Do plants have the same senses as animals, such as hearing, seeing, smelling and tasting?

Animals have hearing, vision, smell and taste, so we can hear, see, smell and taste. What about plants? Do they also have these "senses"?

In fact, we are standing in the perspective of animals, using an animal system to describe plants, so that I can't confirm whether this counts as hearing, vision, smell and taste. If not, then what about photosynthesis? Let's talk about it today! I'm just talking nonsense, and you can just listen to it.

01. What is awareness?

What is "sense"? For example, hearing, vision, smell and taste. **If you define "sense" as: the ability to feel corresponding stimuli,** then I think plants have corresponding induction.

However, if you define it as: a specialized perceptual system that can transmit and process, in fact, this is also our general definition of hearing:

Hearing refers to the sensory system of humans and animals, through which sounds, noises, and other types of sound waves can be perceived. The auditory system includes the outer ear, middle ear, inner ear, and auditory nerve. Sound waves are captured by the ear, then processed by auditory receptors in the cochlea (inner ear), and finally transmitted to the auditory cortex in the brain to produce the perception and understanding of sound. Hearing is not only the basis of human language and communication, but also one of the important means for our perception of the world and environmental perception.

From this perspective, plants do not have hearing. After all, hearing is only for humans and animals with nervous systems.

So, next, we use the first idea: feeling stimulation. Then, plants have the corresponding ability.

02. The impact of sound on plants

Plants do not have organs that can sense sound, but they can respond to sound. The specific mechanism is that the sound itself is a wave, and these waves touch the plant, so the plant will feel the vibration, and then the biochemical reaction in the plant cells will respond.

In recent years, it has also been discovered that plants seem to have a special response to sound. For example, in 2021, a study published in the top journal Cell found that sound stimulation can regulate the expression of related genes and promote the accumulation of anthocyanins, thereby regulating the ripening of fruits [1].

Sound has an intuitive effect on the maturity of plants, which can be expressed in statistical terms as follows:

Moreover, the researchers have found the mechanism behind it

When plants sense sound stimulation, it affects the expression of three strands of the ACO2 gene, which is the key to encoding anthocyanin and ethylene biosynthesis. As a result, ethylene synthesis increases and plant maturity accelerates.

So, do plants have the ability to hear?

03. The impact of light on plants

It is almost needless to say that the response of plants to light is an introductory topic in our high school biology class. The textbooks use a lot of space to explain the phototropism of plants, pointing out that light induces changes in plants' hormones, which is also a set of biological mechanisms behind this.

Another example is photosynthesis.

So, do plants have vision?

04. Smell and taste

If sound and light are relatively special, then smell and taste are even more complicated. Because smell and taste are essentially chemical reactions, odor molecules are sensed by receptors, thus forming smell and taste.

Plants, on the other hand, respond to these molecules and make corresponding changes, so do they count as senses of smell and taste?

So, in the final analysis, I think it may not be appropriate to use "feeling" to describe the reaction of plants. It is more about the reaction to external stimuli.

1 Yamazaki, Mone, et al. "Ethylene induced by sound stimulation enhances anthocyanin accumulation in grape berry skin through direct upregulation of UDP-glucose: Flavonoid 3-O-glucosyltransferase." Cells10.10 (2021): 2799.