduce those leaves in this case grass stem as you can see to a mulch and then insert fresh fungi hyphy in those places like a farmer would put baby plants down and then they have to deal with various pests so they have pesticides and fungicides that get rid of anything that doesn't suit them and every size of ant and there are different sizes that do different duties has a different one of these tasks the leaf cutting ants are relatively large and you go down and down in size so the smallest ants are actually involved with keeping those Gardens pure plucking out anything that doesn't belong there and the next slide shows that smallest ant doing that task and this is a domesticated fungus they domesticated this fungus about 40 million years ago became fully dependent on the ants and like domestication and humans it means that we're doing all the work the fungus are getting a free ride like the wheat plants are the wheat plants have conquered the universe because of us there's so many more wheat plants than anything else and these fungi actually have little nodes on the tips that have the complete and balanced diet of the ant in them there's a little white blobs there that you see in the face of that ant gives them anything they need next so this is just going through the this story now the communication of these ants they're not the brainless but it's pretty small and involves simple signals I'm particularly interested in identity how they societies stay apart some of its ends have more muscles in the head than they have brains actually they do yes and I would think that you know I feel like I'm the smallest ones probably don't but the soldiers would definitely do this slows Reserve the big and dumb and they just know how to cut you up as if you were a leaf and most of these cues are signals are going back and forth between them as they touch each other and answer you can actually determine many things when they're walking down the trails and you see them stop for a second in front of each other they actually can determine and shown for some species what the other ant is doing and they will assess as they go on what the ants and the colony are doing by the ones walking by and decide themselves what they're going to do that day and so this leads to a very efficient society and right down to the last detail on the last slide here you I said that answer doing all kinds of things that chimpanzees don't do when I can tell you one thing chimpanzees don't do is worry about public hygiene and health issues and this is an ant that's a trash collector and you can become a full-time trash collector in an ant colony and believe it or not you can become a specialist an old trash or new trash removing dead bodies to the gravesite that's a job and burying this stuff about 30 feet down some of these large colonies which is equivalent to us putting our worst hazardous wastes three kilometers below ground don't get bad ideas and so and they build these chambers just for the wastes that are as big as a coffin for a small child not a nice image but a pleasant inside and you can imagine how many billions of years combined of all these thousands and thousands of ants it takes to make a chamber that big that far underground just for public health reasons and the reason for that is the diseases that that might carry could destroy the gardens and these ants live and die down there producing this into a mulch that becomes harmless so that's some of the story of how these particular ants work which are among of course the more complicated species out there which is why I picked them out who's making the decisions I mean who's the boss now in a super-intelligent ants would wonder what the heck humans are doing apparently we keep some guy in the White House and if we just take them out we can like take over the whole country what is that about I mean have you ever tried to stop ant you can step on them all day in your kitchen and they're just gonna keep coming and having no leader is a way of being very functional as long as you're organized enough and everyone has enough information to make the right choices appear in aggregate out of all these individuals do you think of each individual ants is like a neuron well it's an interesting thing because basically a large ant colony an ant colony like the leafcutter ants there are a large army ant swarm has an aggregate the same number of neurons that we have in our head but distributed among many individuals and so you can ask yourself what leads to the best result putting all our eggs in one basket so a single bulletin or head can destroy us or distributing ourselves I think of it as a kind of Marvel Comics superhero imagine if you could fall apart into a million pieces you're starving to death but you fall apart into a million pieces and these little mini brains go out and find food that you could never find underneath things feed you and they come back together and there you are again you start you know composing music or whatever you can do with your brain in one place only ants and humans have societies of millions and sometimes billions of individuals and once you have a lot of individuals who have to deal with public health issues and the way that no other vertebrate other than humans does has nothing to do with intelligence and us to do with the fact you have to put together society that stays healthy brainless or not Naomi you've been studying sort of collective behavior of other animals with small to middling sized brains like ants worms honeybees schooling fish bird flocks right what do you think we're learning from looking at those kinds of swarming behaviors well I mean the like these starlings are actually stunning not just beautiful but remarkable and what they can do I mean they inspire me every day I mean I started working on these problems in the context of design of sensor networks of robotic vehicles that would go into the ocean to collect data and thinking about how I would instruct each one you know program up their computers so they would communicate in a sense once and one another and move in patterns to collect data and if you think about that going into the ocean it's it's a crazy heart there's so much uncertainty so many things can happen it's so opaque and to solve these kinds of problems you know I had to make a swarm that would be sensitive to information in the environment that was important and then also