#kind of predict how something is spelled... which is why its such an annoying language to learn...

[snekdood]

one reason i hate the english language is that we borrow so many words from other languages and it just pisses me off. its why spelling isnt always intuitive. idk any french fucking words or how french ppl spell shit and quite frankly i dont think I should have to. can we make up a new word instead with different, more intuitive-to-us spelling

[bearpillowmonster]

Onward Review

The biggest complaints that I've heard about this movie were that the ending is better than the actual movie and that it's not as funny as most Pixar films. This was okay for me, I don't see Pixar movies for the comedy anyway, I originally saw the trailer and thought it was just alright, looked average, then I got super excited for it, then more trailers came out and then reviews and I just kind of fell out of it, wasn't sure if I wanted to see it in theaters...well I didn't, corona made sure of that, there was actually a plan to go though, what corona also made sure of was that it ended up on Disney+ so I could see it anyway...

In the end I expected a fun movie, but not much beyond that and what I got was pleasantly good, my least favorite thing was the trailers (other than putting Magic by the Cars in there) because they make it seem dull and spoils some things that I was expecting by the end of it, it's a movie where I don't think you can explain, just experience. And while I do like Chris Pratt, Tom Holland, and Julia Louis Dreyfus, that doesn't sell me on the movie because that's a good bit of stars, sometimes they let that go to their head and think that alone will sell a movie but I stand corrected, they do a very good job.

Mixes with the world, I like how orderly it is but it's so much so that it's a bit too easy to pick apart and be like "Well that's going to happen later on." predictable with its teases. They basically structure it around learning the spells and creating memories with dad, who is actually pretty cool, we see his legs (obviously) but they give them a lot of character, and sometimes it's like "how can he hear?" but the body language says it all, there are points in this film where he straight up stands up for his sons...Get it? As a pair of legs. The top half they give him just reminds me of Weekend at Bernie's, luckily they don't try to make him talk but Barley acts like he's always been there "Check it out Pop, Ian's still a bit naive." it's pretty charming the kind of relationships they build on their journey and it makes the world they live in blend in that much nicer. The dad is also an accountant which is what my grandfather was, who also died of an illness, who was more of a dad to me and I also have his grey college sweatshirt (wearing it as I'm writing this review actually) but my brother 'did' get to see him, he was an infant so he won't remember much so I can connect to this plot a decent amount and it did give me feels throughout but it's not like when I heard "bring your dad back for a day" I was like "This is for me, this is genius, I wish I could do that." That's whatever, it's not the concept that interested me or made me see this or even made this movie for me, it was the delivery and it did so pretty well.

It conveys that convenience can come at the expense of wonder, interest and excitement. I think they could've taken this one step further with Barley. Throughout the movie, he's seen as this, well, "dude" but sometimes it seems a little over the top and annoying (on purpose I'm sure), the mom even flat out says at one point "One is afraid of nothing, and the other is afraid of everything." that is literally the dynamic. What I think would make it better and make Barley more interesting overall is if they had him bored, actively looking for something to entertain himself with, practically begging for a quest, to see that he's desperate, that everything in the town is the same old, same old and give him a reason to be obsessed with this nerd stuff. Which they don't really explain where the dad got the staff but that's no big deal.

Is it the best Pixar movie? No, but it's nowhere near the worst either, I'd put it right in the middle, above Cars and Planes and all that but under stuff like Inside Out, Toy Story, and The Incredibles. There's this one scene that I call "the training wheels" which has nothing to do with it but you'll understand when you see it why I dub it thee, I can't get that scene out of my head and is kind of the point where everything started boosting and climbing its way up, I'm not sure what people meant by "the movie is bogged down because the ending is better than the actual movie." I mean yeah, it has to build up, that's obvious enough for any movie but it's not diminishing the rest of the movie either. I certainly see this as a literal meaning, "Onward" is kind of like Pixar saying "more original films" after a slew of sequels, a new era if you will.

