Slow Thinker

I was listening to an NPR On Point podcast this week about the intelligence of trees. It had me thinking about things. I did not know that trees had such sophisticated sensory powers. They didn't teach us such things in horticulture. For instance, a tree has senses of touch, hearing, sight, smell/taste, gravity, magnetism. Trees also have what appears like emotions, such as fear or aggression. They can recognize their children and relatives growing nearby. A mother tree can pick favorites among her childen, providing more help to those more likely to thrive and less help to those likely to languish. Trees can count days, which implies some sort of memory mechanism. Otherwise how would they know what number they're on? They also remember past trauma, such as droughts, which alters their future behavior, such as behaviors that use water more cautiously.

One of the reasons why we don't recognize this in trees is because it happens at such a slower rate than stimuli in humans. Our nerves transmit electrical impulses at rates around meters per second. Trees transmit electrical impulses at rates more like centimeters per hour. Thus, a tree may be aware that you hugged it, but hours after you've gone.

The scientist made an analogy between trees and humans and humans and houseflies. To a housefly, we might appear as slow and dumb as trees do to us. A fly is long gone before we've even barely swatted at it, and many times we're not even aware that a fly is walking on us. Perhaps if Aristote was a housefly he'd count humans among the vegetative souls, or some kind of hairy fungus that slowly creeps over the earth and builds colonies in slow motion.