And then remember.

PRUDENCE GIBSON, THE CONVERSATION 9 DEC 2016

Pavlov's plants: new study shows plants can learn from experience

Prudence Gibson, UNSW Australia
The first time I met the Australian evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano, she was wearing colourful paisley trousers and was giving an animated talk at a 2014 environmental humanities conference in Canberra.
Despite her passionate presentation, trouble was brewing. Something was not right in the room. A woman beside me in the audience kept shifting her weight. A man to my left had crossed his arms and released several voluble sighs.
Why? Because Gagliano was using phrases such as “plant cognitive ecology”, “learning and communication”. And because she was, and is, opening up areas of knowledge that some might feel threaten the sovereignty of humans over nature.
That day in Canberra three years ago, Gagliano’s time frames were questioned. The frequency of her experiments were interrogated. Her apparatus was cross-examined. Yet, despite resistance, I believe her work is ground-breaking and opens up debate about plant subjectivity and ethics.

Sensitive plants

In a famous 2013 New Yorker article by Michael Pollan, The Intelligent Plant, Gagliano was introduced to readers as someone whose experiments are extending the concept of cognition to the plant world.
The problem she is addressing is that if plants have brain-like functions and make sentient-like decisions, our existing perception of nature and ourselves must change.
These implications need further analysis. But, first: the experiments. What Gagliano did with her Mimosa pudica plants – also called “sensitive” plants – was to custom-build an apparatus whereby the plants could be suddenly dropped a foot or so on a regular basis.
Initially, on dropping, the plant retracted and curled its leaves, but after repeats, it stopped reacting. Not only did it appear to “learn” a behaviour (without a brain, mind you) but it also remembered.
Gagliano repeated the experiment at intervals and found that even after a break of a month or more, the Mimosa would still not retract its leaves after being dropped.
How does this work? According to Gagliano:

https://theconversation.com/pavlovs-plants-new-study-shows-plants-can-learn-from-experience-69794

Mimosa pudica is also known as the ‘sensitive plant’, and appears to be able to learn from experience. Flickr/foam, CC BY-SA

Gagliano has published her findings and edited various scholarly books on plant research, ethical implications and changed perceptions. She has collaborated with environmental lawyer Alessandro Pelizzon and others on the language problems of writing about plant life.
There is no vocabulary that can be used to talk about brain-like plant structures beyond mere vascular and survival processes, nor about decision-making, sentience, intelligence, learning and memory in the plant world.
There is much more work to be done by artists and humanists to develop these vocabularies together. Scholars such as Michael Marder, Dalia Nassar, Natasha Myers and myself are working in this field where there may be a realm of sophisticated activity in plant life that humans have not yet even fully comprehended.
A forthcoming book titled The Language of Plants is edited by Gagliano and colleagues, and deals with this complex and provocative problem, following on from her book The Green Thread.

Pavlov’s plants

Gagliano and her colleagues have just published a paper in Nature Scientific Reports that could rock our sense of human “self”.
This is a major coup for the plant scientist, who has suffered rejection from journals, for moving plant physiology into the domain of philosophy, for extending animal studies concepts of sentience to plants and more. Does this caution by journal editors reflect a fearfulness about our human place in the world?
The new paper explains her recent experiments where she sought to show plants can “learn” via classical conditioning, similar to the classic Pavlov’s dogs experiment.
Instead of food as the reward (the unconditioned simulus) and a bell as a neutral cue (the conditioned stimulus), she used light as the reward and air flow as the cue.
Gagliano and her colleagues used the air flow caused by a fan to predict the location and time of light. They found that the plants conditioned by the fan would grow towards the source of the air flow even when the light was not present, but only if they were “trained” to do so. This is like Pavlov ringing the bell and the dogs salivating, even if there was no food around.
Gagliano’s peas, Pisum sativum, also behaved according to a simulated circadian rhythm (temperature and light/dark control) and a sense of time of day, which is known to modulate behavioural processes such as learning in animals.
This experiment appears to show associative learning in plants. Gagliano has shown that plants don’t just respond to light and food in order to survive. They also choose and predict.
These findings will get people asking some tough questions. Do plants, like animals, have consciousness? If plants learn, choose and associate, what does this mean for our ethical relationship with them? Can humans learn from the adaptive capacities of plants?
To respond to light, fans and temperature in this way suggests that plants have far more sophisticated abilities than previously thought. The philosophical and ethical implications of this information are confounding.
It provokes further questions about the plant world that we have historically seen as inert and lacking in agency. With no brain, how can plants have cognition? Yet they exhibit functions we typically only associate with a brain.
Where does all this lead us? Well, into troubled waters, so grab your boat and paddle. We are in for a rough philosophical ride.


