There's this notion that the plants actually can sense us and that they're communicating with us. I know this sounds really wacky, but we can certainly see them. We can smell them. They can have, you know, odor effects on us. Some are poisonous, some are delicious and wonderful for us. They're nourishing. What do you think about this sort of cross-species communication? Do you think it's a real thing? Having spent some time, you spent a lot of time on...
I think about plants in a garden, like my mom gardens, and she is convinced, and she's a very rational person, she is convinced that talking to the plants while she plants them has a real effect on the relationship between her and these plants. I mean, she's not thinking that they can hear and understand the language, but that there's some sort of energetic transfer there. And I don't think she's alone. People who garden have a relationship to the plants, and I certainly feel this way about my dog to some extent, my fish, although to a lesser extent. So I don't think it's entirely crazy.
I don't think it's crazy. I think that, um, I haven't had that experience myself. I did have an experience, and this was talk about plant medicine on psilocybin that I described in my book, of feeling that the plants in my garden were conscious and aware and returning my gaze, and they were very benevolent, and I took good care of them.
That's good. Otherwise, it could get scary.
Yeah. [laughter] Yeah.
And I didn't know what to do with that. I mean, there's a whole question with insights you have on psychedelics, like, do they have any value, and how do you judge their value? And in my case, I thought back to William James, who had written in 'Varieties of Religious Experience' that you can't really judge the veracity of a big insight on a mystical experience because we don't know enough, but there are two ways to think about it. Is it a useful thing? Is it pragmatic to believe that? And that's one argument in favor. And the other is treat it as a hypothesis and see if you can find other ways of knowing, scientific or otherwise, that could support that idea. And that's what got me into plant, you know, learning about plant intelligence and plant sentience. We are in relationship with plants, domesticated plants in particular. I think they manipulate us in various ways, but it's not at the level of the individual plant, and it's at the level of the evolution of the species. So, you know, corn came to dominate the landscape in much of the world because it figured out what we wanted from it. And when I say figured out, I mean purely by trial and error. Cannabis too. Cannabis was, you know, this plant located in western China, I guess, and now it's everywhere. And the reason it did is it learned that we respond if it produced this chemical called THC, it was going to get carried around the world and reproduced. And so I think we're in this symbiotic relationship with plants, and that they do manipulate us. They're geniuses at biochemistry, as you suggest, you know, and that's a function of the fact that they can't get up and run away, right? They're rooted. They're sessile, as it's called. And so instead of consciousness like we have and the ability to move around, they develop chemicals, this incredible suite of chemicals. And they hit on some chemicals that happen to change our consciousness. And this has been one of the most successful strategies. Coffee and tea are great examples. They didn't originally make these chemicals for us. They're probably defense chemicals, but what's interesting about the defense chemicals that they produce is that they don't kill anything. I mean, caffeine might kill insects, some insects. But somewhere along the line, they learned that it was better to just kind of mess with your mind than kill you outright. Because if they killed you outright, you would very quickly develop resistance, right? You'd select for resistant members of the species.
The way I learned this, it was courtesy of my cat, Frank. Frank had a real catnip problem. And every night, Frank, I would go down to my garden to, you know, harvest some lettuce or something like that. And I had a catnip plant, and this is in a fenced garden. And Frank would follow me and look at me, and he needed to be reminded where the catnip was. It's like, you know, why don't you know where it is? Because he would get so wrecked on catnip that he would forget. And like, that's a brilliant strategy on the part of the plant to get your predator to forget where you are.
And the other thing they do, of course, many plant chemicals, psychoactive chemicals, diminish your appetite. Another brilliant strategy. So I have enormous respect for what they do and what they do to us, and I really see them as active players in this drama. I wrote a book called 'Botany of Desire' which really looked at how plants have mastered our desires as their evolutionary strategy: desires for beauty in the case of flowers, desires to change consciousness, desires for food. So I have ultimate respect for their ingenuity.
When you say that plants have figured out, do you mean that, sticking with the rule of evolution, you just want to make as much of yourself as you possibly can?
Yeah. In species that nurture young, protect young, proliferate, die, repeat, right? I mean, it's like a harsh way of thinking about it, but those are essentially the simple rules of evolution: try not to die, try to at least live long enough to proliferate, and make sure that the young make it to...
And in retrospect, it looks like you figured something out. But in fact, you're just trying things, and certain things work, and the plants that had the most caffeine, say, proliferated in a way the ones that had the least caffeine did not.
Mhm. I mean, I think about dogs a lot because I love them. And I'm told that dogs descended from wolves that figured out that if they were kind enough and they were patient enough, they might get scraps of food, and eventually that led to the domestication and the expansion of all these different breeds of dogs. I mean, I think that's essentially the story. So, and they're not getting together and having a little, you know, backroom conversation like, 'We've almost got them.' But, so, and that's certainly been advantageous for the domestic dog. They're very well treated, better than some humans, in fact.
Yeah. And there are only 50,000 wolves left in this country. And how many dogs are there? It was a good strategy, right?
