No abstract

No abstract

s a minimal 'cognitive' perception of the world by lower organisms possible? The aim of this paper is to evaluate the ability of plant kingdom to treat information without nervous system. On the basis of experimental results on plant bioelectrical potentials and on the analysis of extended cognitive levels defined in the emergent plant neurobiology paradigm, these organisms are considered: (1) as possessing dynamic integrated perceptive systems close to those of animals, (2) as self-organized entities with protoneural abilities and (3) as expressing primitive generic processes which have nonlinearly conducted to complex brain networks. This approach permits a new bottom-up investigation of plastic interfaces, particularly at the level of perceptive and knowledge accumulating systems. Providing the great value of early sensory processing in plants is accepted, the only way to progress would be to read the emergent behaviors of complex informational systems co-creating the world through a transdisciplinary framework.

Taking as a basis of discussion Kalanchoe's spontaneous and evoked extracellular activities recorded at the whole plant level, we put the challenging questions: do these low-voltage variations, together with endocellular events, reflect integrative properties and complex behavior in plants? Does it reflect common perceptive systems in animal and plant species? Is the ability of plants to treat short-term variations and information transfer without nervous system relevant? Is a protoneural construction of the world by lower organisms possible? More generally, the aim of this paper is to reevaluate the probably underestimated role of plant surface potentials in the plant relation life, carefully comparing the biogenesis of both animal and plant organisms in the era of plant neurobiology. Knowing that surface potentials participate at least to morphogenesis, cell to cell coupling, long distance transmission and transduction of stimuli, some hypothesis are given indicating that plants have to be studied as environmental biosensors and non linear dynamic systems able to detect transitional states between perception and response to stimuli. This study is conducted in the frame of the "plasticity paradigm," which gives a theoretical model of evolutionary processes and suggests some hypothesis about the nature of complexity, information and behavior.

No abstract