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FC2O Episode 13 - Monica Gagliano
17 Plays5 years ago
Wait! Plants have no nervous system - so how could they have any consciousness? Yet, as Monica Gagliano explains, science has proven that plants have sentience - as the shamans have told us for millennia. Join me listening to this amazing and experienced expert in the field of plant intelligence.
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Transcript
Plant Communication Methods
00:00:00
Speaker
there is a myth in science that objectivity means that you don't feel you know and objectivity is in the method and we can apply our methods objectively but we need to recognize like we really must recognize that you as a scientist are not something that
00:00:19
Speaker
is not there you are there and you are totally part of the picture those others are not just um and and here where it gets to really the the cruse of the problem is like there are no machines there are no little uh in her kind of not even almost living entities but the first experiment was actually to see uh whether okay we know that there are these three channels that plants use to
00:00:44
Speaker
talk to each other, light, chemicals, and touch. What happens if I close them all down? And what happens if I close one and not the other? Which one would take precedence? Or if I close them all down, in theory, they shouldn't be able to talk to each other anymore. What if you? And if they do, then there is something else that we don't know. And, you know, surprise, surprise, they do.
Monica Galliano's Unique Approach
00:01:38
Speaker
We have a real treat in store for you this week. Monica Galliano is a highly decorated academic who studies the ecological processes by which organisms are able to gather information on their surrounding environment in order to thrive, which provides us, as you'll hear, with invaluable insights into our own take on our place in the world of living beings. To give you a feel for Monica's academic credentials, she is a research associate professor in evolutionary ecology and adjunct senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia.
00:02:06
Speaker
a research affiliate at the Sydney Environment Institute, and she is a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney's Biological Intelligence Lab. And, of course, she's the author of the amazing book, The Spoke Plant.
00:02:20
Speaker
To me what's unique about Monica is that she bravely combines a mix of objective scientific research disciplines with a number of more subjective empirical disciplines to create a more true, complete and integrated science. This helps us take a peek behind the curtain and better understand the conscious interactions between plants, animals and nature as a whole.
00:02:40
Speaker
Continuing in a similar pioneering vein to cutting-edge researchers such as Cleve Baxter and Rupert Sheldrake, Monica provides us with a highly unusual and paradigm-shifting insight into sentience, consciousness, biological behaviour and its implications for life on Earth. Enjoy the show. Here we go.
00:03:03
Speaker
Well, welcome to another edition of FC2O with me, Matt Walden, and my guest today, Monica Gargiano. So, Monica, thank you very much for joining us. I know you're in transit at the moment.
00:03:15
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, having me in my car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I am not driving, so, you know, just to clarify. Okay, good, good. So, you're all safe. Fantastic. Well, look, Monica, I always recommended your book by a colleague of mine, Paul Chek. And, you know, I think I first listened to it sometime around June this year. So, your book does spoke to plants.
00:03:41
Speaker
You know, it was fantastic. It was so integrated in the way you talk about your research. And I think one of the things that struck me is that, you know, obviously you're from an academic background and working within the academic fields, yet
00:03:56
Speaker
you also integrated a lot of subjective experience with the objective findings of your research and I really appreciated the sort of bravery that you have in doing that because I appreciate that that's got to be a kind of challenging
Childhood Curiosity and Research Journey
00:04:12
Speaker
challenging a process to work through from your perspective, but can you start out by just telling us a bit about your academic background or even your earlier background and how this led you into your current research field? Sure, well then we had to start when I'm like a kid. Okay, let's do it, let's do it. Because this is the classical story of like, oh, when I was little. Yes, yeah.
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah well basically since I was really little I always of course as many kids you know intrigued by nature around me and the little critters and just the thing that they are all surrounding us but
00:05:00
Speaker
I wasn't one of those kids that grew up in a family where we would go out camping all the time or hiking in the mountains or any of that. For me actually nature was always something that was somewhere else outside and do not bring it in because that's not cool and so it was actually because nature was
00:05:24
Speaker
I felt, in hindsight, I understand it. At that time, for me, the experience of nature was of something that was being pushed away. But yet, as a child, and as I said, probably all of us, as children, know that it's like, but why? Why would you push away these amazing things? So I guess I started really getting curious with those animals and plants that I had close enough.
00:05:54
Speaker
So I'm talking about the pigeons in the square and the plants mostly like beans and peas that you know I would help my mom take out of the skin so that she could make soup and especially a lot of beans I thought always they were like amazing because they were awesome.
00:06:16
Speaker
which of course if you fast forward a few years later or quite a few years later when I went to uni of course I learned about you know phenotypic plasticity which really is like the technical term to describe this variation and and now all things are even within the same species are all different in forms and colors and behavior and really that is the core of much of my research is based on that
00:06:44
Speaker
amazing diversity. When I was about maybe around 10, I got obsessed with the ocean and again, I didn't grow up near the sea.
Shift from Marine to Plant Research
00:06:57
Speaker
Right, where did you grow up?
00:06:58
Speaker
I grew up in Turin. So it's an industrial city, you know, next to the mountains, but we never went there. And not too close to the sea that you can just go down and go for a stroll. And yet I always, you know, had these craving for the sea, even if I was absolutely terrified by it. And then I ended up going to, you need to become a marine scientist.
00:07:25
Speaker
Right, so I know from the book you talk about starting in marine biology or marine science and there's a story in there about how you then sort of switch. Do you want to give us a very brief overview of that story?
00:07:39
Speaker
No, well, I actually did my undergrads in North Wales in Bangor. Oh, well, OK. Yeah. And then I did my master in Aberdeen. Right. And and then I decided that those places were just going to be too cold for me to stay any longer. Yes, absolutely.
00:07:56
Speaker
I worked in various few labs and then I ended up in Australia for a PhD and as part of my PhD I was very lucky because I had the opportunity to spend like most of my time really literally underwater and in direct contact with the reef and all the critters that live there and so one of the species that became like very close for me because it was the one that I was studying
00:08:25
Speaker
very much so for my research it was these yellow little damselfish which is one of the pretty fish is in the same group of the you know the Nemos. Yes. So you know that was my but my mind was a yellow jobbie completely yellow with just a little spot on the back if he's little if he's a young fish and otherwise they just look yellow.
00:08:50
Speaker
but I always after a while you spend time in the water and you actually spend time in the same place literally the same chunk of reef the same bits of the same corner the same I knew those corners and those bends you know I didn't need to think about them I knew oh yeah you know in the corner where that bits of chorus sticks out that's where the other guy is living right right
00:09:15
Speaker
and become very familiar and in that process of course you become actually familiar with the individuals that live there and that's where I guess the conflict then arises because although not immediately I did my science and my training and my
00:09:34
Speaker
by observing, catching these fish, putting them in tanks, putting them back sometimes, but mostly killing them at the end of the experiments, which is something that I don't think the general audience realises. What is that? What's the protocol there?
00:09:54
Speaker
Well, they are humanely euthanized. That's the, you know, the word to say like we kill them so that we can get the organs out because we use different parts of the body to determine, you know, I don't know, level of cortisol, if you're looking at stress or reproduction, you know, all sorts of things. So that's normal.
00:10:16
Speaker
That's normal and especially for research that is done in laboratory, pretty much any animals that enter will never exit, even if you don't use them.
00:10:26
Speaker
And I'm using the word using because that's appropriate. In the field sometimes we are able to do work just as observation but it's very rare because the protocol kind of requires, there is an expectation that you will have something internal, so some bits of anymore to validate what you're seeing externally.
00:10:51
Speaker
And to me, I was running this big experiment in the field with this yellow fission. And I was there every day looking at reproductive output and the maternal effects of stress on the next generation. And so I was in a mom's and dad doing their thing, like having their eggs and protecting them, cleaning them, doing that thing.
00:11:13
Speaker
And then when the new babies came out, I was looking at them and how they performed in these environments. Now, after three or four months in the field like this and going to these individuals every day, of course, for the standard of science, you are going to be objective and you number them so they're not people, they're just numbers.
00:11:41
Speaker
But at one point at the very end when I went in the water at the very end of the experiment and I was supposed to catch them and kill them all, I remember the morning I went in and I just wanted to say goodbye because we've been meeting each other every day for months.
00:12:00
Speaker
And I knew, you know, like, oh, the pair that is number three, she's very chill now while he's a bit schizo and he keeps biting me, you know, and you get to know them individually and their personalities.
00:12:15
Speaker
that morning I just wanted to say goodbye to all of them and while for the past months I had these wild animals and they would come to my hand they would sit inside my hand I could even close my hand around them and they kind of knew like that's just Monica she comes every day don't worry about her
00:12:34
Speaker
That last day, nobody came out. No one. Even the friendly one, the more outgoing, no one was out. And there was this feeling, this cold feeling of like, I knew in that moment, I knew that I knew what I was actually thinking of doing in the afternoon, which was exactly, you know, go back and kill them all.