insensitive to all these you know uncertainties and perturbations and noise and when you look at these kinds of bird bird flocks or fish schools or ant colonies that forage in harsh environments and I started talking with biologists I learned that these these animals actually balance this kind of trade-off between being able to be super flexible being able to be super responsive to and sensitive to signals that matter you know a predator food of migratory route that they have to figure out and then not not be concerned with some kind of you know disturbance or false positive and doesn't fall and and so the questions that I've been looking at really reach into both contexts and I actually do use the the the connection between individuals as neurons and the group as as the swarm as as a brain because there's a lot in common in these in these settings in the in the in the design setting you know I'm asking these questions how do I you know gives these individuals rules to spawned to what they they measure about the environment to respond to what they sense but the neighbors that they can see or hear or communicate with so that at the level of the group they're they're flexible and and and responsive but also robust and in the animal world the the the biologists that I work with ask the same kinds of questions but the the opposite direction so they observe these behaviors and they want to know what it is that individuals are doing so what are the underlying responsive behaviors for individual fish or an individual bird how does it respond to what it senses about its neighbors are they doing similar things so school yes and it's it's not just that they're moving in beautiful ways they're actually moving to carry out tasks or they're carrying out tasks as they move together so what might look like this aerial ballet when you saw that the murray-darling the murmuration of starlings is probably more likely an evasion of a predator as a group more a foraging activity or you know sensing and learning about a migration route and and that's just kind of remarkable that they can do this and so so in so in my work week we saw so my work is involved in trying to understand sort of from a mathematical and physical principles perspective what are those interconnections what is it you know what are the rules that animals are using what is it about my neighbor that elicits a response you know if you mon starts running this way am i going to follow him and what if mark runs the other way you know do i don't get us started the questions that you know you were asking what if you know there's food over here or there's something scary over here but my neighbor goes this way should i you know do what this other plant is doing or should i you know go go after what i think is better you know so how so how does that work how you know in the in the case of the the starlings we ask these questions you know if they're in the middle of the flock and all they can sense are their neighbors how is it that you know they're ever going to be able to avoid the predator so then maybe we have to understand what what's the shape of the flock because if the if the shape is like a big sphere then a whole bunch of them are inside and don't know anything but if it's more like a sheep than almost everybody is a kind of on the periphery and and cano things so the the number seven I understand this kind of important number so yeah so in the case of the starlings a group of physicists wrote a beautiful paper claiming that each bird was paying attention to it six or seven closest neighbors and they explained that by looking where their neighbors were located so the first closest the second closest the third closest were in very particular places they tended to be on the sides rather than front and back or top and bottom but when they got up to eight nine it just kind of didn't matter it was sort of arbitrary where you would find the eighth or ninth and when I met them they told me this whole story and of course I asked well why so what's special about six or seven okay I believe you we are at your your argument seems plausible and so we we went ahead and and looked literally at these the if you take a whole set of points of where they are and you look you draw arrows to the six or seven closest ones you get a network and then you say we'll go for that network how well if I give it some basic rules how well it will it perform sticking together flying around like that in the presence of uncertainty and I can ask the same question if they only pay attention to five or four three or eight or nine or ten and what we found was that six or seven actually is for the way they distribute themselves the most efficient way to manage the uncertainty so it's sort of there's a evidence that there's a reason for it it might not be the only reason but one can ask those kinds of questions using using these kind of mathematics and physical principles there using that now in your work with with robotics - this absolutely yeah so so the the idea is to sort of extract out from what we learn through evidence in the national systems and translate that into design because honestly the things that I learned that animals can do I cannot imagine dreaming up a way to make it happen in the design world so I mean every day fascinated and then inspired by new ways of doing things and so these the same kind of rules we use to design our robots in the ocean and elsewhere absolutely six and seven maybe a number that's related to how much brain it takes to pay attention to that many can you you can't go beyond that because it gets too complicated I mean I think there's still open questions about I mean this is a really important question one that we look at which is like who are your neighbors are you looking at them all the time are you constantly looking at six or seven are you kind of getting an average of where the six or seven are are you taking turns maybe looking at this one then this one and this one can fit your sort of evidence now like in fish in human beings that we actually not paying attention to particular individuals but more like the the movement that they perform on a visual field and so there's also what you do with that information I think one of the things that we're doing now is not just relying on kind of like oh you're pulling me this way you're pulling me that way but through this analog with the neuronal dynamics