Organic Empathies
This month, the BPI team sets the project in motion, confronts our own humanist tendencies, and considers how humility is a key ingredient in turning the ideal into the real.
“Skip… Hey, uhm, Skip?”
“Mm?”
“The rose plant Fernando brought over last time to try out our electrophysiology setup with… did you... kill it?”
“Uhm, it’s not doing too well, I have to admit… I tried everything. I watered it and tried giving it more sunlight or less sunlight. Maybe it’s the dry heat in here?”
“Skip… it’s been one week. And this for a guy whose last name, Rosamilia, means a thousand roses.”
“Well, let’s just try it out anyway and see if it still responds at all.”
*Gingerly, we attach the electrode wires to the wilted rose plant, plug the signal amplifier box into the computer, and poke the rose plant with a plastic rod, hoping to see a plant action potential with our own eyes for the very first time.*
“Hello? Rose plant? You alive in there?”
Rose plant: “...”
“Well, good first try guys... Next week let’s try with a plant that’s not dead, okay?”
Experimenting with the electrophysiology of a healthy orchid plant. The orchid responded to mechanical stimulation of its leaves, roots, and soil, and even began responding a moment before it was touched.
The first month of the Brain-Plant Interface project has been a humbling one. It’s been humbling on a scientific level. We’ve crossed the threshold from an imagined concept that, until now, existed only in our grant application into the realm of reality: an original research project we must complete rigorously and - dare we hope - ‘successfully’. Delving into the electrophysiology literature on both plants and humans and reaching out to potential expert advisors leaves us with the old cliché: the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
It’s been humbling on an interpersonal level. We’ve come face-to-face in countless conversations with the same understanding barrier that the BPI project, in its finished form, seeks to solve. Wait, sorry, you’re saying plants do what now...they speak? Just getting to the point where we can explain our goal of facilitating interspecies dialogue requires leading with 10 minutes of phytobiome communication and intelligence examples (e.g. “Did you know that trees share resources with their kin through their root-mycelial networks? And that venus flytraps can count the number of stimulations to their sensor hairs in a 5-second period in order to ensure they are clasping shut around a fly and not a breath of wind?”). These conversations invariably lead to an ‘a-ha’ moment for those we speak to, and they are invariably valuable for us in refining our messaging. But, thus far, an elevator pitch is off the table. It’s ironic: we set out to create human-plant dialogue, but we’re realizing that human-human dialogue is just as important.
Finally, it’s been humbling on an ontological and epistemological level. It’s one thing to advocate posthumanism on a conceptual level, and quite another to feel its truth. Studying what might constitute ‘meaningful’ communication or experience for a plant requires us to confront our own humanistic biases around consciousness, intelligence, and progress. Plants average 15-20 distinct senses to our measly five. They can summon armies of symbiotic creatures to their aid with the mere release of an air-borne chemical cocktail. Forests created their own fungal internet long before we first dreamed of electricity, let alone fiber optics - and they utilize the vast potential of this collective intelligence to balance the Earth’s climate instead of to share memes. And most of all, plants live firmly in community, while humans wander in an illusion of individualistic solitude and wonder why we are unhappy. We humans have fallen from grace so many times already - from Galileo to Copernicus to Darwin and beyond. Yet we still assume our exceptionalism lies safe within our uniquely intelligent brains. But why should this be any truer than those other abandoned claims with which we once propped ourselves up on the pedestal of our egos? Now is the time for us to examine our ‘othering’ and reductionist tendencies, and hopefully, to emerge with greater organic empathies.
These three humblings have brought our team to three new commitments:
To work even more closely with plant scientists to ensure we do not inadvertently ‘mis-translate’ a plant’s signal to fit into our dominant species worldview.
To make hosting monthly community discussions on human relationships with nature a priority.
To consider closing the human-plant dialogue loop by giving humans a technologically-mediated new sense, instead of simply making the plant’s signals accessible to our pre-existing senses.
Next up, we meet with our potential plant science advisors for the first time and try to organize a remote research arrangement as Fernando travels home to Mexico for the holidays. We continue to dive into the physics of electrochemical waveforms, learn from our phyto-companions, and pray that Skip will keep his next houseplant alive.
Until next month!
Anna, Fernando & Skip