00:12:59
Speaker
I wasn't carrying anything that was going to give me away with my murderous intent, but that's it. I was carrying on intent and that was already in my mind and somehow they knew.
00:13:14
Speaker
And the interesting thing about this is that it took me 10 years to actually share this story. And when I did, I actually realized the amazing gift that was in that event. Aside from the fact that it turned my career around because
00:13:30
Speaker
I then experienced a kind of ethical crisis and I was like, very clear, I cannot do this. I cannot, you know, there is no question that I can,
Objectivity in Science: Myth or Reality?
00:13:39
Speaker
I can ask that it's worthwhile me and it gives me the right to take anybody's life. For what? No matter how big apparently the question, how important the question is, is I want, the life is more important always. So,
00:13:57
Speaker
So that was the superficial, I guess, the more obvious turnover. And I then turned to plants after that moment without really knowing what I was doing. But when I did start sharing the story, and as I said, it took 10 years before I had the courage, because really, would you say to your colleagues, oh, you know, I had a feeling that they knew that I was going to kill them and they didn't come out and then I felt really bad and
00:14:25
Speaker
I just have to change, you know, it doesn't make much sense. But what I learned is like, well, first of all, there is no such a thing as there is a myth in science that objectivity means that you don't feel, you know, and objectivity is in the method. And we can apply the method objectively, but we need to recognize like, we really must recognize that you as a scientist are not something that
00:14:54
Speaker
is not there you are there and you are totally part of the picture those others are not just um and and here where it gets to really the the cruise of the problem is like there are no machines there are no little uh in hurt kind of not even almost living entities but there are people that just fish yeah absolutely you know they know you yeah absolutely i remember going to a talk by uh a vet who um
00:15:22
Speaker
She used homeopathy and I think she's quite an open-minded vet and she was giving this presentation on working with animals emotions and animals that get depressed and this kind of thing and I just went along it was a free local talk and she made the point that as you've just said that
00:15:39
Speaker
animals have personalities and I think we can all agree on that so your fish have personalities obviously our pets have personalities uh that you know the the wild animals that we see in the garden they have personalities and he says and she said so you know if if they have personalities then they are a person right and it was one of those things that just I think because of the way we're kind of enculturated to think of animals as others and as more lowly than us and indeed plants even more so
00:16:07
Speaker
then, you know, we don't see them as people, but yet we use that in our language because that's our lived experience of them. And, you know, one thing I was just going to throw in because it's a quote that I used in the paper I shared with you over email was there's a quote from a guy called Houston Smith who's
00:16:28
Speaker
is, you know, one of the great sort of theologians and he was explaining that he says our mistake was expecting science to provide us with a worldview when we now see it only provides us with half the world. It's physical, testable, significantly controllable half, right? And isn't that beautiful? It really just sort of makes
00:16:50
Speaker
so obvious what we seem to be blind to in our kind of scientific, materialistic, deterministic culture that we seem to inhabit at the moment. Yeah and I guess that view as well in itself also betray the very thing that is criticising as well because not us.
00:17:13
Speaker
that half doesn't exist. Yes. Even when we are pretending to be objective according to what is this ideal of being objective, we cannot be because we are not objects.
Reevaluating Plant Perception and Consciousness
00:17:25
Speaker
And there is no object to observe either. And it's all about the relating. And so in that relating, if there is another, there is you as well. You can't just, there is no relation if there is just one. Yes.
00:17:40
Speaker
We cannot, you are correct, I think, we have been indoctrinated and socialized to think that we're the only real people here. Yeah, absolutely. It does not matter. And you're right, we plan, the situation just escalates. And so that in a way, I think,
00:18:02
Speaker
that's when I started working with plants that's where it became really is through the engagement with the plants then I had to change first my views and realize wow like everyone else I didn't really see plants I mean you see them pretty when they have the flowers on but for the rest of the time we kind of ignore them in the other kind of background
00:18:25
Speaker
Well this is um this this relates to the the notion I'm sure you've heard of this before called um green blindness where you know yeah where yeah and I saw it I think on a youtube clip that was talking about plant consciousness and it was a picture of a guy standing there in front of a forest looks looked like a kind of amazonium forest and the guy was saying you know what do you see in the clip and of course you're drawn straight to the person and uh
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah. And he makes the point that, you know, actually most of the picture is green and we're blind to this greenness or to the plants. And, you know, but is it, it's over 99% of the world's biomass is vegetable, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's just crazy, isn't it? And you know, I find that the really incredible thing is aside from what we see, so this is one sense, right? But
00:19:18
Speaker
If you were to stop just a second and it's such a simple thing, but like how long can you hold your breath?
00:19:26
Speaker
Not long. Because, and after that, what do you do? Let's say that you're really good and you can hold it for a long time. What are you going to do after that? Is the plant more there? Like you wouldn't last, there would be no life. The way we think of life, any more life would definitely not be here. We all need plants and not just to eat them, but literally to just be here, you know? Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is the season.
00:19:54
Speaker
go on sorry what blows me away as well is that you know when you eat anything where there is directly eating the plant or whether you're eating animals that have eaten plants does
00:20:07
Speaker
building blocks, those cells, those materials, right? They're actually entering these container, these body, and they are remaking it constantly new. So really, the question is, I saw who is this person that I call myself, you know, the Monica that it's here is that how much of the human is what I think human?
00:20:32
Speaker
Yes, actually a collection, you know, a collaboration of many others. And so really, can I really distinguish myself from the race? Honestly, no, because I'm probably more planned than anything else. So the concept of the human needs to change itself because
00:20:53
Speaker
the concept of the humans doesn't really capture what the human is made of. Absolutely, absolutely. One of the things that has struck me, and again we allude to in the paper, the Ghost in the Machine paper, is that much of our functioning is unconscious, below the conscious level. And one of the terms that's used for that in the medical textbooks and anatomy textbooks is vegetative function.
00:21:18
Speaker
you know it's the way our body does what it's supposed to do this innate intelligence and it and you know the organs and the autonomic nervous system really does behave in a vegetative way and so that that's that's one thing that i think should be a big clue as to uh to how we uh have evolved to to actually you know uh be and to function but you know another another part of what you were just saying triggered a thought in my mind and this is that
00:21:44
Speaker
you know if you if you listen to there's a guy called Dan Siegel who talks about mind and you know we're going to come back to this later because obviously what you seem to have uncovered in your plant research is this very clear intelligence that plants have which you might term mind although i know a lot of people would reject that because they say well where is it they don't have a brain they don't have a nervous system you know so so i know that's a kind of common critique
00:22:12
Speaker
But the way Dan Siegel defines mind, and he does this not just on his own, but through a think tank of 40 experts who are a mix of psychologists and anthropologists and sociologists. And they had to find a definition that worked for all different groups. And I think it works for your work as well. And he says that mind is an embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information.
00:22:41
Speaker
Exactly and and so it feels to me like you know when like you say when you're eating a plant you are eating a flow of energy and information and you're embodying it um yeah and and so you know the experiences that you describe in your book which like I say we're gonna gonna get into it that is exactly your subjective experience of of working with these plants in that way isn't it?
00:23:06
Speaker
Yeah and also what triggers me from your comment is actually that it is exactly because the majority of like the mainstream of humanity mainstream of thinking about these questions of
00:23:22
Speaker
consciousness or cognition of mind, you know, because they all kind of converge ultimately to the same issue. And I think the main issue that I see is that traditional mainstream cognitive science, for example, is subscribing to a particular view of cognition. And this one is a closed one.
00:23:41
Speaker
What I mean by that is like you have cognition that actually is a property, a thing. So when we talk about like, well, if you're cognitive, if you've got the mind, where is the thing that does that? And of course, because from that perspective, when we think about cognition, cognition is the brain or the nervous system or both, like as a central nervous system. And cognition sits inside its box.
00:24:06
Speaker
it's inside the organism so it's a property of the organism and so of course it makes logical sense that if that organism doesn't have that box so it doesn't have a brain and a neural system then it cannot be conscious or cognitive or intelligent or any of those.
00:24:21
Speaker
Well but this view which by the way sees perception so the incoming in of the information and action and behavior as the outgoing of the of the processing of the commission. Well that view actually funny enough comes from cybernetics.
00:24:38
Speaker
right which means that we build computers which of course do work according to that model and then we decided to try to understand ourselves based on the machines that we build yeah because it didn't work quite well now we're doing the other way around and now we are trying to build machines that are to our image but we're still not clear of who we are so we are keeping
00:25:04
Speaker
We're externalizing and trying to build models of who we are when we haven't even stopped to check what is actually here.
00:25:14
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing is like the other view that is the alternative view. And it was, you know, these view have been working in parallel all the time. It's just that they, as always, there is one that become dominant because in the context as well, the social, economical, political system, certain views are more useful than others to push other agendas. And so the other perspective, again, it's been around for the same amount of time.
