02/01/2026
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The evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has done groundbreaking experiments suggesting plants have the capacity to learn, remember, and make choices. That’s not all.
Gagliano, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia, talks to plants. And they talk back.
Through psychedelic experiences, Gagliano reports plants having guided her with instructions on how to live and work.
Along with forest scientists like Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, Gagliano raises profound scientific and philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence and the possibility of “vegetal consciousness.” But what’s unusual about Gagliano is her willingness to talk about her experiences with shamans and traditional healers, along with her use of psychedelics. For someone who’d already received fierce pushback from other scientists, it was hardly a safe career move to reveal her personal experiences in otherworldly realms.
Gagliano considers her explorations in non-Western ways of seeing the world to be part of her scientific work. “Those are important doors that you need to open and you either walk through or you don’t,” she told me. “I simply decided to walk through.” Sometimes, she said, certain plants have given her precise directions on how to conduct her experiments, even telling her which plant to study. But it hasn’t been easy. “Like Alice, [I] found myself tumbling down a rather strange rabbit hole,” she wrote in a 2018 memoir, Thus Spoke the Plant. “I did doubt my own sanity many times, especially when all these odd occurrences started—and yet I know I do not suffer from psychoses.”
Steve Paulson talked with Gagliano at Dartmouth College, where she was a visiting scholar. They spoke about her experiments, the new field of plant intelligence, and her own experiences of talking with plants.
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