Plant Sentience - A New Model of Intelligent Life
Leading scientist of plant cognition, Monica Gagliano (Australia), presents a new understanding of the vegetal world. She argues that, in order to understand plant sentience we need to radically rethink our definitions of intelligence and consciousness to move away from a human-centric model. Through a survey of plant capabilities from sight, smell and touch to communication, the podcast will challenge our notion of intelligence, presenting a vision of plant life that is more sophisticated than most imagine.
Monica Gagliano, PhD is a research associate professor in evolutionary ecology and former fellow of the Australian Research Council. She is currently based at the University of Sydney as a Research Affiliate at the Sydney Environment Institute and a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, where she has opened the doors of the brand-new BI Lab–Biological Intelligence Lab as part of the Diverse Intelligences Initiative of the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Monica is 2020 Fellow-in-residence at the Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth (ICE). In her latest book, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic Books, 2018), which she calls a phytobiography, she describes her experiments that opened the space to begin to understand how to make contact with this other-than-human intelligence.
For more information: www.monicagagliano.com