00:25:44
Speaker
sees a cognition in a totally different way. It's not a property, but it's a process. So cognition is not in a box, but it's a process that is happening and is similar to what you were saying, and it refers to a flow of information, not a thing. So suddenly you don't need to look for a brain or a particular structure to do the cognitive process, because a process is not a thing.
00:26:13
Speaker
And not only that, but because the process is implying that there is movement and for something to move, it needs space and it needs connection. And so suddenly this model sees perception, cognition, well, I should say perception, the body and the behaviors or the action as
00:26:35
Speaker
Those ones are not separate from the environment. So the environment is part of the cognitive system and everything is open. Instead of closed inboxes, there is a flow that goes in and out. So as much as I am affected by my environment in terms of my internal physiology, what I perceive, what I'm going to do next.
00:26:57
Speaker
but also me being in the environment is changing my own environment and therefore is changing me and therefore, you know, and so seeing cognitive perspective suddenly, you know, because until recently I couldn't understand why these people who are always putting up this critique which is kind of quite
00:27:17
Speaker
mediocre, I have to say, can not be intelligent because they don't have a brain. Well, there's plenty of people who do have brains and those seem to use them very much. Aside from that, why this obsession with the brain?
00:27:34
Speaker
Yeah, well and so what I see you've done with your research is you've used the objective scientific model to identify intelligence within the plants, so you're using the sort of very objective models that perhaps your critics would
00:27:53
Speaker
put their trust in. But then you've got a behaviour that doesn't add up with that kind of cybernetic idea of a brain box, right? So if you want to stick with that old worldview, the cybernetic worldview, then you've got a real problem, haven't you?
00:28:11
Speaker
Exactly. So basically it's highlighting that there is an internal controversy with the model. So when they say, but the plants don't have a brain, what they're really saying, which is highly unscientific, they're saying you need to throw away your data because the theory must be right.
00:28:28
Speaker
Right, yes, exactly. I mean, what I'm replying to them is like, I don't know what the right theory or the right, you know, theoretical explanation is, but what I do know is that these guys are doing what I'm seeing. Yes, exactly, exactly, yeah. So you make up whatever story you like about the theory that explains it, but I'm not throwing away the data. The data is actually telling me, is showing me what plans are capable of. And I'm using, as you said, I'm using your methods.
00:28:57
Speaker
That's it. So should we talk about a ringum? Is that how you pronounce the word a ringum? And how would you define that? Cool. Or explain it. How would you explain it to someone who's never heard of that before?
00:29:13
Speaker
Well, I guess the closest, but here is like language, I say in advance, language fails miserably. So this is only an approximation, I guess, experience, which again is a very embodied experience is embedded in a particular context and relationship. So, but I guess is a thank you.
00:29:39
Speaker
Yes. And it's not just a thank you, like oh thanks for that, but it's a thank you that is specifically referring to the listening. And this was arriving from the plants that I was working with when I went to South America the first time and in particular this was
00:30:01
Speaker
was a little fan that offered that and and it was quite funny because it happened during a ceremonial ritual that I was doing there and uh with uh curandero from the shippebos and
00:30:15
Speaker
And you know, like I heard this word and he's again, he's aware that word is a sound that I could totally, you know, repeat. So that's how I knew he was sounding like. And I knew exactly what he meant, even if, you know, nobody actually spoke to me in my ear and say like, this is what it means. So it's a body knowing and which then the human being, being me in this case,
00:30:44
Speaker
is trying to give a language to it, which makes sense to me. But the word itself, the sound itself comes with its own language and its own meaning, and that has not been changed, that's not been altered. So it's just more my limitation in trying to explain and
00:31:06
Speaker
give it a form that makes sense to us, but it would make total sense to our body. Sure, this is something that again my colleague and he's been a great teacher of my full check, he teaches on one of his courses sacred listening and the idea that you can still yourself
00:31:30
Speaker
down to a point where you can listen to the trees or you can listen to a plant and of course you know like you say if you're speaking to a very objective left-brained scientist they would think you've perhaps gone slightly mad yet you can have this lived experience of that and you can
00:31:48
Speaker
derive huge sense of connection but also wisdom from the plants and I've experienced that personally and clearly you've experienced that many times and have documented that in your book. So I mean one of the first experiences I think you described is your experience with the Sokoba tree. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
00:32:13
Speaker
Yeah, I should also say before I get into that, that this book, which of course challenged the scientists in me as well throughout preparation, you know, all of it, this book is, as I see it now, is probably really the most scientific work that I've ever done. In the sense that it is actually really
00:32:41
Speaker
just reporting what has happened and is not trying to understand it necessarily, it's just reporting what happened and what the consequences of those happenings were in my own personal story, but that could be applied to anyone.
00:33:02
Speaker
And in that sense, you know, not sharing this would be unscientific of me because actually real data, you know, they're real information. And what I'm learning from, you know, the feedback that I've got from people all over the place, that basically so many of us have these experiences, of course, because it's totally part of our natural being. Yeah.
00:33:27
Speaker
and denying them again is unscientific because he's again the same story as I don't like the data so let's stick with the theory even if the theory is wrong and the data or the experiences are showing us that these connecting and these silencing and these listening are totally real.
Integrating Indigenous Knowledge
00:33:47
Speaker
out. If you're not prepared to take the time, then you are not allowed. You should not have the right to criticize this. Talk about something that you don't know.
00:33:59
Speaker
Yeah, and I do wonder if the kind of process of education that we go through almost creates an element of crisis in our self-esteem and our value of our own experiences, because we have to sort of bow down to authority. And I know there's a value in that. There's always a value in listening to people with more experience and things that have been studied using the scientific methods. But that should not be at the sacrifice of our own subjective experience, in my view.
00:34:30
Speaker
Absolutely. And also like, again, these listening to, you know, wiser people or, you know, people with experience, it's also not been done fully according to what, you know, we speak one thing, but we do other things because we haven't considered a valid at all the thousands of years of experience that our indigenous people everywhere have.
00:34:59
Speaker
It's been considered not valid. Based on what? Just because you think that yours is better. Again, that's a very non-scientific approach. If you're gonna try to be objective, then you need to be objective. And it's like, okay, there is these people who have been here for a very long time and they've been just fine. What do they know? But now as a colonizing, appropriating way of doing, but it's more like, what can I give into this so that I can learn?
00:35:27
Speaker
Yeah. And when you do, you learn a lot. Yeah, absolutely. Well, perhaps we should just preface the discussion on the Sokoba with the paper that I referenced in the Ghost in the Machine paper, which, because I think what this does is it makes this understanding that you and I are talking about, which may seem a little bit abstract for some listeners initially, but it brings it into kind of concrete, real life. And that was that there's a
00:35:54
Speaker
medical paper published by a guy called Norman Farnsworth in 1990 and he and other people have published several other papers since then and you know what he explains is that there's 250,000 species of plants or what he calls higher plants on the planet and possibly as many as 500,000 that you know haven't we don't know the exact number because of course it's such a huge task to really pin that number down but
00:36:24
Speaker
But he explains that 74% of Western pharmacopoeia, so essentially the medicines that your doctors are using, 74% of those plant-based medicines are derived from conversations with shamans.
00:36:43
Speaker
And what he means by that, obviously, is drug reps going into places like the Amazon or speaking with men, medicine women, shamans, et cetera, and asking them, well, what would you use for these symptoms? And then, of course, the indigenous people will say, well, we would combine this leaf with that root, and we'd grind them together, and we'd boil them, or whatever. And that's how we would manage those symptoms.
00:37:11
Speaker
you know there's a guy called Jeremy Narby who's an anthropologist and he I'm sure you're familiar with him in his work but you know he actually I think started out not not particularly interested in this field but when he spent time in the field with with the indigenous peoples he became increasingly I guess irate would be the word the fact that
00:37:33
Speaker
this indigenous knowledge was being essentially stolen from them as they were sharing it but then huge profits were being made from it by the pharmaceutical industry with no kind of gratitude to the original
00:37:49
Speaker
people that had discovered these things and I guess the point in describing that 250,000 species is that the chances of being able to combine these plants or find these plants from a kind of trial and error perspective
00:38:04
Speaker
is the statistics on that is that essentially it's impossible and whenever you speak to these indigenous people then you ask them how did you know that that helps with blood sugar or that that helps with depression or whatever they would say well the plants told us
Peruvian Journey and Plant Communication
00:38:19
Speaker
Yeah, just asked. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is what Bruce Lipton would call a cosmic joke. You'd have a doctor sat in his office, sat here in the UK or in Australia or wherever, prescribing medicines that he thinks are fully scientific objective. And of course, they have been tested in that way. But the original source of them was from a conversation with a plant. And of course, that would not be entertained.
00:38:44
Speaker
So it's kind of fascinating. I think hopefully that provides a little bit of context because we're all exposed to this medical system and the drugs that have been manufactured as a result of those conversations with plants. So do you want to talk about your conversations with Sokoba?