[vermiculus-incipiens]

OOC INFORMATION:

What’s your name? Myr

Preferred Pronouns: She/her pronouns

Timezone: GMT+1

IC INFORMATION:

Character Name: Daisy Gemma Maris Hookum Daisy - From the English word for the white flower, ultimately derived from the word ‘daesaege’ which means ‘day eye’. It gained its popularity in the 19th century when many of plant and flower names were used as names. Gemma - It is an Italian nickname meaning ‘gem - precious stone’. A variation also often seen in Great Britain is Jemma. Maris - The use of this name is rare in the English language. It’s meaning as ‘means of the sea’. It’s from the Latin title of Virgin Mary, ‘Stella Maris’. This means to be exact ‘the star of the sea’. Hookum - The name looks close to the Irish surname ‘Logan’. It comes from the ‘descendants of Ogan’. Ogan is a diminutive of óg meaning ‘young’.

What’s a hobby or pastime that your character enjoys? Daisy is inseparable from her writing pad. Wherever she goes, she always carries one with her so she can write whenever she wants. Her mother introduced her to the pen and she will always have one with her as well, next to a spelled quill that would produce its own ink. So it is safe to say that a hobby / pastime to Daisy is to write. It’s kind of cliché, but she loves a dramatic and romantic setting. It is the same subject of the books that she reads so much and that she can forget the entire world in. If she wants, she can spend an entire day with her nose in a book. She doesn’t mind studying for her school as well however. She tries to keep up with the subject that she would have followed at school with tutors in Diagon Alley. As of right now she wants to be finish her school once the war is over.

Do you have any preferred ships or anti-ships? I don’t really have anti-ships for Daisy. First and foremost I am one for chemistry between two characters. So if that happens then it is great of course! But when it comes to Daisy however there is only one ship that I go for and that is of course Daisy x Tilden. I love their dynamics and their backstory. I just have to say that it is cute.

What do you think your character’s Boggart would be? If their greatest fear isn’t something that could easily take a solid form, what is it? Why? Her Boggart would take form into a headstone. It is the headstone of her mother’s grave but this time the name of her father is also added. And if she probably was close by the Boggart for longer then more graves will be shown as well. With Tilden’s grave next. All the dates on the graves are timed in the period of the war. The reason that her Boggart would take this form is simple; Daisy don’t want to lose more people to the war than she already have. Her mother might have been the only loss to her but it is enough. The young woman is pretty sure that she would not survive it mentally if someone else is taken away from her as well besides her mother.

What’s your character’s biggest pet peeve? It is quite a silly pet peeve. At least, that is what Daisy would call it. Her biggest pet peeve is when people walk too slowly in front of her when walking in the city. She is a quick-pace walker most of the times. She can get very irritated or annoyed whenever she is stuck behind them and is unable to get past them. If you are joining her at that moment you’ll definitely notice.

What would you consider to be an eccentricity of your character? Daisy has a profound love for everything that writes. She has a collection of writables. This includes two typewriters, several quills (some write on their own, some write when talked to, some predict), different kinds of ink (some change color depending on mood, all kinds of colors) but also Muggle attributes like different pens, pencils and writing pads. Every time she finds a shop with these attributes, she has to buy something. Her father would say she had enough by now but she would argue otherwise. Scribbulus Writing Instruments is her favourite shop in Diagon Alley.

What is / was your character’s favorite subject in school? Why? Despite having a Muggle mother, Daisy found Muggle Studies to be her favourite subject at Hogwarts. It is a different kind of view on the world that she knows so well and as she can learn from this and this view on Muggles, others are also able to learn from her as she’s a part of the Muggle world whenever she returned home as well. She believes that the relationship between Muggles and the Wizarding World could be so much better if there weren’t people with a patronizing view of the other. They are all equal, the Wizarding World had his plus sides, just as the Muggle World has.

What time of day is your character’s favorite? What time of year? Daisy prefers late nights or maybe even midnights. It is at those times that she gets the most inspiration when it comes to writing. Even with her eyes heavy of sleep she is able to get the most words on paper at that time. It is not that enjoyable for her neighbours probably since she does her writing at home with a typewriter that she had gotten from her mother at the age of eleven. When it comes to her favourite time of the year, it has become the spring. This means that most of the plants and flowers are in full bloom. Maybe it is because of Tilden, maybe she does her name justice, but she loves it to be outside in the spring. At times chilly but the view makes up for that without any problems.