it's that that there's sort of an excitability in the same way it like a neuron firing excites another neuron to fire so it's not just that you pull me this way but I'm sort of more excited about whatever activity we're doing because you're excited or not or maybe you're excited I get less excited but it gives it gives us a lot more meat to be able to explain things like like super fast movements that you see and fish schools and cascades that you see I mean you can do that with these just sort of spring like you pulled me this way I pull you that way something I didn't mean in the birds right there something you have to understand is that they fly maybe 2030 centimeters apart at 30 35 miles per hour and they can turn almost on the spot and they don't collide with each other and that's something that you like the speed at which the brain need to process that kind of information is just amazing yeah I mean that's an example of intelligence without a brain I mean the individual birds are not unintelligent but the group yeah it's it's bigger than the sum of its parts it has its own intelligence and I guess there is another element you know kind of the other side of the coin as well is that not all individuals although they are cooperating in this moving together they're all different exactly so even those rules because of the difference the the the rules remain flexible because of the individuality that is present in the exactly which is actually the power of the growth yeah and I think that's a new topic I think people have been ignoring that for so long they've been ignoring that is the methodology the view I mean that's gonna be it's challenging the mythology to be used sort of went like I've arranged everything exactly washed it washed in the modeling and methods we use this quash this viability yeah but it was there just at the time you didn't have maybe the tools or the computing power to actually take into account diabilities in your models and I mean I guess this is what we actually do in general right we look at our numbers and we just trying to get those errors to be as small as possible right and of course there is a reason you don't want to add the error in your studies but also like some of that variability is exactly what makes the system that system exactly I totally agree so general train the science is right now where you want to show the entire distribution of your data because a lot of the vibe a lot of the viability is actually extremely important to explain what's happening yeah if you just look at the mean you actually miss a lot of the information you miss everything that's happening at the extreme which sometime is especially enough times all of these things have to do with motion and space and the relationships between organisms in your case and to me that's really the one of the other things I work on is canopy biology and that's the formations of plants in a rainforest or other communities and you may end up with this labyrinth which is an architectural marvel that various creatures have to move through and one of them are the plant that some of them are the plants and I've worked a fair amount with some of the people working on them and one one fellow Tom ray was working on the philodendron and they're amazing because what happens with the philodendron is a bird will drop a seed to the ground and it sprouts and it moves directly towards the nearest tree trunk in the dark and the understory somehow it knows where that tree trunk is presumably because of the quality of light and it climbs up the tree but what becomes amazing is that it grows 2 or 3 meters long and it loses the the tail going to the earth and it stays 2 or 3 meters long and moves through the forest like a snake in super super slow motion and it has to choose where to go and every bifurcation up there all these labyrinths of architecture it has to go through that and what happens if it reaches of spawn that's in the shade it grows very fast with small leaves and when it's in a sunny spot it grows these enormous leaves like you see in the philodendron z-- in your doctor's office and if it gets to the top of the tree and tries to cross to the next tree it'll it'll make a leader chute that extends out and it will actually try to reach the next tree and it will grow out a several feet and drop drop and eventually hold on to the other side and it'll cross the next tree but if it loses its grip and falls now if an orchid up in the top of a tree falls to the ground it's dead it's not going anywhere but these philodendron simply uncoil themselves moves to the nearest tree trunk and start up again and so all these things in the plant world - are this dynamic thing that if you could speed up time there's this life and death and chaos going on it's like e Pennington everywhere thank goodness there are trees that crush other trees to death you know so that you don't want to be standing there for too many years just one more data point that's all so it sounds like we should move beyond the kind of neuronal brain centered definition of intelligence I mean why have we been so neuronal I think Simona I saw something where you were talking about how a neuron and a dish is a stupid thing doesn't do anything but watch yeah so we kind of imbue it with this power of consciousness and all that but it isn't it's just a cell well I mean part of what biology is sort of getting at right now is that is that the unit is not what's important is the interactions between the many units all right so the intelligence doesn't leave in the neuron something isn't in your own there's some activity there but what's important is who this neuron is connected to and how many of them and and how the behavior of one you on impact the view of the other neurons and if it's you know properly set up that can generate circuits and feedbacks positive and negative that then become the substrate for storing memories or for you know remembering things or solving optimization problems etc etc so I think that's one of the big changes in the field in biology in general but in in science in general over the past that's it 20 years beautiful kind of the scales kind of repeat so that is the elements at one level at the fine scale become the course here but then the court those themselves are the fine level for the next level up is going right until you get to these populations and every level it's the interactions between