00:39:01
Speaker
Yeah, well, I ended up going to Peru because I had a series of dreams while I was in Australia. And they were of the kind that it just didn't feel like just a dream. And by the third dream in a series, I decided to investigate a bit further. I knew that this place that I was seeing in my dream actually existed. I had this feeling.
00:39:30
Speaker
And so I went to look for it. And when I actually did find it in Peru, I was there for a while and I worked with the Sokoba plants, which of course kind of already knew that I was coming because I think that she's the one that called me.
00:39:47
Speaker
And when I asked the curandera, you know, like, you know, he already knew what my plant was. And I couldn't have known because I didn't know anything about plants and I didn't still want. And I definitely didn't know anything about a plant that is living somewhere in, you know, near Pucalpa. You know, it's like, I didn't even know what this place was. Monica, could you just explain what a, did you say curandera? Is that the name?
00:40:17
Speaker
Curandero is the name for the doctor. Cura means heal, so it's the same as saying the healer, but they're actually, as you just mentioned before, these guys are high-level doctors. They can treat almost anything.
00:40:35
Speaker
and I have seen them doing that including both locals and foreigners that come in and they are looking for help and so yeah he was one of those and we had plenty of chats and everything and I started this process that is called the dieta with Sokoba which meant that the shaman or the curandero made a little
00:41:03
Speaker
kind of like a tea out of the bark of this tree and and I was I was drinking it and and then being placed in isolation so I was in my little heart nobody would touch me look at me talk to me except for the curandera would would come once a day and check on me and I should say as well this is not an hallucinogenic plant it's just another plant and
00:41:29
Speaker
well as actually a tree and yeah and you're just sitting there and it's really the first thing that you you find is that it's really hard for us coming from a very busy environment to sit in a hut doing nothing yes yes what am i doing here and what am i supposed to be expecting you know what is the
00:41:49
Speaker
until the unexpected happens and then you're like, oh, this is what I was doing here. And that's when the plants arrive and you know that you're in the presence of someone else.
00:42:02
Speaker
And the amount of information that arrives is incredible. It can come, again, through dreams, but it can come just in the middle of, you know, you're just swinging in your hammock and suddenly she's there. Yeah, you can download it. Yeah, exactly. But even like I remember with Sokoba in particular, I was literally swinging in the hammock inside my little hat on my own. And then suddenly I had these
00:42:32
Speaker
vision I guess out of nowhere and and he was right my eyes were open and he was right in front of my eyes as if I went somewhere else for a while and and I know this plant is not hallucinogenic so it's not about you know tripping and then you come back
00:42:52
Speaker
And so the amount of information that the plant shared were not just the information that were directly relevant to my own personal journey as an individual and in relation to my family and the people around me, but also unexpectedly really because I'm not a medical doctor, I was receiving information about what the plant is for.
00:43:17
Speaker
and it was through drawing as well and I was finding myself drawing things that I didn't know why I was drawing them and then they will you know coalesce in like a yeah because I'm the cleanser for the blood and I'm like oh okay and when I came back of course from that first trip I the first thing that I did clearly as a scientist like go to the database that we have access to and screen the literature
00:43:45
Speaker
for the plans and I couldn't find anything and I was like I don't even know what the real name is like the the real name meaning the latin name I don't even know if the cobra is only the name over here and maybe the same tree is called something else in another area of Peru so that would be even more impossible so
00:44:05
Speaker
At the beginning, I had to just to trust the information that the plant had given me. I'm like, well, that's what the plant said. I don't know if it's true, but that's what I received. And then by the time I had to, I decided to write the book, I did a second search, but that was years later. And at that point,
00:44:24
Speaker
I could find all of these materials and it was like why wasn't it there when I was looking for it and of course I think as part of the little cosmic game you know if it would have been there my mind would have grabbed it and made a nice story and trying to find validation through that well I really needed to learn that some of this information has its own validity and it doesn't require the validation of science although as a scientist it was good to eventually find that yeah
00:44:54
Speaker
I can validate this and I can actually, if you look at the literature for this tree, it will find that the information the plant has shared with me is exactly what we have found in laboratories. Right, right. I've never done any of those experiments. I didn't know anything about these plants before going, so it's not that there is a preconceived idea or pre-knowledge, nothing. It was just actually the interaction with the plant and I was, I guess the only thing that it was there was that I went open.
00:45:23
Speaker
I was ready to learn and I was open to learn whatever it was that I was supposed to learn. And so the plant was very generous and it provided with all sorts of information. Yeah, yeah. I know in the book you say that one of the things that you got from that interaction was that it is through the blood that we're all connected. And I thought that was just, you know, you could say that there's some obviousness behind that statement, but also
00:45:53
Speaker
you know, I think you go on to say that the wisdom is in the oxygen and the blood is the great connector. And, um, you know, one of the things, I mean, obviously there's the biochemical side to that, as you describe, uh, well, in that sentence, you know, the, the idea that the oxygen is, is transported on the blood and the blood is what's connecting that oxygen from the outside to the, the working organs and muscles and so on insides, but also, um, interesting enough in, in manual therapy, one of the, uh,
00:46:21
Speaker
things that we know is that blood is actually a connective tissue. It's classified as a connective tissue and it's actually important in the stability of the system. So the fact that it's connective tissue and that it provides stability also seems to be congruent with what you got from that interaction with Sokoba.
00:46:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, you went on to do many, many other experiments.
Plant Sound Communication Experiments
00:46:50
Speaker
I know there's the Chile experiment, for example, where, well, do you want to explain, do you want to explain a little bit about what you did with the Chile plants and the other plants? Yeah, the Chile plants were the first plants that I kind of worked with in the lab, primarily because I was told that they were easy to grow.
00:47:12
Speaker
And when I worked with plants before, I didn't know where to start, so I started from the place that it was the easiest, right? And they were relatively easy to grow, so I thought, okay, I can do this. And because I was coming obviously as an animal ecologist, I was coming from a very different background.
00:47:31
Speaker
And so what I brought into the plant experiments was always this animal view of how I would do, if that wasn't a plant, wasn't an animal, how would I design this experiment? And so the first thing that I did when I started with the plants, it was like, because I was working already in, you know, how animals communicate and how they share information and how this information moves across generations and
00:47:57
Speaker
you know, how do they make decisions about this information? How do they learn? So those were the core questions for me already before. Yes. And so when I entered the plant area, I thought, well, I don't know, do we know anything about this stuff?
00:48:13
Speaker
work out you know where the plant can communicate or whether they learn or any of that and in the context of the communication which was the first place where I looked at there was some already some beautiful work done on the chemical communication and now you know the volatiles and all of that are used by plants but also
00:48:32
Speaker
even you know before the chemical communication we have known for a while that plants can detect different frequencies of light and depending the ratio between these different frequencies they can tell whether you know someone is growing next to them or whether they should like speed up their growth or they can modify out what they're doing in response to light basically which is you know no surprise
00:48:57
Speaker
Yes and of course there was also the area they described the biochemicals as well as physical touch and plants can you know if they touch each other they would know whether that these that I'm touching is a friendly one is not a friendly one or is a brother or sister so is a sibling or is not a sibling and and decide what to do and do different things based on those bits of information
00:49:24
Speaker
So I thought, wow, this is amazing. It was really fascinating. But what surprised me was, again, because of my animal bias, I guess, that there was no work on sound. And of course, in the animal field, no matter what animal you're looking at, with the underwater, on land, wherever, sound is everywhere. And of course, sound is one of the cues that travels the best everywhere, because unless you've got a vacuum, sound can travel.
00:49:52
Speaker
While all the other signals can be struggling a bit because, for example, for the chemical communication, you would need the appropriate apparatus. So you need a receptor that can detect the sound, the receptors, the chemical receptors that can produce the chemical and all of that.
00:50:13
Speaker
sound is a mechanical signal so you just need to be able to sense and of course you the plants are very good at sensing and because it's a mechanical vibration as long as you can sense mechanical stimuli of any kind including for example gravity then it should be a good legible you know listener
00:50:34
Speaker
And so we started from there, but the first experiment was actually to see whether, okay, we know that there are these three channels that plants use to talk to each other, light, chemicals, and touch. What happens if I close them all down?
00:50:52
Speaker
And what happened if I close one and not the other? Which one would take precedent? Or if I close them all down, in theory, they shouldn't be able to talk to each other anymore. What if you? And if they do, then there is something else that we don't know. And, you know, surprise, surprise, they do.
00:51:10
Speaker
And so even when all those channels are closed, they can totally tell who is growing next to them, even if they go no access to them at all, and change their behavior. So they grow differently depending on who is there. And they can tell whether this is a friendly neighbor or not. And of course, that in itself was interesting, but I guess what was really interesting for me was the fact that this opened up the question, so how do they know? Yes, it's out of here.
00:51:37
Speaker
acoustic area came in because it was like well maybe it is sound it might not be the only thing or it might be not the thing but there is definitely something that is not what we already know.