What’s your character’s Patronus? If they can’t conjure one, what would it be if they could? Why? When Daisy has tried before to conjure a Patronus, she was unable to do so. Ever since classes she hasn’t tried again. If she would have to do it again right now, she would not be able to do so. The memory of her mother dying is one that is too fresh and too heavy for her to be able to find a happy memory at the moment. Her Patronus would be a Basset Hound however. It is not something that many people would expect with her since the Patronus looks a bit clumsy. But the Hound is a sign of being smart, intelligent. They are a bit stubborn but above all friendly and devoted to their friends - or in Daisy’s situation also devoted to whatever she put herself to. Determination above all.

What is your character’s biggest vice (bad habit or immoral craving)? Daisy’s biggest vice is hastiness. This can be discovered in different ways. She does things without thinking it through properly. This is due to lack of time or simply due to impulses. This is definitely what is the case with her the most. She acts on what she feels and with the current developments in her life, acting on her feelings is not the greatest things to do. There are only a few things that keep her grounded very much but she tries her best on changing this.

Is your character an introvert or extrovert? How well do they handle social situations? Daisy can be seen as a combination of both. Whenever she joins in social matters, she first stays silent so she can look into the situation. It will take a little bit of time before she decided to join in. She won’t go meddling into subject that she doesn’t have a say in. Once Daisy is feeling more in her place then she will start the talking and once she’s started it can be a lot. She can ramble in moments when she feels comfortable and sometimes you will have to stop her from talking. So this is why I would call Daisy both an introvert and an extrovert.

What is your character’s diet like? What’s his or her favorite food? If you look at Daisy, you would definitely not expect it but she is a person that is able to eat whatever she wants. She can surprise you with how much she is able to eat before she is finally full. She has a massive sweet tooth, so you would make her happy with any kind of dessert. This is definitely something that she has from her father. She can remember very well how long they would be seated at the dining table after dinner together simply because the food was good and the mood was nice because of it. If she had to pick one type of food she would go for anything chocolate related.

How do you think your character’s psychological issues have manifested and changed your character up to this point? Daisy has shown a big growth in her character due to the war. She had to grow up all of a sudden. It was not possible for her anymore to enjoy her youth and her time at Hogwarts. The war had gotten too close to her all of a sudden. The death of her mother in front of her eyes is something that is edged into her brain. Whenever she closes her eyes, she sees it happen in front of her. Sleeping got harder and there are times whenever she wakes up screaming for her mother as she died in her arms. But this happens behind closed doors, no one knows about this besides the one that are close to her and the ones that have seen her during the night. When Daisy is out in the open she is one that tries to keep a brave face. She does not want to be seen as weak. People already underestimate her and it would only grow worse if they would take pity on her. Daisy will always keep her walls up and it will take quite something to make her break down those walls.

Give us a headcanon for your character. Anything is acceptable. Daisy started her seventh and last year at Hogwarts, knowing very well that her heart was somewhere else. The war had already started when she started her last year and she had lost her mother in the winter of her sixth year. Her focus was not at school work anymore, it was on the many people at school that were suddenly not worthy of any of her trust. So when Dumbledore let every student at Hogwarts know that they would not be allowed to be a part from the Order of the Phoenix, it was an easy decision made by Daisy. Mostly out of stubbornness but she decided to stay home after the winter holidays. Until this day she has not regretted it one bit, despite taking lessons of tutors so she will be able to finish her last year one day.

[shirlleycoyle]

A Linguist Explains Why Texting and Tweeting Aren’t Ruining the English Language

As a social media editor, I am Extremely Online, and pride myself on knowing the latest memes and internet-speak. I see how phrases enter the lexicon and travel a similar pathway: used by a small group of people online (often young people and people of color), then spread out to a wider net of people who are also Very Online, eventually reaching those who aren’t on Twitter for 10 hours a day (and, for better or worse, brands).

