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Link to original content: http://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32880005
Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness - PubMed Skip to main page content
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Review
. 2021 Mar;258(2):239-248.
doi: 10.1007/s00709-020-01550-9. Epub 2020 Sep 2.

Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness

Andreas Draguhn  1 , Jon M Mallatt  2 , David G Robinson  3
Affiliations
Review

Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness

Andreas Draguhn et al. Protoplasma. 2021 Mar.

Abstract

Plants have a rich variety of interactions with their environment, including adaptive responses mediated by electrical signaling. This has prompted claims that information processing in plants is similar to that in animals and, hence, that plants are conscious, intelligent organisms. In several recent reports, the facts that general anesthetics cause plants to lose their sensory responses and behaviors have been taken as support for such beliefs. These lipophilic substances, however, alter multiple molecular, cellular, and systemic functions in almost every organism. In humans and other animals with complex brains, they eliminate the experience of pain and disrupt consciousness. The question therefore arises: do plants feel pain and have consciousness? In this review, we discuss what can be learned from the effects of anesthetics in plants. For this, we describe the mechanisms and structural prerequisites for pain sensations in animals and show that plants lack the neural anatomy and all behaviors that would indicate pain. By explaining the ubiquitous and diverse effects of anesthetics, we discuss whether these substances provide any empirical or logical evidence for "plant consciousness" and whether it makes sense to study the effects of anesthetics on plants for this purpose. In both cases, the answer is a resounding no.

Keywords: Cognition; General anesthetics; Ion channels; Perception; Sleep.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Effects of anesthetics in different taxa of organisms. Conserved effects are in the bottom rows (molecular-cellular) and grade to more taxon-specific effects in the middle and top rows. Note that the effects on mitochondrial complex I have only been shown for animals/humans but may well be present in plants and single-celled organisms (see main text). Sources of the illustrations are (1) http://www.biology-resources.com/drawing-paramecium.html (D.G. Mackean); (2) https:www.biologie-seite.de/Biologie/Venusfliegenfalle (William Curtis 1790); (3) Frieda Kahlo painting, 1944 (the broken column showing the results of her spinal surgery for a painful back injury); (4) a fearful cat. Charles Darwin (1872) The expression of emotion in man and animals. John Murray, London
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Effects of general anesthetics on plants versus animals. The top half shows the shared effects on plants and on all animals, whereas the bottom half shows that they affect consciousness and pain in certain animals with complex nervous systems. Dotted arrow indicates how plant neurobiologists speculate without evidence that the anesthetics cause the same consciousness-diminishing effects on plants. However, the basic, shared effects can account for plants’ responses without any need to invoke plant consciousness
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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