Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants

An accessible and compelling story of a scientist's discovery of plant communication and how it influenced her research and changed her life. The projection of one´s subjectivity onto anything defines what, often, is unamicably labeled "pseudoscience". The problem here is that Gagliano´s contributions do both, science and pseudoscience. She did science in studying physiological reactivity in plants, an old biological topic that doesn´t require any atribution of subjectivity or existentiality. She does pseudoscience in ungroundedly sustaining this added attribution. Monica Gagliano (born 1976) goes on with her self-identification with plants up to the point of labeling her biography as a "phytobiography". Such an extreme, ungrounded view bestowed on her fame, and the adhesion of unacademic lay people. Of late such a condition turned her mediatic, inflated her (non-vegetal) ego, and nowadays it´s difficult that she could revert her pseudoscientific attribution, of existentiality to plants. This unbecoming situation has been bolstered by its framing in the Anglo-American neuroscience, which on political reasons has pretended to be universal, whence it broadcasted worldwide its blindness toward some hard-science topics -which are essential for the book´s matter- instead flagged by other academic traditions. In this "phytobiography", a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant-research scientist, Monica Gagliano "reveals" the dynamic role plants play in genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and "cognition". With the excuse of transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people–beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and -why not?- also volition, and hence having the capacity for their own "perspectives" (subjective ones, to be sure) and what the book calls "voices". The main issue, notoriously, is a lack of command on philosophiocal anthropology, namely on the concept of what a person is: if robots and machines are supposed to enjoy subjectivity and will, even down to receiving citizenship in Saudi Arabia, and if psyche is thought as some kind of fungible substance, How avoiding to project animism onto rocks, planets, and of course plants? The book draws on up-close-and-"personal" encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world, and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the scientific discoveries that emerged from it. Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, "remember" (i.e., modify themselves structurally, like computer "memories"; i.e., not refer mentally to past episodes, an ungrounded mental reference which Gagliano ungroundedly proclaims), and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit distinctive sound vibrations (Gagliano of course calls them "their own voices") and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally the already well-known fact that learning is not the exclusive province of animals and man-made machines (such as Googgle engines), Gagliano pretend to jump up into thin air so hight as to re-ignite the pseudoscientific discourse on plant subjectivity and its supposedly ethical and legal standing. On page 105, she adamantly says, "The story that cemented the foundation for that plant revolution dates back to Aristotle, perhaps the most influential thinker of all of Western history. By defining insensitivity as the key criterion to differentiate plants from animals (including human beings) and hence positioning plants outside of the domain of sensitive life, the Aristotelian story had, in effect, transformed plants into objects—a spurious idea that still sanctions the human right to use (and abuse) plants and that exempts us from any sense of responsibility or respect toward them as living beings." Although any radar is highly sensitive but not sentient, Gagliano clearly mistakes insensitivity as insentience. And reactivity as sentience. This is the story of how she made her discoveries, the good and the mythological ones, and added on them her phytobiographical fantasies, and how the observation of plants was unable to refrain her inmoderate hermeneusis along the way.