The phenomena of memes, gifs, and other ways of communicating online are increasingly the subject of serious academic inquiry. There’s already been a dissertation on memes, and another on 4chan, for example. While some may dismiss “doge” and “smol” as insignificant, others know the internet is changing the fabric of the English language daily. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch has been writing about the language of the internet for seven years, and now she’s encapsulated some of that knowledge into a book. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language , which comes out July 23, breaks down the history of internet language, from the first-known use of “lol” to emoji to memes.

VICE spoke to McCulloch about why she wanted to write a book about internet linguistics, as well as why we shouldn’t worry about emoji “replacing” English. It has been edited for length:

VICE: What made you want to write this book? Gretchen McCulloch: It was a bit weird to say, “Oh, I want to write a book about the internet.” The internet is so fast moving, and a book is so much of an archive that preserves something in a very static form. You can’t just go update it like you could, say, a blog post. I wanted to take on the challenge of writing a book about something that was so fast moving as the internet; another generation, people won’t necessarily know what it was like to be around at this time. Websites decay, websites go down, Geocities went away.

When you write a book, you’re trying to figure out how to distill something that’s living and breathing into a format that’s very static and fixed. At the same time, it’s an opportunity; if you can kind of encapsulate a particular era, then you have that as a sort of historical record. You have it to look back on, even when it eventually becomes a history book.

In terms of why you should read this book now and not 50 years from now: a book is still the best way we have for people to experience something big in the same order. I write a lot of short articles, but each of them have to start with the assumption that people have never necessarily read anything I’ve written, or read anything else about linguistics, or don’t necessarily know anything about the internet. With a book, you can build up for a bigger idea because you have a longer space.

Every so often I see people concerned that emoji will “replace” words and we’ll all be talking in emoticons in the future. In the chapter on emoji in Because Internet , you say there’s no reason to fear that because emoji are not a language. So what are they? My favorite analogy for emoji in terms of what they’re doing in communication is that they’re akin to a gesture—say, a thumbs up or a middle finger. We gesture all the time but we don’t really think about what we’re doing when we do it. My podcast co-host, Lauren Gawne, has done a bunch of research on this.

Thinking about emoji as gesture explains a lot about how they caught on so quickly. There are systematic ways people use gesture. One big distinction is that some gestures have conventional names and some don’t. A thumbs up, or the middle finger, or a wink has a name. You know what the gesture looks like. But if you were to describe your travels, you’re probably going to make gestures to describe your trip. But those gestures don’t have conventional English names. Maybe you pointed, maybe you used your open hand—you could’ve done a bunch of things. We don’t have names the way a thumbs up is a thumbs up is a thumbs up.

This is one of the distinctions you can make in terms of emojis. Some emojis have iconic names and they’re used specifically as emojis. You have the winking face, the thumb and index finger on your chin—that’s a specific thing that has an additional meaning it brings when you say an utterance. It’s used as its capacity in emoji to change something about what you’re saying, to change something about the meaning of what you’re saying.

And then you have emojis that are more of a literal illustration, like a birthday cake. You don’t have to have any “emoji fluency” to interpret that the birthday cake is a birthday cake. You have to have a cultural fluency of what a birthday cake is, but there’s nothing special about that emoji. Whereas the thinking face emoji requires an “emoji competence” to interpret.

Some emojis have a specific “extra” meaning—like the “tears of joy” emoji, which someone could interpret as crying if they are not “emoji fluent.” If you think of them in this kind of relationship to gesture, then the different types of functions that emerged have make a lot more sense. This also means that—we gesture along with our speech, and that doesn’t mean we don’t talk. They have a mutually-beneficial relationship.

Something that wasn’t really covered in Because Internet —maybe it will be in a future edition!—is the rise of voice memos and smart devices like Alexa and how they impact internet linguistics, or linguistics overall. I thought about whether I should include a discussion on this in the book. I decided not to because a lot of what people are doing with voice tech at this moment is giving commands to a machine. You’re saying, “Set a timer for five minutes.” That’s a user interface, that’s not a conversation. Even things we talk about conversational design is a different kind of user interface. I’m not talking about the design of menu buttons in the book, either. Not talking about voice commands like, “Set a timer for five minutes” is the same as not talking about the graphic design of your timer app where you press a button to set a timer.