Prudence Gibson, Art writer and Tutor, UNSW Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

MRI's tells us about Canine Brain activity!

Phoenix eyeballing me

What an absolutely fascinating article about dog brain activity, behaviour and dog feelings.   Mostly all of what is in this article below we have experienced with our dog.  I had only said two days ago when she was watching like she was listening to me talk to my partner.  I flashed a look at her and said half jokingly, "What are you thinking about this Phoenix".  I then said to my partner I often wonder what she is thinking. 

This new research reveals a lot of interesting things.   Our dog frets terribly in storms and comes for us to be with us and so that is also like a child as is said in the research.  Our dog feels earthquakes 2 hours flight away in New Zealand and behaves the same as when there is a storm outside and there isn't a cloud in the sky but she feels NZ quakes.  I think she is amazing.

Read Full article here: "Brain Scans Reveal What Dogs Really Think of Us"

http://mic.com/articles/104474/brain-scans-reveal-what-dogs-really-think-of-us

So when your dog looks into your eyes they way they do, now you know that they are telling you the only way they can besides mental impressions, they love you very much.  Reading this made me feel very warm inside.
Images @ Eminpee Fotography

Dealing with Difficult People

Quantum Jumping
At one time or another we all have to deal with difficult people.

The epitome of difficult -- dealing with my ex husband John B.

The Whiner.  The Victim.  The Steam Roller.  The Know-it-All.  The Cry Baby.  And let’s not forget Sarcastic Sam.

Some difficult people become Masters specializing in just one technique – others do their damage by mixing it up.  No matter what the “technique”, most difficult people have the same goal:  they crave power and control over people and situations.

Additionally, not all difficult people you may have to deal with are difficult all the time.  For that matter, if you’re honest, it is most likely that, with very little thought, you can conjure up a time or two when you were a little difficult to deal with yourself.

No matter whether confronting an “always” difficult Know-it-All boss, or an occasionally Sarcastic Sam (or Samantha) Spouse – you are not defenseless.  The following are a few suggestions for dealing with both full and part-time difficult people.

Don’t Take it Personally

Ironically, one of the most useful techniques is not to become defensive when defending ourselves from the damage difficult people attempt to dish out to us.  Difficult people feed on the energy of our defensiveness.  The more angry or upset we become, the more in control the difficult person feels.

We become defensive when we take things personally.  When we take everything a difficult person is capable of dealing out personally we become frustrated and tend to express our defensiveness via our own negative responses such as anger or perhaps guilt.

The next time you are dealing with a difficult person focus not on how to defend yourself – instead focus on remaining calm.  Remaining calm is a signal to the difficult person that you are not relinquishing control.  It may take quite a few “sessions” – but if this technique is used consistently and repeatedly, the difficult person comes to understand that you are your own person with your own power and do not make it a practice of relinquishing control to others.

Victim (1961 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Walk a Mile in Their Moccasins

No matter how difficult a person may be, taking a moment to muster a little empathy is huge when it comes to creating positive outcomes when dealing with difficult people.  Don’t be stingy when it comes to making an effort to empathize with a difficult person.

Getting the needs met is important for curing being "DIFFICULT"

Most difficult people are difficult because they have needs that are either not being met or they think aren’t being met.  A sarcastic co-worker who mocks your work may suffer from extreme insecurity.  While you certainly can’t expect difficult people to share their true motivation for being difficult, quite often an empathetic response can help to soften their demeanor towards you.

Take Care of Yourself

Not taking it personally and showing empathy when dealing with difficult people can be very useful.  However, perhaps the most useful technique when dealing with difficult people is creative visualization.  And, while creative visualization may be the last technique mentioned here, it is actually the first technique to employ before attempting not taking a difficult person personally and instead attempt to show them some empathy.

Learning to live with negativity is never easy -- needs unmet.

Difficult people are negative people – and it is important to protect yourself from the negative energy difficult people throw at you.  You not only have a responsibility to attempt to come to a positive resolution with a difficult person, your first responsibility is to respect yourself and protect yourself from their negative energy.  Creative visualization can be a very effective means to do just that.

For instance, the next time you have to deal with your Know-it-All boss visualize yourself placing a bullet (and negativity) proof wall between you.  Starting your day by visualizing yourself surrounded by a protective bubble or aura is also very powerful.  Or perhaps you visualize yourself as King or Queen and are protected by a moat surrounding the thick walls of your castle.

Me and Gary

The very practice of visualizing you are protected from difficult people creates the positive energy necessary to deal with difficult people effectively.

Images @ Eminpee Fotography