00:51:50
Speaker
Sorry, I was going to say this reminds me a little bit of research that I read on noradrenaline in rats. And what they were able to do was to record the actual sound of noradrenaline because every molecule has a vibration, right? And so if you've got sophisticated enough recording equipment,
00:52:08
Speaker
then you can record the sound of that vibration and so they did that with rat noradrenaline and then they played the sound back to the rats and monitored their various vital signs and of course their heart rate went up, their breathing rate went up as if you'd injected them with noradrenaline so it just shows how everything is a vibrational reality that we're living in yeah and it sounds like you know very similar in some ways to what you've uncovered with the chili plants
00:52:36
Speaker
Because then, of course, I went on and looked at our sound, my effect, a little bit similar to the rat experiment, you know, like, okay, so if I record a sound that I know the plant is after, say, the sound of water, and then I only play it back, but there is no water there, you know, it's just a recording of it.
00:52:54
Speaker
would the plant know and what would it do and of course they know that it's water and of course they try to grow towards it because that's what they want and now there's another research from other colleagues you know the sound of the caterpillar chewing on the leaves right the sound of the bees approaching flowers and you know and it's really for me of course it's really good to see because when of course i started it took forever as a
00:53:22
Speaker
to publish the work because they really thought that this doesn't make any sense, would you mean? You don't even know what the signal is, so how can you say? And it's like, well, I don't know because it means that we need to look more into depth.
00:53:39
Speaker
And so at the beginning there was a lot of resistance and a lot of like, you know, not very nice behavior. Very friendly. And now it's really good to see that actually quietly and in the little, you know, in the secret chambers of their labs, other colleagues have started exploring these. And, you know, the last example of the bees
00:54:03
Speaker
you know, the sound of the bees affecting the sugar levels of the nectar in the flowers. That comes from a lab where one of the senior researchers there actually was very skeptical of my find. And then 10 years later, he released, you know, doing it himself. So that for me is really good because it's like, I don't actually care if they remember
00:54:27
Speaker
I'm sure they do, but I don't care. It's more like the fact is I, well, if someone that was actually skeptic about this is now investing resources and energy to explore this, obviously something good has happened.
Mimosa and Pea Plant Cognitive Studies
00:54:44
Speaker
Something is moving. Definitely.
00:54:49
Speaker
Yeah, and it's like the kind of difference between scepticism and cynicism, isn't it? I think scepticism is healthy, isn't it, to have a degree of scepticism. You can't be completely, what's the word, gullible, I suppose. So you need a degree of scepticism, but if you have
00:55:06
Speaker
you know either empirical support then it needs to be you know or you know just some kind of lived experience and that needs to be assessed further and if you're a cynic you probably just would dismiss it but if you're a skeptic then you might say okay well you know it doesn't make sense based on my current worldview but let's investigate this further because as you say the data is there.
00:55:26
Speaker
Yes, so that's cool. Yeah, it's brilliant. So I don't know if you've finished on the Chile experiment, I'm sure you could keep talking on any of these for a long time, but shall we move on to the mimosa plant briefly and just explain how, because that was a fascinating one, the habituation of the mimosa. Sure, mimosa is the super rock star, I guess.
00:55:51
Speaker
and I guess for good reason probably because it was the first experimental study
00:56:01
Speaker
um to really demonstrate that a plant can learn and remember but not in uh you know because the word learning memory and that kind of stuff has been used on plants before but it was always kind of yeah metaphorical or yeah they're learning but we don't really mean learning what we mean is like that you know a plant will know when to flower it's like but that we know that that is encoded in the genes we know that that's uh you know a quite kind of
00:56:29
Speaker
you know if there is a particular temperature that's what triggers the plant you know it's kind of fixed and not flexible while the learning that I was talking about is the same kind of learning that we would talk about if we talk about you know ourselves or we talk about our dogs and our cats and you know and and that means that the learning is happening within the lifetime of the individual
00:56:54
Speaker
it's a flexible response, it adapts, it changes in real time. So it doesn't wait for the next season and it doesn't wait for the temperature to trigger it, but it's actually like, oh, what's happening now? And what do I do based on my previous experience? And that's what Mimosa was able to do because Mimosa is a plant that
00:57:15
Speaker
it was a good target because given you know we started at the beginning talking about plant blindness one of the major issue with plants is that we don't recognize them as doing so behaving because their movement to our
00:57:32
Speaker
perception is nil reality they do move but a very different time scale which is so different from our time scale that we can't even perceive it unless we stop and really observe and really listen so mimosa is a special case in the sense that is one of the few plants that actually does move at our time scale so we can literally see it doing a thing and
00:57:59
Speaker
So she closes the leaves when she's disturbed or when, I should say, when she perceive a threat. And then, you know, when the leaves are closed, there are big spiky thorns that show up. And so she's going to be less appetizing. And the idea is that, okay, the predator, maybe we'll leave her alone. Yeah.
00:58:20
Speaker
And the cost of doing that, because of course many of the defense mechanism in animal plants and everything, they come with a trade-off. And the trade-off in this case is that when the leaves are closed, she comes to synthesize us efficiently.
00:58:38
Speaker
almost like half of the capacity for photosynthesis is lost. So you see there is like, well, if the threat is real, then hey, you know, you better survive. So you're going to do everything that you can and you're going to have to compromise and not feed on life for a while. But because you're trying to protect yourself to be alive.
00:59:01
Speaker
But if the threat is not real, then actually you've been stupid because you're wasting your opportunity to grow and if you're really not getting it, then you might actually really compromise your survival by starving to death. So there is a fine line between like you need to know what's happening and then act accordingly in the most optimal way that you can.
00:59:24
Speaker
Well, the idea of plans be able to learn would imply that they will be able to determine their circumstances and then change their behavior. And in the case of Mimosa, what I was asking her to do, it was the very most simple level of learning, which the technical term is habituation. And the idea is very simple. It's like there is something happening around you, and we experience this all the time. And wherever we have looked, habituation is there.
00:59:54
Speaker
So the idea is like there is something happening in your environment and through repeated exposure, you kind of tune out because if nothing happened as a consequence of that, whatever is happening, say that you're listening, there is the sound of the fan.
01:00:10
Speaker
and you might notice it when you enter the room but after a few minutes or not even there you know that the fan is not gonna kill you you know everything is okay and you kind of not hear it anymore in the same way with the changing temperatures that you might enter a room where it's you know cold but after a while you kind of adjust to it because you know that it's okay
01:00:30
Speaker
But let's say that then a fire alarm goes off, you need to be able to actually ignore that and be able to recognize, okay, I might still ignore the fan, but this one I need to pay attention because this one could be dangerous.
01:00:46
Speaker
So what I was asking Mimosa to do is like, okay, I'm gonna give you an experience that is looking like it could be dangerous, it could have consequences, but through repeated experience,
01:01:03
Speaker
if you can learn you should know that actually there are no consequences and so in theory if that's possible for you to learn and understand this you should be just um you know maybe you close your leaves the first time that you experienced this because you don't know what it is maybe the second time but soon you should be able to realize that this is no dangerous reopen your leaves and keep feeding because it's business as usual yeah and so in the case of the mimos experiment i drop it
01:01:31
Speaker
I dropped it was a controlled draft and as I always say it's like no plants were harmed in the process. It was enough to basically scare the plant with this uh yeah with this sudden uh stimulus that arrives and it's like whoa and of course the plant should be thinking what's that yes until it worked out what's that and then when and in fact when the plant does work out what that is
01:01:58
Speaker
he opens the leaves again and i'm still dropping it but the plants has already decided like oh this is annoying you know it's really annoying me but it's not deadly it's gonna go hopefully soon and and that will be fine and so
01:02:13
Speaker
By doing that, what the plant was showing me is like it was literally adapting its behavior in real time in a flexible way that reflected the needs of the environment, which in itself is great. Then of course, we had two groups and one of them was in an environment that had plenty of light. And so the mimosa in those environment could afford to be lazy because anyway, there is lots of light. So even if you get it wrong a few times, who cares?
01:02:43
Speaker
And while the plants in the lower light environment were making mistakes there and closing for no reason or for no real threat, that might cost you. And what I found between those two groups is that exactly what I just described, the plants that were in high level of lights were kind of like lazy. Like they still learn, but they were lazier because they didn't need to be fastened.
01:03:12
Speaker
while the one in the low light environments, there was urgency, so they learned much quicker. Sure. It also feels like, again, if we anthropocentric, I don't know how you say it, anthropocentricize.
01:03:29
Speaker
We make it anthropocentric. Then it feels like also the plants seem to have some kind of vestibular system. And now is there something known within the plant that allows it to feel that sense of drop that we would feel if we were dropped?
01:03:43
Speaker
Well, this plant is quite well studied and it's got all sorts of electrical capabilities to detect its environment. By chance it's called the sensitive plant. It's a very sensitive plant and it can probably sense both the displacement, the impact and all of that combination.