It’s an interesting space. That’s something I really hope they’ll be more research about in the next few years because I think there are people using voice memos for communication. There’s been a little bit of research about that so far, especially refugee populations because some of them are illiterate, or they don’t have keyboards that support their languages. So, they’re using voice memos because it’s difficult for them to communicate with each other otherwise. It’s easier for them to use recorded voice, which is a really interesting use case.

Do you think we’re going to eventually sound the same, is our vocabulary going to merge as we all spend time online? Will there be a death of regional slang? This has been a constant prediction that has never actually been borne out. Over time, there’s been people thinking that the rise of various kinds of mass media will lead to the collapse of different regional ways of talking. Some of the early dialect surveys from the 1800s featured people saying, “Well, now we have newspapers so people aren’t going to talk the way that they used to.” A few decades later it happened with the radio, then with the television, and now with the internet.

It’s an understandable type of impulse, but we haven’t seen it with any other types of mass media. I think it’s probably overblown. There are definitely some slang terms that can spread via the internet. There is internet-based slang, while other slang terms are regional or local or age-based, or generational. Those slang terms are passed along through other means. You’ll see internet-based slang may have specific spelling, or include emoji or emoticons, that are based on the writing format itself. An example is “smol”—that’s an internet-based slang not attached to any region that spread through the internet.

Finally, is there an internet linguistic trend you hate, like a slang term or meme? What really gets me is people dismissing internet languages. The people that are creating it are doing so consciously and intentionally and creatively. It’s really easy to say, “Oh, well, the kids are doing something that I don’t understand, therefore, they’re not doing anything important.” What annoys me is the annoyance over internet languages itself. It’s easy to dismiss something as laziness, when in fact, it often takes more effort to punctuate exactly how you want to convey a particular tone of voice online.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

A Linguist Explains Why Texting and Tweeting Aren’t Ruining the English Language syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[insession-io]

The Minds of Plants

At first glance, the Cornish mallow (Lavatera cretica) is little more than an unprepossessing weed. It has pinkish flowers and broad, flat leaves that track sunlight throughout the day. However, it’s what the mallow does at night that has propelled this humble plant into the scientific spotlight. Hours before the dawn, it springs into action, turning its leaves to face the anticipated direction of the sunrise. The mallow seems to remember where and when the Sun has come up on previous days, and acts to make sure it can gather as much light energy as possible each morning. When scientists try to confuse mallows in their laboratories by swapping the location of the light source, the plants simply learn the new orientation.

What does it even mean to say that a mallow can learn and remember the location of the sunrise? The idea that plants can behave intelligently, let alone learn or form memories, was a fringe notion until quite recently. Memories are thought to be so fundamentally cognitive that some theorists argue that they’re a necessary and sufficient marker of whether an organism can do the most basic kinds of thinking. Surely memory requires a brain, and plants lack even the rudimentary nervous systems of bugs and worms.

However, over the past decade or so this view has been forcefully challenged. The mallow isn’t an anomaly. Plants are not simply organic, passive automata. We now know that they can sense and integrate information about dozens of different environmental variables, and that they use this knowledge to guide flexible, adaptive behaviour.

For example, plants can recognise whether nearby plants are kin or unrelated, and adjust their foraging strategies accordingly. The flower Impatiens pallida, also known as pale jewelweed, is one of several species that tends to devote a greater share of resources to growing leaves rather than roots when put with strangers – a tactic apparently geared towards competing for sunlight, an imperative that is diminished when you are growing next to your siblings. Plants also mount complex, targeted defences in response to recognising specific predators. The small, flowering Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as thale or mouse-ear cress, can detect the vibrations caused by caterpillars munching on it and so release oils and chemicals to repel the insects.

Plants also communicate with one another and other organisms, such as parasites and microbes, using a variety of channels – including ‘mycorrhizal networks’ of fungus that link up the root systems of multiple plants, like some kind of subterranean internet. Perhaps it’s not really so surprising, then, that plants learn and use memories for prediction and decision-making.

What does learning and memory involve for a plant? An example that’s front and centre of the debate is vernalisation, a process in which certain plants must be exposed to the cold before they can flower in the spring. The ‘memory of winter’ is what helps plants to distinguish between spring (when pollinators, such as bees, are busy) and autumn (when they are not, and when the decision to flower at the wrong time of year could be reproductively disastrous).

