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5 May 2026

The History of Plant Communication: From Darwin to Biosonification

The idea that plants communicate and respond to their environment is not new. It stretches from Darwin's observations through 20th century controversy to today's established science. Here's the history.

The History of Plant Communication: From Darwin to Biosonification

The idea that plants communicate — that they perceive their environment, signal to each other, and respond — has had a strange and contested history. For most of the 20th century, it sat at the fringe of biology, associated with pseudoscience and wishful thinking. Over the past three decades, the science has caught up, and what was once marginal is now a legitimate field of research.

Biosonification — the practice of translating plant bioelectrical signals into music — sits at the leading edge of this history. To understand it, you need to understand where the science of plant perception has been.

Darwin and Plant Movement

The serious study of plant behaviour starts with Charles Darwin. His 1880 book The Power of Movement in Plants, co-written with his son Francis, documented something that challenged the assumption of plant passivity: plants move, and they move in response to their environment.

Darwin documented phototropism (movement toward light), gravitropism (root growth downward regardless of orientation), and thigmotropism (growth response to touch). He observed that roots behave as if they have a sensing and decision-making function — noting that "the tip of the radicle... acts like the brain of one of the lower animals."

This was a careful observation, not mysticism. Darwin wasn't claiming plants think. He was noting that coordinated, adaptive behaviour occurs in plants just as it occurs in animals, and that the mechanisms deserve investigation.

Early Electrical Research

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physiologists were measuring bioelectrical activity in plants. The Bengali scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose developed sensitive instruments to record electrical and mechanical responses in plants and published findings showing that plants respond to stimuli — injury, poison, extreme temperature — with electrical signals analogous in character to those in animal tissue.

Bose presented his work to the Royal Society in London in 1901. The reception was sceptical. He was asking an audience trained on the assumption of plant passivity to accept that plants have something resembling a nervous response. The data were real, but the framing was resisted.

His work was largely set aside for decades. The idea that plants have electrical signalling systems comparable in any way to animal nervous systems was considered too speculative to pursue.

The Baxter Effect — And Its Problems

In 1966, Cleve Backster — a polygraph expert — claimed that a plant (a Dracaena) he had attached to a lie detector responded to his thought of burning a leaf with a measurable electrical change. He went on to claim that plants respond to human emotions, to distant events, and to the deaths of nearby organisms.

This received enormous popular attention. Books, television features, the 1973 popular science bestseller The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird — all amplified Backster's claims. The book sold millions of copies and shaped public perception of plant intelligence for a generation.

The problem: Backster's experiments couldn't be replicated under controlled conditions. When researchers controlled for investigator bias, random electrical fluctuations, and confirmation bias in data selection, the effects disappeared. The Backster effect is now considered a methodological failure — a cautionary example of how compelling-sounding findings can emerge from poorly controlled experiments.

The damage to the legitimate field of plant electrophysiology was significant. Serious researchers distanced themselves from any work that sounded adjacent to Backster's claims. The baby went with the bathwater.

The Rehabilitation: 1980s Onward

Starting in the 1980s, plant signalling research began to re-emerge — this time on firm experimental footing.

1983: The Volatile Chemical Alarm

Two independent papers in 1983 showed that trees under insect attack released volatile chemical compounds that triggered defensive responses in neighbouring trees. The mechanism didn't require anything mystical — it was chemistry, not telepathy. But it established that plants communicate with each other, via chemical signals, in ecologically meaningful ways.

1990s: Systemic Acquired Resistance

Research on how plants respond to pathogen attack established systemic acquired resistance — a plant-wide immune response triggered by local infection. Electrical signals travel from the infection site through the plant, preparing distant tissue for attack before the pathogen arrives. This is a documented, repeatable, mechanistically understood form of within-plant communication.

Mycorrhizal Networks

Research from the 1990s onward documented how trees in forest ecosystems share carbon and nutrients through underground mycorrhizal fungal networks — a phenomenon popularised as the "wood wide web." This is interplant communication mediated by a third organism, but no less real for that. The implications for understanding forest ecology are substantial.

Monica Gagliano and Plant Cognition

From the 2010s, the Australian-Italian researcher Monica Gagliano published studies suggesting plants can learn — most notably, that Mimosa pudica habituates to repeated harmless stimuli, stopping its leaf-folding response after the stimulus has proved non-threatening multiple times. This is a form of associative learning without a nervous system. The work is contested within plant science, but it represents a serious scientific claim backed by repeatable experiment.

Plant Neurobiology as a Discipline

By the early 2000s, researchers at the intersection of plant physiology and neuroscience had coined the term "plant neurobiology" — deliberately provocative, to signal that the electrical and chemical signalling systems in plants deserve the same rigorous attention as animal neural systems, even though the mechanisms are different.

The Society for Plant Neurobiology (now the Society of Plant Signaling and Behavior) was founded in 2005. The field publishes in peer-reviewed journals. It is not fringe science.

The core finding that grounds the field: plants have electrical signalling systems, and those systems transmit information about environmental conditions throughout the plant body and, via chemical signals, between plants.

Where Biosonification Sits

Biosonification — translating plant bioelectrical signals into music — is a practical application of this scientific history. It doesn't require claims about plant consciousness or emotion. It requires only what is established: that plants produce real, measurable, varying bioelectrical signals in response to their environment.

Devices like PlantWave (see our device comparison post) pick up those signals and translate them into sound. The music is real — it's a real-time readout of real bioelectrical activity. What the signals "mean" to the plant is a question science hasn't fully answered. What they sound like, translated to music, is something you can hear.

The history of plant communication science is a history of ideas that were right before they were accepted. Darwin's observations about plant movement were correct. Bose's electrical measurements were correct. The chemical signalling research was correct. The mycorrhizal networks were correct.

The persistent finding is that plants do more than we assumed — they sense, respond, signal, and adapt. Biosonification is, in a sense, a listening technology: a way of hearing what plants are doing, translated into a form the human auditory system can appreciate.

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