01:04:11
Speaker
Yeah. And the interesting thing about this is that, you know, I did the experiment and then I left them, all of them, no matter what treatment they were, what group of light they were. I left them there for a while and then I went back to see whether they could remember what I did. And the first time I went back was actually three days later thinking,
01:04:35
Speaker
very anthropomorphic and anthropocentric I think it was if it was me and I had dinner because that's the equivalent would I remember what I had dinner three days ago now so I don't reckon they can remember what this is and instead when I re-offered that experience they were like oh dear this again
01:04:57
Speaker
And so from the very beginning, they were like, no, there's no need to close about this, I know this. And I was like, maybe it's too soon. So I went back six days later still, and then I left them for 28 days. So that's almost a month later. And again, if I had to be anthropocentric, it's like, I do not remember what I ate for dinner a month ago. But the mimosas do, and they remember the experience, and again, they know exactly what's going on.
01:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? Really fascinating. And I guess it poses the question, which I appreciate you may not have the answer to, but where is that memory stored? How do they recall something that is, as you say, a long time in the past? Yeah, well, this is something that, it's an important question and this is something that goes back again to the initial part of our conversation on how we see these processes.
01:05:57
Speaker
And again, if we are looking at a memory from the, you know, cognition is in the box kind of model, then we are expecting to find a chip. We are expecting to find that something that is in the brain is something in there that is like the memory chip, right? And of course, this is very problematic, especially for those that do subscribe to this model because
01:06:24
Speaker
already there is no brain. So you start already with the wrong food is like there is no brain. Yeah. The brain, but obviously the mimosa can remember. So what is it? Yeah. And then if you take the other perspective, um, then I don't think there is much of a problem in the sense that if you are looking at the other way, then you could think of memory as a part of the embodiment in a particular place, but it's actually everywhere.
01:06:52
Speaker
implants a model of decentralized system, right? Yes, exactly. It sounds a bit like Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenic fields and the notion that these processes are stored in a field that is accessible to any organism that is tuned into that field. Have you studied Sheldrake's work or are you familiar with it at all?
01:07:18
Speaker
Oh, I am. And naturally, I read one of his book when I was 11. You know, it's been and I we have met a few years ago. Oh, fantastic. Conversation. I bet you had a great conversation. And it's, yeah, I think we will be at a place in time now where his theory could be put to the test.
01:07:42
Speaker
Okay, excellent. That's exciting. Yeah, but as always, you know, it requires, and that has been, I guess, one of the problems, it requires some support.
01:07:54
Speaker
And without the support, it becomes difficult to, because you can't do it in a small way. You have to do it, you know, it has to be, it's a big project. And yeah, it'll come, it'll come. Yeah, for sure. That's fantastic. Why don't we try and do a quick, a quick, if that's possible, version of talking about pea, pea brains and how the peas and other plants as well exhibit consciousness. What was your experiment around there?
01:08:24
Speaker
yeah the experiment with the piece which was by the way and that it's something that you know is described in the book yeah totally inspired and instructed i should say by a plant again from the amazon and because i was trying to do that experiment which was basically trying to find a way to experimentally test
01:08:51
Speaker
The concept of Pavlovian learning, which is the same story that we, you know, many of us know about the Pavlovian dog. And the story goes that, you know, Pavlov noticed that, you know, the dog salivate before receiving dinner.
01:09:07
Speaker
then he's ringing a bell and the bell doesn't trigger anything because it doesn't mean anything to the dog until he rings the bell and then he presents dinner, rings the bell and presents dinner. And when the dog starts learning about this association, which is a bell predicts the arrival of dinner, then the bell alone
01:09:29
Speaker
was we'll get the dog salivating and so the dog is basically imagining dinner arriving which normally it does straight after the bell and not only that but it's um yeah it's salivating in anticipation basically and so the idea was like can we find a way to test whether this kind of learning which is known as Pavlovian learning or associative learning
01:09:51
Speaker
And it's a level up from the habituation because it requires the organism to associate, so to create a link between two things. One, one that they really want and the other one is something that doesn't have any meaning or value to start with, but it requires value through experience. So it's a bit more
01:10:17
Speaker
You know, it's a bit more complex than habituation. And then, and it wasn't working. And then I ended up in the Amazon, totally, you know, separate issue from that experiment. And one of the plants told me exactly how to construct the experiment, not only there, but it made very clear that I was using the wrong plant. So it was like, no, don't use sunflowers. This experiment needs to be done with the peas.
01:10:46
Speaker
So I went back home and I got some peas and that's how I started and you know it took a while because it's a very challenging experiment like it's simple but it required a lot of piloting and trying and fine tuning
01:11:04
Speaker
And it's deceptively simple. And then what we found though is absolutely the pea, just like the dog, doesn't care about the bell, which in my experiment wasn't a bell, but it was a little fan. It cares very much about dinner, which in this experiment for the plant was blue light, which we know they really love and they bend towards if the light comes from one side.
01:11:31
Speaker
that is kind of like already, the knowledge on that was already established, the phototropic responses of plants, and especially the phototropic response of this bending behavior towards blue lighting piece, it was very well known already. So I didn't discover anything there, but what I did is I introduced this extra element, which was this little fan, which played the role of the bell for the Pavlovian. And so the plant doesn't care when the fan is blowing alone.
01:12:01
Speaker
But after three days, when the fan is always preceding the light, just like for the dog, the bell always precedes dinner, when then I tested it. So I only presented the fan and no light followed. The plant decided to follow the instruction, basically, or the suggestion that the fan was proposing, which is I follow me and you'll find the light. The important thing here to say is that
01:12:31
Speaker
The way in which I tested these was I knew that if there was only the light and no fan in the picture, what the plants will do will go 100% to the light because that's what they do.
01:12:43
Speaker
Now, when I tested them, basically I was asking them to follow the fan, which was giving a kind of contradictory piece of information. It's like, I know you saw the light last time from this side and instinctively you would want to go that way. But if you've learned that the fan is the real key here and he's going to tell you exactly where the light is going to come from, if you learn, then you'll follow the fan.
01:13:08
Speaker
So between these two choices, the plants actually follow the fan over their instinctual, you know, job going for the light from the place where they saw it last, which is what they would do naturally.
01:13:21
Speaker
So that decision was a strong one. The plant is really committing to go in a direction which instinctively doesn't make any sense. Unless from experience you have learned that actually this makes total sense. I know what's coming next.
01:13:39
Speaker
And yeah, so it was interesting because first of all, of course, it's like, again, plants do learn and not only habituate like the mimosa did, but they learn also this higher level of learning, which we considered always just completely an area for animals only, you know?
01:14:02
Speaker
Not only that, but the plant just like the dog is also anticipating. So it's expecting something to happen after the fan in this case. And so, first of all, who is expecting what?
01:14:19
Speaker
Who is it that is expecting here? If there is no one there, who is it? Someone is expecting. And also it means that just like the dog, there is a projection in the future based on the past. So there is an understanding somewhere that there is value into things and these values allow you to
01:14:44
Speaker
determine what you're based on your previous experience, what you're going to do next, which is the definition of learning. So, so the P was, there was a recent article by a group of colleagues, I guess, which, you know, was featured quite widely and also including the Guardian and other magazines. And they were, you know, attacking both the mimosa and this P study.
01:15:14
Speaker
with the usual like they don't have brain therefore and it's like what they what is interesting is that what is was missed is the fact is like here is the data yes you might not like it and i understand that you might not want to know that this is happening and i understand that because we have lived for a long time
01:15:35
Speaker
in the recent decades or centuries maybe as a western culture we have lived for a long time enough to to think that this is how it is plants don't do anything but that is not true simply you know i'm not the only one saying it like the dowings of the world have said it so many have said it so this is really an idea that is totally unscientific yeah and
01:16:00
Speaker
And yet, you know, it causes so much stir, not so much because of his scientific validity, but totally because he's going, you know, touching those preconceived ideas.
01:16:16
Speaker
You know, one of the things that I've read around is sort of models of conscious development and Ken Wilber is one of the sort of leaders in that field and he talks, he's combined a lot of different people's models into looking at them from an evolutionary perspective and seeing how the human consciousness has developed across the eons and essentially he kind of starts out with
Challenging Scientific Materialism
01:16:42
Speaker
the idea that you've got archaic belief systems and they're magical animistic belief systems which is kind of what we're talking about here that there's spirit or life in everything including of course the plants but in animistic systems it might be the rocks and the rivers as well.