these things which creates what's it at the level above and we are more and more understanding then it's what we noticed but my there was a lot of open question that the interaction is what is extremely important I feel like the the nerado model is a good one but it's really familiar to us and so we like it stretch that little bit feather is not it is just familiar to us is like witty is all about us it must be the best and therefore almost the only definition we've worked with exactly we need to enter pole centric yeah space basic one way to play and we just use that as the golden standard to measure everything against instead of like it's just one model and our beautiful you know it's not making a less or more it's just like how beautiful and they are like the beauty is that there are so many other ways to do exactly the same task in so many different combinations can always bring back everything to networks exactly of interactions between all these different paths so I think that's where the newer model is not wrong when it's not wrong because it's what it is right it's yeah it's just a no we realized it as long as you have a network like this what if it's made off with it's made of neurons yes yes exactly this network is going to generate this emergent poverty that sometimes I didn't want to say that you would know what about consciousness I mean do you think that the C word they have some self-awareness I mean there's an ant self-aware as a tree self-aware well one really interesting thing about my self aware no no thank you for taking the heat for everyone one interesting thing about humans is we take a lot of information from our faces so a person who has a neurological problem and can't express emotion we attribute to them fewer emotions and an attribute of ant if you've looked at them closely as they have fixed faces so the question is what's going on there and you know when I do photography of ants for National Geographic among my with with my research - and if I'm stalking an ant I have a high magnification camera and I'm looking at that and it's behind a leaf I can tell by the tense of how its body tenses and how it turns that it's knows that I'm there and you know you know it's interesting to know that because that's that's how if you look back at hunter-gatherers and descriptions of how they hunted that's how they dealt with other animals anthropomorphism was how we move through the world and if you do it smartly you can learn things from it yeah and so hunters would know from the footprints where the animals gonna go whether it was in a hurry whether it was horny whatever was going on and you know I've been with him and it's just amazing to see what information they pull up maybe it's not accurate but it still gets them the result and that in itself tells you something interesting as a starting point for thinking about how those animals behave and maybe plants I don't know if hunter-gatherers sit around watch it plants grow I'm sure for a long time one question I have about this and that is do you think that this has any ethical implications if you're gonna have to kill to eat as we do is it more ethical to kill a plant than an animal ethics belongs to a human world so we should acknowledge that first that we are talking about not what the plant feel or the animal feels but when we talk about ethics we are talking about our we behave towards the world right and and so the question really is like we just define misconduct our own behavior because if we are even asking the question is this a tic is maybe because we already know that it's not otherwise we wouldn't be asking it and maybe some people don't ask and that's okay maybe they have a easy life but I think as a group as a collective obviously this question arises over and over again whether we're talking about farming of animals whether we talking about farming or plants and so the fact that the question is actually there is because fundamentally we have an issue with our behavior and to me I am vegan and you know I have eaten the animals then no animals but you know just as a vegetarian and then I moved on to a vegan diet just because my body decided so and and then what I understood for myself is that actually the main reason the main issue and the main reason why I had an ethical issue with eating animals was because of my lack of awareness of our these anymore arrived to me and the fact that my mom still you know we were talking about it these are this morning afternoon in a different session you know my mom still thinks that salami is not on anymore you know I I don't eat meat and so yeah but this is salami okay I don't need salami yeah but that's exactly the point is like salon is not on anymore so I don't have any need to worry about what the story is behind this but when you actually concern yourself or when you really tune in with this body and you are really interested to know who are you what are you what is this you know what are you made of and I think as a scientist ultimately the only question that we are all asking is like what is what is this life whatever whatever and so you know the the closest place that I found for myself personally is via the conversation via food is that okay I take this other and I get it in here and that other is making this basically right so even the concept of like I'm a human being is like well I'm much of this is actually plant material really mostly because I only eat plants and so the question is like these transmutation of one organism into the other which well suggested actually we have the entire system is very porous and very mutable and volatile and but also like then even more reason to be not only respectful and appreciative of the fact that you know these other is gonna make your body next because your body is being rebuilt all the time but but also like well then you wanna make sure that what you put in in here is actually clean and good and happy in a way so you don't want to have to eat an animal that is been through horror and suffering because you know why that's what you're eating yeah and the same would be true for planets so it's not so much whether you're eating meat or not actually I wouldn't call it whether you're eating the animal or whether you're eating the plant or both it's more like do you actually know what you're eating and if you don't when does then start thinking about it so I think we're just about out of