in this regard, i am always reminded of pioneering (in true sense of that word) work of jagdish-chandra-bose ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose ). it truly is fascinating !
Ahem, that is Sir Jagdesh.
:)
Plants can detect sound
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: Plants can detect sound
#32This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).
They could be. We have words to describe the special types of touch so we can differentiate them
Re: Plants can detect sound
#33This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).
Similar to a question I had in physics class at school, which was quickly brushed aside by the teacher, who wanted to continue with the content: Why is temperature one of the base units? Isn't temperature just movement as well? Nowadays I know I was more or less right. Just that 1 molecule moving hardly makes temperature and one probably needs a large number.
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Re: Plants can detect sound
#34I was reading about this last week and the thing that struck me is that every experiment was "plants respond more to than ", or male voices vs female voices or swearing vs compliments.
It's total pseudoscience designed to generate comedy science articles and press releases.
If anyone actually cared about this they'd be playing sine waves and white noise at various frequencies and amplitudes. You'd see a graph of growth vs frequency or whatever.
I couldn't find anything like that though. Does this article have it (can't read due to paywall).
Re: Plants can detect sound
#35They don't have eyes but can detect light, too...
they don't have feet but they can detect gravity too and grow vertically when they can
Re: Plants can detect sound
#36I ththought of this: https://youtu.be/b9UO9tn4MpI?si=JhvoaRUdBLed-LBR
I thought of this [1]
Re: Plants can detect sound
#37This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).
touch isn't one sense either. You have separate organs in the skin for high and low frequency vibrations, pressure, and more.
Merkel's disks (close to surface, sense edges and slight pressure) Meissner corpuscles (close to surface, sense fine vibrations) Pacinian corpuscles (Deep, sense low frequency vibrations and heavy pressure) Ruffini endings (Sense skin stretching)
Not to mention other touch-like senses like pain, heat/cold, and burns. There are also separate dedicated mechanisms for erogenous zones (Krause end-bulbs) Your brain does a fine job interpreting all of these together but they are totally different biological mechanisms
Re: Plants can detect sound
#38Just read “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham (1951)[1]. It’s a great, classic horror sci-fi novel where plants can hear and talk to each other. Big influence for “Annihilation” and “28 Days Later.” Gotta love it when some crazy fictional idea turns out to have some factual (?) basis. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids
I think Annihilation is more a shameless remake of Stalker, as far as going into a "Zone" where an alien influence has changed the nature of reality.
Re: Plants can detect sound
#39I guess this answers the question If a Tree Falls in the Forest and There's No One Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound? yes the trees do hear it.
Re: Plants can detect sound
#40This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).
Touch is measuring motion or sustained pressure. Taste doesn't care about how hard the molecules hit your taste receptors, only if they bind to the taste receptors or not. Our eyes don't measure the photon pressure[1], the photons react with the atoms in our photoreceptor cells[2] triggering an electrochemical process. Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on our body which is part of our sense…
If you're going to categorise senses into the usual five, which is what seems to be going on here, then hot, cold and pain are going to count as "touch" too. Those aren't about measuring motion so this explanation doesn't seem to work.