Monica Gagliano
MONICA GAGLIANO is Research Associate Professor of Evolutionary Ecology. She is currently based at Southern Cross University where she leads the BI Lab – Biological Intelligence Lab. She is the author of numerous scientific articles in the fields of animal and plant behavioural and evolutionary ecology, and is the co-editor of The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World (Lexington Books, 2015), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy and Literature (Minnesota University Press, 2017), Memory and Learning in Plants (Springer, 2018) and The Mind of Plants (2021). Her work has extended the concept of cognition (including perception, learning processes, memory and consciousness) in plants. Gagliano has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own 'voices' and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments.
2 Books Written
Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants
by Monica Gagliano
Rating: 2.7 ⭐
• 1 recommendation ❤️
An accessible and compelling story of a scientist's discovery of plant communication and how it influenced her research and changed her life. In this ''phytobiography''-a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant-research scientist Monica Gagliano reveals the dynamic role plants play in genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition. By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people-beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it. Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own 'voices' and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. This is the story of how she made those discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.
En écoutant son intuition et en s'ouvrant aux savoirs chamaniques, la biologiste Monica Gagliano a mis au jour de nouvelles formes d'intelligence chez les plantes. Ce livre, compte-rendu d'une décennie de recherches scientifiques sur le monde végétal, nous révèle que les plantes savent communiquer, apprendre, mémoriser, décider, et qu'elles sont porteuses d'un grand dessein pour les communautés dans lesquelles elles vivent. Il nous ouvre un espace nouveau dans lequel il est possible de reconfigurer les liens entre plantes et humains, et d'imaginer de meilleurs modes de vie entre des espèces qui forment d'autant plus un tout qu'elles partagent la même planète. "Guidée par des chamanes autochtones mais aussi par sa propre réceptivité qu'elle cultive, Monica Gagliano s'isole pour mieux plonger dans un dialogue avec différentes variétés de plantes, connues pour leurs voix puissantes que les humains peuvent entendre. Elle consulte les plantes qui indiquent, par des instructions précises, comment prouver l'existence d'une conscience végétal à la fois dans le monde que l'on voit et dans celui que l'on ne voit pas."- Kathleen Harrison enseignante et ethnobotaniste, Botanical Dimensions