Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness
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REVIEW
Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness Andreas Draguhn 1 & Jon M. Mallatt 2 & David G. Robinson 3 Received: 30 July 2020 / Accepted: 26 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
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 General anesthetics . Sleep . Ion channels . Perception . Cognition
Introduction With the aim of eliminating pain, memory, movements, and conscious experience during operations, volatile anesthetics were introduced into medical practice more than 170 years ago. Interestingly plants also react to these substances as originally demonstrated by Claude Bernard in 1878, causing him to claim that “… plants and animals must share common biological essence that must be disrupted by anesthetics” (Bernard 1878; Grémiaux et al. 2014). In the following 100 years, reversible inhibitory effects of anesthetics on various
Handling Editor: Handling Editor: Jaideep Mathur * David G. Robinson [email protected] 1
Institute for Physiology and Pathophysiology, Medical Faculty, University of Heidelberg, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
2
The University of Washington WWAMI Medical Education Program, The University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844, USA
3
Centre for Organismal Studies, University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 230, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
aspects of plant growth and motility were recorded (e.g., Bancroft and Rutzler 1931; Bünning 1934; Taylorson 1982), with little indication as to their mode of action. With the introduction of the plant neurobiology concept (Brenner et al. 2006), the notion that plants are conscious organisms has become more popular, especially in the popular press (e.g., Trewavas and Baluska 2011; Calvo et al. 2017; Gagliano et al. 2017; T
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