In the biologists’ favourite experimental plant, A thaliana, a gene called FLC produces a chemical that stops its little white blooms from opening. However, when the plant is exposed to a long winter, the by-products of other genes measure the length of time it has been cold, and close down or repress the FLC in an increasing number of cells as the cold persists. When spring comes and the days start to lengthen, the plant, primed by the cold to have low FLC, can now flower. But to be effective, the anti-FLC mechanism needs an extended chilly spell, rather than shorter periods of fluctuating temperatures.

This involves what’s called epigenetic memory. Even after vernalised plants are returned to warm conditions, FLC is kept low via the remodelling of what are called chromatin marks. These are proteins and small chemical groups that attach to DNA within cells and influence gene activity. Chromatin remodelling can even be transmitted to subsequent generations of divided cells, such that these later produced cells ‘remember’ past winters. If the cold period has been long enough, plants with some cells that never went through a cold period can still flower in spring, because the chromatin modification continues to inhibit the action of FLC.

But is this really memory? Plant scientists who study ‘epigenetic memory’ will be the first to admit that it’s fundamentally different from the sort of thing studied by cognitive scientists. Is this use of language just metaphorical shorthand, bridging the gap between the familiar world of memory and the unfamiliar domain of epigenetics? Or do the similarities between cellular changes and organism-level memories reveal something deeper about what memory really is?

Both epigenetic and ‘brainy’ memories have one thing in common: a persistent change in the behaviour or state of a system, caused by an environmental stimulus that’s no longer present. Yet this description seems too broad, since it would also capture processes such as tissue damage, wounding or metabolic changes. Perhaps the interesting question isn’t really whether or not memories are needed for cognition, but rather which types of memories indicate the existence of underlying cognitive processes, and whether these processes exist in plants. In other words, rather than looking at ‘memory’ itself, it might be better to examine the more foundational question of how memories are acquired, formed or learned.

When the plant was dropped from a height, it learned that this was harmless and didn’t demand a folding response.

‘The plants remember,’ said the behavioural ecologist Monica Gagliano in a recent radio interview, ‘they know exactly what’s going on.’ Gagliano is a researcher at the University of Western Australia, who studies plants by applying behavioural learning techniques developed for animals. She reasons that if plants can produce the results that lead us to believe other organisms can learn and remember, we should similarly conclude that plants share these cognitive capacities. One form of learning that’s been studied extensively is habituation, in which creatures exposed to an unexpected but harmless stimulus (a noise, a flash of light) will have a cautionary response that slowly diminishes over time. Think of entering a room with a humming refrigerator: it’s initially annoying, but usually you’ll get used to it and perhaps not even notice after a while. True habituation is stimulus-specific, so with the introduction of a different and potentially dangerous stimulus, the animal will be re-triggered. Even in a humming room, you will probably startle at the sound of a loud bang. This is called dishabituation, and distinguishes genuine learning from other kinds of change, such as fatigue.

In 2014, Gagliano and her colleagues tested the learning capacities of a little plant called Mimosa pudica, a creeping annual also known as touch-me-not. Its name comes from the way its leaves snap shut defensively in response to a threat. When Gagliano and her colleagues dropped M pudica from a height (something the plant would never have encountered in its evolutionary history), the plants learned that this was harmless and didn’t demand a folding response. However, they maintained responsiveness when shaken suddenly. Moreover, the researchers found that M pudica’s habitation was also context-sensitive. The plants learnt faster in low-lit environments, where it was more costly to close their leaves because of the scarcity of light and the attendant need to conserve energy. (Gagliano’s research group was not the first to apply behavioural learning approaches to plants such as M pudica, but earlier studies were not always well-controlled so findings were inconsistent.)

