A man named Klausner invents a machine that can hear sound the human ear cannot hear. It reproduces the sounds on a lower pitch so that human beings can hear it. With this machine he hears roses scream as his neighbor cuts them. The next morning he hears a tree scream when he cuts into it with an axe. He calls his doctor excitedly and asks him to come over at once. The doctor comes and Klausner says he wants him to listen to the tree's screams. He starts cutting into it with an axe and a large branch begins to fall. They barely get out of the way in time. He asks the doctor if he heard the scream but the doctor will not say that he did. Klausner is very upset and demands that the doctor paint the two gashes with iodine.
Dahl wrote a lot of very unique children's books - fantasy novels. Several have been adapted into films: "James and the Giant Peach", "Matilda", "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", "The Witches", "Fantastic Me Fox".
> Neurons... transfer information about sensation and motion from peripheral parts of the body to the brain and back. By sending electro-chemical signals in the form of atomic ions, neurons can communicate great distances through the body... Most of this information is passed as sodium ions — atom-sized charged particles that pass through channels to zap from one neuron to the other. Lidocaine, a local anesthetic commonly used by dentists, blocks these sodium channels, stopping neurons from sending information to each other. That’s why they make your mouth numb, the neurons there can’t send pain sensations to your brain. They’re stopped.
> ...they [Plants] do pass information from cell to cell just like we do, via ion channels. That’s probably where lidocaine does its work in plants, blocking these channels and cutting off communication. That’s why the hair cells in the Venus flytrap can’t tell the motor cells to contract, there’s no signal being passed between them.
And ether works by blocking cell membranes in both plants and animals. I think there are some specifics about how organisms with cell walls are blocked by ether - but that's more of a "how?" rather than a "why?"
In summary: even though plants don't have nervous systems like animals, their motor functions are still ultimately controlled by ion channels with are blocked (or their cell membranes are blocked, thus blocking the ion channel) by certain anesthetics.
This post (of all things) seems to be rate limited:
> Sorry, I'm confused. What's the difference between "how" and "why" here?
We know the cause and effect behind why anesthesia works in plants: plants' motor functions are controlled by ion channels, and anesthetics block those ion channels. We know that Lidocaine blocks the sodium channels themselves, and that ether seems to block the entire cell membrane. The remaining unknown is how ether blocks the cell walls in plants.
In short the answer to why anesthetics works in plants is known: because it blocks ion channels. Saying we don't know how anesthetics work in plants is sort of like saying we don't know how asymmetric encryption works because we still haven't solved whether P = NP. There exist remaining unknowns, but we do have an understanding of why it works.
> "that ether seems to block the entire cell membrane"
For an ion channel there is a clear thing that can be blocked: the pore, but I don't think "blocking" a membrane in this context is meaningful. That's the crux of why we don't know how/why many anaesthetics work. We have some ideas, the obvious ones seem to be wrong, the less obvious ones are harder to test with the current level of technology.
There are plenty of anaesthetics where we don’t have very good guesses as to what makes them tick, though. Halocarbon based ones being especially cool.
When it comes to scientific discoveries, "how" and "why" are essentially the same question. Asking "why" usually means "for what purpose" -- and given that "purpose" is not something well defined scientifically, we tend to take it to mean "by what means" instead.
I read uit as the distinction between: “how does it work in current plants?” and “why do we have plants that share the same signal transmitters that work similar to ours and fulfil a similar function.”. The first question was answered the why wasn’t.
No, that is speculation and in a very laymen article. It clearly states that we do not know how it works. You can't postulate from the information in a pop sci article. Go do some further reading first.
And what do all three have in common? Microtubules, as predicted by Orch OR. It will take a long time for the entrenched interests heavily invested in AI to admit artificial general intelligence is not possible with classical hardware.
> Within intra-protein hydrophobic regions, anesthetic gas molecules bind by London force dipole couplings, and thereby (somehow) exert their effects on consciousness. Historically, views of anesthetic action have focused on neuronal membrane proteins, but actual evidence (e.g. from genomics and proteomics), points to anesthetic action in microtubules. In the most definitive anesthetic experiment yet performed, Emerson et al. used fluorescent anthracene as an anesthetic in tadpoles, and showed cessation of tadpole behavior occurs specifically via anthracene anesthetic binding in tadpole brain microtubules. Despite prevailing assumptions, actual evidence supports anesthetic action on microtubules.[1]
> I talked about paramecium, single cell organisms which could swim nimbly, find food and mates, avoid obstacles and predators, learn, and have sex, all without synapses, using their microtubules. For information capacity we calculated a billion tubulins per neuron switching at, for example, 10 megahertz, giving 1016 operations per second per neuron, 1027 ‘ops/sec’ in the brain. This pushed the AI target for brain equivalence in computers far into the future. ‘Simulate a paramecium before worrying about a brain!’, I insisted — I became unpopular among AI people, and remain so.[2]
This is an attempt to model the behavior of a 1mm worm with 302 neurons. The idea that we are going to jump from failing at this to succeeding at something comparable to human intelligence is pretty far fetched.
