Take the Green Pill

Keanu Reeves is the key to plant empathy

For my generation, Keanu Reeves was Ted.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, 1989

But he really hit his stride when he controlled time.

Keanu Reeves enters Bullet Time in the Matrix, 1999

In the Matrix, “bullet time” involves extreme slow motion. As the chosen one, Neo/Keanu can control time. He can move while everything around him is still.

Keanu’s bullet time is the key to plant empathy.

Plants can seem boring. I know, I have seen it on the faces of my students. As a young faculty member at the University of Idaho, I would start a lecture about xylem, stomata, or photosynthesis, and look out at a sea of bored, barely sentient students.

But there is more to plants than these students knew. To see it, they needed only to shift their time scale.

We see only human time. Anything that happens faster or slower than we can perceive is invisible to us. But if you look at plants from their time scale, they look completely different.

When I show this video to my students, there is a shift in the room. Students see plants in plant time. In plant time, plants behave.

If you plant a seed, the growing plant embryo senses gravity: roots grow down, and shoots grow up. Plants respond to the gravitational pull of the Earth.

The system that plants use to do this is stunning in its elegance and simplicity.

Inside a plant cell are dozens of tiny gravity monitors called statoliths, organelles filled with starch. These statoliths are heavy - much heavier than anything else inside a plant cell. Like miniature tater tots scattered through the cell, they sink. Pulled by gravity, they move to the bottom of the cell.

When a statolithic tater tot hits the bottom of the cell, physiological magic occurs. The cell releases a special molecule, a plant hormone called auxin. Think of auxin as a controller of plant behavior. It is a chemical signal that can be interpreted in all sorts of ways by a plant.

For sensing gravity - gravitropism - roots and shoots have opposite reactions. In both, auxins accumulate in the bottom of cells. In shoots, auxin makes cells stretch out, getting longer. In the growing shoot, lower cells elongate while cells on the top do not. The plant shoot bends up, away from gravity.

Gravitropism in a shoot, from wikipedia by Maddiahola. Small dots represent auxin.

In the roots, by contrast, auxin inhibits elongation and the cells remain squat. The cells on the top surface of the root, away from gravity, elongate. The root bends down as it grows.

Gravitropism in a root, from wikipedia by Maddieahola. Small dots again represent auxin.

As the root or shoot bends, statoliths move, and the auxin gradient lessens. Bending slows, stopping only when the auxin concentration is balanced. The plant grows directly up or down, as required, in perfect opposition to gravity.

A plant behaving. Also from wikipedia by Rufus22181496.

I am surrounded, right now, by about a dozen houseplants. They are soaking up the early morning sun on a cold spring day in northern Idaho. They look stationary, motionless, with their roots stuck in pots. But I know there is a slow chemical symphony playing inside their cells. They are thinking, in a way, but their thoughts are not like mine.

Brainless but wise, plants sense the world around them and respond. They behave by growth. Their time is not our time.

Like Keanu, we can manipulate our perspective on time. If we take the green pill, we can see the world through plant time - a dramatically different point of view.