But what about more complex learning? Most animals are also capable of conditioned or associative learning, in which they figure out that two stimuli tend to go hand in hand. This is what allows you to train your dog to come when you whistle, since the dog comes to associate that behaviour with treats or affection. In another study, published in 2016, Gagliano and colleagues tested whether Pisum sativum, or the garden pea, could link the movement of air with the availability of light. They placed seedlings at the base of a Y-maze, to be buffeted by air coming from only one of the forks – the brighter one. The plants were then allowed to grow into either fork of the Y-maze, to test whether they had learned the association. The results were positive – showing that the plants learned the conditioned response in a situationally relevant manner.

The evidence is mounting that plants share some of the treasured learning capacities of animals. Why has it taken so long to figure this out? We can start to understand the causes by running a little experiment. Take a look at this image. What does it depict?

Most people will respond either by naming the general class of animals present (‘dinosaurs’) and what they are doing (‘fighting’, ‘jumping’), or if they are dinosaur fans, by identifying the specific animals (‘genus Dryptosaurus’). Rarely will the mosses, grasses, shrubs and trees in the picture get a mention – at most they might be referred to as the background or setting to the main event, which comprises the animals present ‘in a field’.

In 1999, the biology educators James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler called this phenomenon plant blindness – a tendency to overlook plant capacities, behaviour and the unique and active environmental roles that they play. We treat them as part of the background, not as active agents in an ecosystem.

Some reasons for plant blindness are historical – philosophical hangovers from long-dismantled paradigms that continue to infect our thinking about the natural world. Many researchers still write under the influence of Aristotle’s influential notion of the scala naturae, a ladder of life, with plants at the bottom of the hierarchy of capacity and value, and Man at the peak. Aristotle emphasised the fundamental conceptual divide between immobile, insensitive plant life, and the active, sensory realm of animals. For him, the divide between animals and humankind was just as stark; he didn’t think animals thought, in any meaningful way. After the reintroduction of such ideas into Western European education in the early 1200s and throughout the Renaissance, Aristotelean thinking has remained remarkably persistent.

It’s often adaptive for humans to treat plants as object-like, or simply filter them out.

Today, we might call this systematic bias against non-animals zoochauvinism. It’s well-documented in the education system, in biology textbooks, in publication trends, and media representation. Furthermore, children growing up in cities tend to lack exposure to plants through interactive observation, plant care, and a situated plant appreciation and knowledge by acquaintance.

Particularities of the way our bodies work – our perceptual, attentional and cognitive systems – contribute to plant blindness and biases. Plants don’t usually jump out at us suddenly, present an imminent threat, or behave in ways that obviously impact upon us. Empirical findings show that they aren’t detected as often as animals, they don’t capture our attention as quickly, and we forget them more readily than animals. It’s often adaptive to treat them as object-like, or simply filter them out. Furthermore, plant behaviour frequently involves chemical and structural changes that are simply too small, too fast or too slow for us to perceive without equipment.

As we are animals ourselves, it’s also easier for us to recognise animal-like behaviour as behaviour. Recent findings in robotics indicate that human participants are more likely to attribute properties such as emotion, intentionality and behaviour to systems when those systems conform to animal or human-like behaviour. It seems that, when we’re deciding whether to interpret behaviour as intelligent, we rely on anthropomorphic prototypes. This helps to explain our intuitive reluctance to attribute cognitive capacities to plants.

But perhaps prejudice is not the only reason that plant cognition has been dismissed. Some theorists worry that concepts such as ‘plant memory’ are nothing but obfuscating metaphors. When we try to apply cognitive theory to plants in a less vague way, they say, it seems that plants are doing something quite unlike animals. Plant mechanisms are complex and fascinating, they agree, but not cognitive. There’s a concern that we’re defining memory so broadly as to be meaningless, or that things such as habituation are not, in themselves, cognitive mechanisms.

One way of probing the meaning of cognition is to consider whether a system trades in representations. Generally, representations are states that are about other things, and can stand in for those things. A set of coloured lines can form a picture representing a cat, as does the word ‘cat’ on this page. States of the brain are also generally taken to represent parts of our environment, and so to enable us to navigate the world around us. When things go awry with our representations, we might represent things that aren’t there at all, such as when we hallucinate. Less drastically, sometimes we get things slightly wrong, or misrepresent, parts of the world. I might mishear lyrics in amusing ways (sometimes called ‘mondegreens’), or startle violently thinking that a spider is crawling on my arm, when it’s only a fly. The capacity to get it wrong in this way, to misrepresent something, is a good indication that a system is using information-laden representations to navigate the world; that is, that it’s a cognitive system.