I have very limited understanding of what the OpenWorm project is doing, but it sounds like they're trying to simulate the real worm in a bottom-up manner by simulating its cells / neurons?
The fact that they're struggling to do this would indicate that we're nowhere near being able to simulate a human brain bottom up. But there are other approaches being tried to implement strong AI that don't involve brain simulation - for example, machine learning approaches that don't involve any human-brain data.
Quantum biology is here to stay, even if you don't care to read about it. Consider doing at least some research before commenting.
> Orch OR was harshly criticized from its inception, as the brain was considered too "warm, wet, and noisy" for seemingly delicate quantum processes. However, evidence has now shown warm quantum coherence in plant photosynthesis, bird brain navigation, our sense of smell, and brain microtubules. The recent discovery of warm temperature quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons by the research group led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay, PhD, at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan (and now at MIT), corroborates the pair's theory and suggests that EEG rhythms also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations. In addition, work from the laboratory of Roderick G. Eckenhoff, MD, at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that anesthesia, which selectively erases consciousness while sparing non-conscious brain activities, acts via microtubules in brain neurons.
It seems strange to be so sure that it's weird when ether affects both plants and animals, while simultaneously not being sure how ether actually works.
I agree wholeheartedly. It's like when a programmer is surprised their optimization didn't help when they also admit that don't really know how a computer works.
I actually disagree, but think your analogy is perfect here. Most programmers (even good ones) don't really know how a computer works, but they have notions of how it does. As such, they have a good idea of what they think should work, but can still often be surprised by behavior that falls outside that expectation. There's a lot of computer behavior that's "weird" due to low-level quirks.
Doesn't seem that surprising. Receptors and transmitters are highly conserved across the evolutionary hierarchy. Going the other way, there's plenty of molecules from plants and fungi that affect the human nervous system.
But I think the point is that a bunch of anaesthetics (like halocarbon anaesthetics) very much don't bind to receptor sites in ion channels. One running hypothesis IIRC is that they intercalate into the membranes and alter their membrane fluidity... Then underpants gnomes... Then "reduced ion channel activity". Iirc We know it's not something more obvious like "conductivity of the membrane" because that's easy to measure and the effect is not enough to explain the observation.
Animals are basically jumped-up fungi, so anything that plants figured out before fungi diverged might show up in the animal kingdom.
And some things are important enough that they've evolved several different times. At the bottom it's all chemistry and quantum mechanics. If you can make a chlorine or an iron atom do something interesting, nature will find a way to make that happen.
In general, it doesn't seem surprising that exposing carnivorous plants to large amounts of random chemicals causes them to stop moving, at least while the chemicals are present.
In addition to trying lots of similar substances that don't have anesthetic properties in animals, it would be interesting to try xenon, which is all but inert chemically but still works as an anesthetic.
> “Going the other way, there's plenty of molecules from plants and fungi that affect the human nervous system.”
That is true. On the other hand it sounds like you are saying it is because “ Receptors and transmitters are highly conserved across the evolutionary hierarchy”. The most commonly used explanation for poisonous plants and fungi is that they make these chemicals as a defence mechanism. The mamal eats the thing, the mamal has a bad time and learns to avoid eating the thing. The thing thrives, which provides positive selection pressure for the fungi/plant which can make nasty chemicals. So it is not an accident that mamals react to the secreted chemicals, and it is not because “transmitters are conserved” or something like that.
"Finally, metabolomic and pharmacological data failed to detect either the presence or any physiological action of serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, adrenaline, octopamine, acetylcholine or histamine – consistent with the hypothesis that ctenophore neural systems evolved independently from those in other animals."
I was following a scientist who was looking at anesthesia in plants. I can't seem to find any of his published work on the topic but some pretty wild stuff. Anesthesia causing plants to stop following the sun, something like that. Ill see if I can find an article
There are a lot of basic mistakes in this article. It claims that cells haven't changed much in 1.5 billon years, when in fact eukaryotic cells and multicellular life are only 0.5 billon years old. The details of action potentials are wrong too.
Those mistakes are just details. But I'm a physicist, so I can't tell if there are more serious mistakes that break the whole argument. Any biologists want to comment?