01:16:59
Speaker
and you move into the sort of mythical side of things which is where the religions start to emerge with their myths and then you move into scientific rationalism and materialism which of course is where science is based and you might think well that's it that's the top of the hierarchy in a way but beyond that you have the kind of postmodern and pluralistic and ecological sides which again you're moving back into a kind of awareness of nature and the pluralistic aspect of that is that
01:17:26
Speaker
you realise that there's two sides to every coin like we said the objective and the subjective and then when you move beyond that it's taking it into integrative consciousness so it's saying well how do we reconcile these objective findings which don't fit with our existing models or not with the mainstream ones at least
01:17:47
Speaker
And how do we integrate that into a new level of awareness or consciousness and so on? And that's it strikes me that's where your work is sitting at the moment. And there's still plenty of people in that scientific materialist kind of level that just don't like the idea of moving up. And I guess because it's I don't really know how you move. Yes. I guess
01:18:17
Speaker
Yeah I wouldn't know what to say to them if I had a chance as I look because you know it's the same as if you are if you are very religious and you're trying to explain to someone what God is well unless I have the same feelings I will not understand what God is and if anything I might explain I might feel like that
01:18:39
Speaker
You are kind of a bit weirdo because you think that God exists, you know, while I don't, what is that? So these are views that are like, they require the personal, again, the subjective experience to enter in the picture because ultimately your experience tells you what is true for you.
01:19:00
Speaker
And also, and this reminds me of Alan Watt because he gave a lecture, you know, when he was lecturing this season and I was listening to it and I thought this is, I mean, I really like him and I think it was brilliant. And he gave this analogy of a piece of metal, like a magnet.
01:19:24
Speaker
And he said, you know, let's say that you go the positive pole and the negative pole in the magnets, right? But you really don't like the negative pole. So let's cut it off.
01:19:35
Speaker
Cut it off, you know? Yeah, that's what we're doing. So you cut it off because, no, I don't want the negative pole. I want a magnet just with a positive pole. And guess what? As soon as you cut it off, exactly where you cut it off, not only now you have two pieces, but both of them have negative and positive poles. So by trying to get rid of one pole, you're actually not only multiplying your problem, but not resolving it at all anyway, because the pole is just reformed immediately.
01:20:03
Speaker
Yes. Yes. It never went anywhere. So then from that perspective, what I get is the only place where you can be is in the middle so that you can see both poles, but you don't take them seriously. None of the two have the complete picture. So why would you, you know, subscribe to one and not a exclusion of the other? Yes.
01:20:25
Speaker
And then there is yet another layer of this, which of course is about even still in the middle, you're still inside this story where there is polarity, which is really like much of the reality that we experience most of the time. But to see the middle place, then you have to transcend that too. And when you transcend that middle place, then I guess you can integrate the poles and the middle place and you can realize, oh, it was just a magnet.
01:20:56
Speaker
It's a great analogy.
Spiritual Insights from Tobacco
01:20:58
Speaker
The black and the white, the positive and negative, or even the middle, because then we get upset about the middle. It's like, it's just a magnet. This is the rule of the game. And if you're going to be blaming this reality, this is what you got. But you also can tell that it's just a game, and so you can transcend in that sense.
01:21:17
Speaker
But you have these experiences like this, of like really feeling what it is to be at the pole that is the positive and you might like and the negative and you might don't like the middle sometimes and then none of it at all and all of it at the same time and that's where the place
01:21:36
Speaker
where you can see the poles, you can see the middle, you can see the magnets basically. That place is a very powerful place because suddenly you also know that any idea that you might have of yourself as a separate thing from the rest makes absolutely no sense. Because every time that you have that idea it means that you are
01:22:00
Speaker
inside the story of the magnet again. So you're separating yourself in one aspect of the magnet or one aspect of reality and you lost the picture that, oh, it's just all a magnet, or it's just one reality. Well, look, I think this leads absolutely beautifully into a part of the book where you're talking about tobacco. And of course, tobacco, you know, has quite a bad reputation amongst us, I guess,
01:22:28
Speaker
was what would be the term a kind of industrialized, industrialized nations who tend to abuse it. But, um, you know, I was quite fascinated to read, I think actually it might've been Jeremy Narby's book, um, The Cosmic Serpent, where he was talking about, um, tobacco being called by the ayahuasca. So these are the shamans that use ayahuasca, um, in ceremony. Uh, and they called it the daughter of ayahuasca.
01:22:51
Speaker
and I kind of didn't get what they meant by that initially I could conceptualize it to some degree but but reading your book you know you went into one of these experiences with tobacco and can you tell us I because I think I think was this
01:23:10
Speaker
eating the diet approach or was this smoking the tobacco that you I never smoked in my life although I've been all rounded by smokers including my family and this is it wasn't because I was trying to be good it's just like it never interested me so it's actually really strange for me to then have this very profound relationship with this plant in particular but maybe it is because I never really abused it that I was able to connect and I'm very close to it and
01:23:40
Speaker
And I think it's probably one of the most precious plants that we have. And to me, rather than a daughter, it's more of a grandfather. He's the big boss. And if you look at those cultures, you'll find that pretty much everywhere, including here in Australia, but pretty much everywhere, there is a tobacco plant who is used to basically open the door. It's the guardian between the spaces.
01:24:08
Speaker
It really feels like if it's there, everything will be fine. It's the one that looks after the space and makes sure that everyone is behaving accordingly to the rules and is behaving respectfully. It was interesting because I've done work with elders and grandeiro and amazing indigenous people from all over the place.
01:24:36
Speaker
but in the context of the theater I was told my very first, the very first GP woman that I worked with, they told me like you know here is what happened to me after doing lots of theaters with various people and you know my grandfather first and all of that and this is a mess started like when he was eight or something you know but no comparison but uh
01:24:56
Speaker
But he said to me, at one point, the plant will call you by name. And there will be no need for you to have an intermediary like a teacher, because the plant will be directly the teacher, is always directly the teacher, even when the teacher, the human teacher is in there. But in that case, you will know that then it's just you and the plant. And so you will have to engage in that way.
01:25:19
Speaker
and for me that was a surprise because of course I never thought that that would happen to me but that's what exactly what the tobacco did and it literally called me by name just as the sheep people man had told me and it was no choice it was very clear like okay we're doing this work and so you know what is required to diet with me come on let's do it and
01:25:42
Speaker
So I did and of course circumstances were created around it. They were like, oh dear, this is perfect. You know, I was offered this place by a friend that lives like in the middle of the forest. She was going away and she's like, would you like to look after my place?
01:25:58
Speaker
yeah so i had my dog with me who is my little guardian angel and you know and if i was a witch and he was a cat then we would be a perfect match and he's not a cat but he was still a perfect match and so yeah and the tobacco was incredible in the sense of like
01:26:22
Speaker
the depth and the perspective that he provided, not just from a health perspective and what he's good at, but the clarity that he gave me on the state of humanity and why we are suffocating in our own story.
01:26:43
Speaker
and creating so much chaos and destruction especially at the moment more than ever. It was just incredible and it blew my mind how a plant would be so generous with the knowledge.
01:27:01
Speaker
and in explaining to someone that I kind of felt like I'm the retarded human here that doesn't know what's going on and here is a really wise plant who is going to actually teach me what it means to be human.
01:27:18
Speaker
Because with the ayahuasca, I know some people, and I think this is including the indigenous peoples that use it in ceremony,
01:27:33
Speaker
term it an entheogen, or it is termed by some people an entheogen, which means a gaudevoking experience. And, you know, the quote, one of the quotes you have in your book, when talking with tobacco, which, as I say, the Iowa scarers make this very close association between Iowa and tobacco.
01:27:51
Speaker
The sentence says, I am the Holy Spirit who connects you with great spirits, the God creator, the universal mind, the divine, or whatever name you want to use. And when I read that, I thought, oh, wow, OK, that links very closely with what I've read in Jeremy Narby's book. But then you go on to talk about, of course, how
01:28:14
Speaker
humanity itself is in this state of painful disconnection and how we're drowning in grief and filling up our lungs with this emotional pain, which of course in the Chinese medical system, they've always said that grief is held in the lungs. So there are all of these things just firing off in my mind as I was reading these words. And then tobacco said to you, I meet these emotional waters with my holy fire and dry this disease out of your pure being. I bring peace.
01:28:44
Speaker
But then you obviously went on to experience him saying that his flowers are the best remedy for pulmonary conditions, which is, and specifically pneumonia, which was a fascinating insight. And he said that by affecting the proper functioning of the lungs and compromising the amount of oxygen that reaches the blood, pneumonia is in fact the physical manifestation of grief, the pain of separation in the emotional body.
01:29:14
Speaker
And I thought that was a beautiful insight. Have you shared that with many people? Is that something that other people resonate with or that you see patterns related to that observation?
01:29:30
Speaker
I guess I have shared it with many people in the sense that now he's in this book and it's like for everyone to see but I did make the remedy according to the instruction that he has given me and it's in my fridge and it will wait for the person that will need it.