time but I did want to take a couple of questions from the audience so I was wondering much of what all of you mentioned has to do with collaboration and collaboration being as a trait for intelligence now does that is that collaboration affected by the harshness of an environment for example the flock of birds if they were in a super comfortable position would they still collaborate there's talk about the flock of birds or actually a lot of this flux in schools is a predominant theory to explain how they form it's because they were respond to predation you can actually create mathematical model well the if you're the only pressure you produce Pradesh and they will evolve this schooling and flocking behaviors so the question whether if you relax that pressure they will go back to leave by themselves it's possible because there's a lot of cost of living in groups right you have to compete for your food with people around you you have to compete for the mates that are around you you have to compete for space there's a lot of disadvantages like infanticides and certain animal societies etc i mean we see it like nepotism is a form of that in human societies where we try to add advantage or take advantage of and the system for our kids yeah i've introduced but the question in the final food by yourself and you need somebody else to find it so the question is if that's predation that's only driving a system and yes this this system will probably go back to being solitary but then there are things also when you have reached this point where you live together and it's in the case of in the ends for instance you reach this point where the advantage is when you pass that sort of like evolutionary hump behind the hump there is like so many advantages that you can actually the original pressure can disappear and then you never go back and I mean that's what I can you with some probably oh yeah book on societies and where they come from and what causes them to come together and fall apart and societies as groups with distinct memberships those are extremely rare in nature most ninety-nine percent of the species are alone all the time or just temporarily social when they need to be so this is actually a tough hurdle but as you say once you you get there you can conquer the world we in ourselves or societies because our own bodies are consisting of cells that are totally in collaboration to get something done so we are the most successful societies all these large organisms that are around the actual insects and all the other large creatures that we see mostly our loners yes sir if I might add it depends really like we've been talking about timescales but he also really depends where is the scale of the question so ultimately like you know the entire decent our place is based on primarily collaboration and competition is as important though so competition creates that noise that is required to create a variability that allows for the system to be dynamic and then he finds places where it can collaborate our bodies are a good example in places where things don't collaborate very well and in some situation when that collaboration breaks down as we know in our body cancer does that very well then it can kill everything but actually life seems not to just die off like that so maybe the two forces are working together but I was in I would say the collaboration is very important beyond just like you know there is a it's advantageous because when you are collaborating as a group you can survive better as a you know from a predator leaving the population level at collaborations also the perceived collaborations really important that mycorrhizal networks and our microbiome we're not just human here right and so there are a lot of functions and a lot of shall we say niche space that's being fulfilled not by us but by other organisms in our bodies and is that a perception or is that a reality do the bacteria want our brains to get bigger for instance just to put it in a very stark way heterogeneity and individual differences so if we're all gonna be able to do the same thing then maybe we don't need to collaborate but if we are different and we have different expertise and it makes a lot of sense like like ants with a super specialized kind of right which emerges as their colonies get bigger and bigger and things get more and more complex that's when it becomes into that's when they didn't have any more and more sort of parallels become more and more interesting with us so there's selection pressure towards a job not necessarily there are ants with huge colonies where everyone is pretty much the same but they're not very interesting socially though to study but these leafcutter ants are among the most extreme and as I said you can tell what they do by their size just as you can tell what people do by whether they were wearing the hard hat and have the lunch pail or looking like a lawyer or whatever in the ants I'm just looking like I should be in the jungle where I should be well I think we have to wrap it up now and I want to thank everybody for coming it's been great [Applause] [Music]

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 154,783

Rating: 4.8646302 out of 5

Keywords: Intelligence Without Brains, exploration of plants, Monica Gagliano, Simon Garnier, Thomas Horton, Naomi Leonard, Mark Moffett, Natalie Angier, Plant bio-acoustics, Slime mold intelligence, Plant memory, Plant learning, Collective intelligence, Leafcutter ant, Consciousness, beyond the neuronal model of intelligence, Ethics with plants and animals, Environmental effects on collaboration, best science talks, New York City, World, Science, Festival, 2019

Id: RpwW9Lw2Ku4

Length: 89min 12sec (5352 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

reminds me of a mythbuster's episode where they hooked up an EKG to a plant and hit it and the machine registered a response from it.

[u/dimolition]

Poor vegans what will they eat now?

[u/thecorndogmaker]

In the 70s this idea was very popular, and people sold albums claiming to encourage plant growth. These claims were pseudoscientific at best.

More recent research done by Dr. Monica Gagliano suggests that plants can communicate via sounds within the soil. This line of inquiry was likely partly inspired by her psychedelic experiences. Much of plant bioacoustics is not fully understood and not universally accepted, so take it with a grain of salt.