I know that usually when Americans are seduced by a dharmic religion, it's Buddhism. I however find the teachings and doctrines of Jainism far more in touch with how I feel about ethics, and I think it is relevant to this notion of plants potentially feeling pain.
My understanding of Jainism is that one of it's ultimate goals is the eradication of suffering on earth. However, they take this radically. You cannot be violent for any reason at all (and yes, this has kept the number of Jains throughout history to be quite small). This prohibition against violence is so extreme that they have a word for "Kitchen Violence" which is the violence that they accidentally exert onto the remaining plant matter when they are wishing their plates after eating. At least they acknowledge the impossibility of truly eliminating all violence on earth (you must clean things), so it's a little bit of necessary violence but it also leads to aestheticism and a general desire to not waste resources.
I think Jainism is the only religion in the world that has a belief system which is similar of that to Negative Utilitarianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_utilitarianism) which I strongly believe is that most intuitive and authentically ethically compassionate doctrine in our current society. Many of the folks who believe in negative util do so with further specifications that pain and pleasure (the hedonistic form) are one very good way of measuring this.
Maybe it sounds absurd to give Anesthesia to a plant before cutting away at it or something, but the possibility that plants feel pain and have something ackin to an experience of reality was quite concerning for people ancient and modern - and those who think strongly enough about it may believe in plants as holding some sort of ethical value (no matter how small).
I hope that sometime in the far future, we may eliminate pain and displeasure from the universe. Jainists, Negative Utilitarians, Anti-natalists, and others who recognize the possible horrors inherit to reality (and it's negative nature e.g. it tries to negate you if you take no actions via entropy), would be some of the most ethical actors in a society where we find out that "Plants feel things too" or "It's possible to imagine, or simulate the experience of being a plant that is harmed"...
This comment should have had more upvotes. I think link to relevant articles and Marconi plagialirizing his design of radio device would have piqued HN reader's interest.
“ Right now, anesthesia science is like physics before Einstein. ”
Not quite, the answer is due to quantum mechanical-electro-chemical dynamics. That we know, since cells are such constructs, including all derivative conglomerate entities.
A better way to put it:
“Right now, anesthesia science is like astronomy before the invention of space based telescopes.”
> Fortunately, this work may go faster than anesthetic research in animals. There are fewer ethical issues surrounding plant research, so more studies can be done.
Are there fewer ethical issues in plants than animals? Or might we just know less about plant sentience than we think we do?
The former. Suffering appears to require a nervous system. So in the absence of one we have no more reason to assume plant-suffering than bacteria-suffering, and we lay waste to countless billions of those without blinking.
> So in the absence of one we have no more reason to assume plant-suffering than bacteria-suffering, and we lay waste to countless billions of those without blinking.
To play devil's advocate (panpsychist's advocate?), how do we know that we aren't causing immense bacterial suffering each day? Your argument mainly appears to be a pragmatic decision to assume that suffering doesn't exist unless it's obviously apparent to our monkey brains.
>Are there fewer ethical issues in plants than animals?
Yes. There are no ethical issues in plants. Nobody gives a flying ducks about individual plants wellbeing... (not the same as environment and plants ecosystems in general).
I pull off pine needles when I walk in the forest so I can crush them and put them up to my nose and smell the fresh pine. Would you consider that immoral?
According to wikipedia, diethyl ether inhibits processes such as oxidative metabolism of a range of compounds. The article doesn't go into specifics, much less the mechanism.
The pharmacological dynamics of those compounds are different than general anesthetics, theoretically the effect on cells will be different as well depending on what receptor proteins the plant cells express.
Medium's automatic dark mode made this hard to read and I couldn't find a toggle to turn it back to white... This is a bit concerning to me as a web developer who likes OS dark mode but is not convinced of web dark mode (especially an automatic non-immediately obvious optional one).
My main concern was the image of the molecules obviously not fitting with a black background. I fear that will get lost in translation entirely but I’ll give it a shot when I’m back on desktop.
By Roald Dahl
September 10, 1949
A man named Klausner invents a machine that can hear sound the human ear cannot hear. It reproduces the sounds on a lower pitch so that human beings can hear it. With this machine he hears roses scream as his neighbor cuts them. The next morning he hears a tree scream when he cuts into it with an axe. He calls his doctor excitedly and asks him to come over at once. The doctor comes and Klausner says he wants him to listen to the tree's screams. He starts cutting into it with an axe and a large branch begins to fall. They barely get out of the way in time. He asks the doctor if he heard the scream but the doctor will not say that he did. Klausner is very upset and demands that the doctor paint the two gashes with iodine.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...