on Mar 09, 2026 03:35 am
Michelle Z. Donahue, Staff Writer – National Geographic
Stephan: I was doing some research for a paper I am writing, and came across this study, and then found a general audience article that reported it. If you have been reading SR regularly, or going to Academia.edu to read my papers, you know that for decades I have been telling you that all living beings have some measure of consciousness, that consciousness is causal and fundamental and that spacetime arises from consciousness not consciousness from spacetime. Materialism is not so much wrong as inadequate, because it does not recognize that consciousness is fundamental. The founders of modern physics all told us that, but only a few people listened. The reason that wellbeing must become our first priority as a society, is because all consciousness is interconnected and interdependent, as this study demonstrates. The failure of American society to recognize this is why we are in the mess we are in.
A brown and yellow hoverfly rests on a dewdrop-covered evening primrose in the U.K.
Credit: MichaelGrant / Wildlife/ Alamy
Even on the quietest days, the world is full of sounds: birds chirping, wind rustling through trees, and insects humming about their business. The ears of both predator and prey are attuned to one another’s presence.
Sound is so elemental to life and survival that it prompted Tel Aviv University researcher Lilach Hadany to ask: What if it wasn’t just animals that could sense sound—what if plants could, too? The first experiments to test this hypothesis, published recently on the pre-print server bioRxiv, suggest that in at least one case, plants can hear, and it confers a real evolutionary advantage.
Hadany’s team looked at evening primroses (Oenothera drummondii) and found that within minutes of sensing vibrations from pollinators’ wings, the plants temporarily increased the concentration of sugar in their flowers’ nectar. In effect, the flowers themselves served as ears, picking up the specific frequencies of bees’ wings while tuning out irrelevant sounds like wind.
Hadany’s […]
Thank you, great article.