01:29:48
Speaker
I have, after the tobacco, and this is no longer in the book, but after the tobacco, I had other plants come in and ask him, oh, can I be the next one? And so I had dieted other plants. And one in particular, again, a very generous spirit, again, very clear instructions. And what happened was that with the tobacco,
01:30:10
Speaker
I did have some experiences. Immediately after I did the Dieta with it, I had a few experiences where some people would arrive and they would be like, oh, I'm having this problem here and there. We're just, you know, we're just talking. And suddenly I could hear it almost in the back of my mind that the tobacco was like, that's my job. That's my job. And so I would ask them like, would you mind if, you know, and I would pull out the tobacco. And in a couple of cases,
01:30:39
Speaker
where this happened, whatever issue was there, it wasn't anymore. And again, it's got nothing to do with me. It's just that the plant seems to have decided that I'm stupid enough to listen. So I'm the perfect collaborator. But the other plants that I dieted after the tobacco, which was as insightful as I said, this time,
01:31:09
Speaker
she because she gave me the condition that she was describing to me as the thing that she heals and so and because she she heals amongst the various things she heals the fungal infections suddenly i got this disgusting fungal infection out of nowhere on my arms and i was like what is this you know and i was like maybe this time i really stuffed up you know i shouldn't have done it whatever
01:31:38
Speaker
And then the voice in my mind was like, I already told you what to do. So now do it.
01:31:44
Speaker
And of course, one thing is like, oh, someone will come and, you know, I help you, but it's none of my problems, you know? And if it doesn't work, it's not me. Another thing is when, well, there it is. You know what to do. I told you how to use me. Now you have to, because you don't have the choice. It's like, otherwise go to the doctor and ask them for the cream. They won't work. And you know, go ahead.
01:32:08
Speaker
But here it is. This is your apprenticeship. Come on. And so I followed the instructions.
01:32:17
Speaker
And it was amazing because literally by the time I started within three days, because the skin was totally flared up, all of these red blotches and it was just like, oh my God. And then in three days, everything just cooled down, everything disappeared. And I actually have a record because I kept a diary.
01:32:38
Speaker
And within 10 days, everything was clear, as if I've never had anything before. And of course, it has never come back or anything. And I know it wasn't because I contracted something. It was literally part of the theater, part of the learning. Plant wanted me to experience it directly so that I wouldn't find excuses. I'm like, well, here it is. So you have to. And now I know what she's for.
01:33:07
Speaker
from the direct experience but also I know that I can really trust them and whatever information they have given me in this context of like even like medical healing I don't need to know uh you know the medical names I don't need to know I just need to ask them and they will just exactly as we've done as humanity for a long time you know they will tell you and if you're gonna follow the instruction you you'll just get there
01:33:35
Speaker
Beautiful, beautiful stuff. Yeah, so just to sort of round off on the tobacco story, you know, I know I keep reading passages from the book but it's because it's so good and pertinent, but this passage I think was near the end of where you're talking about tobacco and you're saying that in each moment humanity can open its eyes to close the rift that separates it from the whole by realizing that there is no rift at all.
Human Disconnection and Consciousness
01:34:00
Speaker
This realisation heals the root cause of humanity's pain. Instead, it has looked for a quick relief from its effects, filling up the lungs with my smoke to bring a temporary piece away from a pain it forgot it never needed. Instead of asking for complete healing, humanity has misused me as a partial sedative. This abuse turned me into a poison.
01:34:23
Speaker
You know that point I think A is pertinent because of course of the way tobacco is often abused in society but it also provides an explanation for why that may be the case and how we've lost this sense of connection and it just seems to me that that fits so beautifully with what we see going on in society or maybe it's not beautiful but it's
01:34:45
Speaker
It connects with our observations of these soaring rates of depression, this sense of isolation, despite social media, social media almost being a driver of isolation. And you were talking about when we were discussing researchers and levels of consciousness, you were talking about this sort of sense of being separate and different from and being the observer.
01:35:14
Speaker
You know, it struck me, I was reading a book called Love, Freedom and Aloneness by Osho, which is interesting because, I mean, this is just a coincidence, I'm sure, but Osho, every time I heard you mention Osho, I kept thinking of saying Osho. And anyway, Osho was the plant that, you know, obviously talked about blood being the great connector, but
01:35:40
Speaker
in Osho's book you know he was talking about aloneness and and it really struck me that you know you could choose aloneness or you could choose all oneness and I think that's what your research is is uncovering is this sense of unity and all oneness and how we are all completely integrated and interactive and would that be a fair sort of comment
01:36:07
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess, you know, really it's about there is only one body and the destruction of the Amazon right now, the fires here in Australia, they should be painful now because you're watching the news and thinking like, Oh my God, you know, that's really bad, but it should be physically painful. Because if you realize that that is your body too,
01:36:33
Speaker
then why would you burn it? Why would you burn yourself? Why would you cause the destruction to the self? Because there is only one self.
01:36:47
Speaker
I guess, though, again, as we were talking about before, if you're stuck into the positive or negative pole story of reality, you can't see that. And even if you sit in the middle, you still can't see that. You recognize that they're poles, but you can't see that. And what is requiring here is to see that there is a magnet. And by just stepping into that space, automatically there are things that we would never, ever dream of doing.
01:37:12
Speaker
because they make absolutely no sense, not from a moral perspective, not from an ethics perspective. We wouldn't need no morals and no ethics, because we would just know, and you do, you just know that there are some things that are just not what you do. It would be madness to do it, but that's what we are experiencing, it's madness. Yeah, yeah.
Integrating Insights into Life
01:37:35
Speaker
So to round this off,
01:37:39
Speaker
I guess the big question for most people is how do we reconcile this new information into our daily lives? What are the implications for life on the earth as we know it today? I mean, there are implications for farming and for diet and even for academia and so on. But what are your sort of take-home messages? Well,
01:38:08
Speaker
First of all, it's like get out there and get your hands dirty. And that will be already a solution for a lot of the problems anyway. And I think that each one of us has a particular love. We love doing certain things that we really love, the same love that we had when we were children. And we're like, oh, someone loves playing music.
01:38:34
Speaker
Why have we created a society that is forcing people to be something that they're not, is the problem. Instead of like, if you were born to be a musician, you should be cherished just for that. And not because you're gonna become famous, that's not the point, it's just because it gives you joy to deliver yourself in whichever way you are delivering yourself.
01:38:58
Speaker
And so a lot of the things, a lot of the issues that we are having, for example, you know, with diet or with the way in which we produce food, it's just highlighting that, you know, we're not really in love.
01:39:11
Speaker
Because if you're in love, there are some things, again, that you wouldn't do. And so fall in love. Fall in love with your God and fall in love with the things that you want to do. The things that really give you joy. It's not a kind of temporary satisfaction and then you're back to looking for more. And give.
01:39:32
Speaker
there is a say that like the more you give the more you're given but it's so true and it's like and you're supported all the time in this process because I mean we are given all the time in such an abundance look at nature even now she's burning she's uh you know thirsty and yet she keeps giving uh we are nature yeah so we are not being true to our nature by not
01:39:59
Speaker
giving the best fruits that we have and then as well that the best idea the most brilliant minds uh which can be from any space of society they don't i'm not talking just academia you know the brilliant idea that we all have come to
01:40:19
Speaker
bring to manifestation to creation well this is exactly what we need we need you we need you in the best way that you can be because that is what the solution for all of our problems are and by just being you you already solving something.
01:40:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it reminds me of the word forgiveness, which of course is a driver behind many of the world's religions and spiritual teachings, but it's literally the notion that we give in advance and then we receive as a result because that's the interaction. You can't help but have that response if you give. And the other thing you mentioned was, you know, you're essentially saying,
01:41:05
Speaker
to be yourself you know you have something to to offer to the world and in that way you're vital and I always think that isn't that interesting that we use that very word you know vitality to represent health and function and so if we can move ourselves towards optimal health and function by
01:41:27
Speaker
being vital, then we become vital to the planet or to the universe or however you want to frame that. So I was going to finish with this sentence, which I'd like you to finish off for me if you know what I'm talking about. And that is, it said, here is the very first and very last story of you. Stories are a learning tool for the soul. Once you remember who we are, you no longer need any story at all. Yeah.
01:41:57
Speaker
Do you know what comes after that in your book? The land. Beautiful. That's the concluding paragraph from the book.
Endorsements and Reflections
01:42:07
Speaker
And it is a fantastic book. And there's so much in there that we haven't even been able to touch on, but it's a brilliant audio book as well. So either way, if you prefer to listen, I normally start out listening and then think, oh, that's really good. I've got to buy the book as well.
01:42:23
Speaker
So that was fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today and for taking time out on the side of the road to talk to us. It's brilliant. No, thank you very much. Yeah, yeah. And who knows, maybe down the line we'll do some more, but that was fantastic. Thank you, Monica. Yeah, it was great. Thank you.
01:42:46
Speaker
Well, I don't know about you, but I was just buzzing after finishing this interview with Monica. Her research and willingness to dive deep into domains that have been taboo in mainstream scientific circles has certainly met with resistance. Not because the science is bad, but because her findings strongly suggest that our current model of consciousness is either wrong or at best incomplete. Her message, though, is one we can all agree on. That all life is sacred.
01:43:11
Speaker
If you're as inspired as I was by that interview, please do share it with anyone you think would find it as fascinating as you did. Look forward to seeing you on the next show.