When we create memories, arguably we retain of some of this represented information for later use ‘offline’. The philosopher Francisco Calvo Garzón at the University of Murcia in Spain has argued that, for a physical state or mechanism to be representational, it must ‘stand for things or events that are temporarily unavailable’. The capacity for representations to stand in for something that’s not there, he claims, is the reason that memory is taken to be the mark of cognition. Unless it can operate offline, a state or mechanism is not genuinely cognitive.

The mallow learns a new location when plant physiologists mess with its ‘head’ by changing the light’s direction.

On the other hand, some theorists allow that certain representations can only operate ‘online’ – that is, they represent and track parts of the environment in real time. The mallow’s nocturnal capacity to predict where the Sun will rise, before it even appears, seems to involve ‘offline’ representations; other heliotropic plants, which track the Sun only while it is moving across the sky, arguably involve a kind of ‘online’ representation. Organisms that use only such online representation, theorists say, might still be cognitive. But offline processes and memory provide stronger evidence that organisms are not just responding reflexively to their immediate environment. This is particularly important for establishing claims about organisms that we are not intuitively inclined to think are cognitive – such as plants.

Is there evidence that plants do represent and store information about their environment for later use? During the day, the mallow uses motor tissue at the base of its stalks to turn its leaves towards the Sun, a process that’s actively controlled by changes in water pressure inside the plant (called turgor). The magnitude and direction of the sunlight is encoded in light-sensitive tissue, spread over the mallow’s geometric arrangement of leaf veins, and stored overnight. The plant also tracks information about the cycle of day and night via its internal circadian clocks, which are sensitive to environmental cues that signal dawn and dusk.

Overnight, using information from all these sources, the mallow can predict where and when the Sun will rise the next day. It might not have concepts such as ‘the Sun’ or ‘sunrise’, but it stores information about the light vector and day/night cycles that allows it to reorient its leaves before dawn so that their surfaces face the Sun as it climbs in the sky. This also allows it to re-learn a new location when plant physiologists mess with its ‘head’ by changing the direction of the light source. When the plants are shut in the dark, the anticipatory mechanism also works offline for a few days. Like other foraging strategies, this is about optimising available resources – in this case, sunlight.

Does this mechanism count as a ‘representation’ – standing in for parts of the world that are relevant to the plant’s behaviour? Yes, in my view. Just as neuroscientists try to uncover the mechanisms in nervous systems in order to understand the operation of memory in animals, plant research is beginning to unravel the memory substrates that allow plants to store and access information, and use that memory to guide behaviour.

Plants are a diverse and flexible group of organisms whose extraordinary capacities we are only just beginning to understand. Once we expand the vista of our curiosity beyond animal and even plant kingdoms – to look at fungi, bacteria, protozoa – we might be surprised to find that many of these organisms share many of the same basic behavioural strategies and principles as us, including the capacity for kinds of learning and memory.

To make effective progress, we need to pay careful attention to plant mechanisms. We need to be clear about when, how and why we are using metaphor. We need to be precise about our theoretical claims. And where the evidence points in a direction, even when it is away from common consensus, we need to boldly follow where it leads. These research programmes are still in their infancy, but they will no doubt continue to lead to new discoveries that challenge and expand human perspectives on plants, blurring some of the traditional boundaries that separated the plant and animal realms.

Of course, it’s a stretch of the imagination to try to think about what thinking might even mean for these organisms, lacking as they do the brain(mind)/body(motor) divide. However, by pushing ourselves, we might end up expanding the concepts – such as ‘memory’, ‘learning’ and ‘thought’ – that initially motivated our enquiry. Having done so, we see that in many cases, talk of plant learning and memory is not just metaphorical, but also matter-of-fact. Next time you stumble upon a kerbside mallow bobbing in the sunlight, take a moment to look at it with new eyes, and to appreciate the window this little weed provides into the extraordinary cognitive capacities of plants.

Laura Ruggles is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

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