7 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story…
- Research suggests that consciousness could extend far beyond just humans—every cellular creature in the universe, no matter how big or small, could be conscious, too.
- Studies show that single-cell organisms—like mold—display traits associated with cognition, such as counting and collaborating.
- Plants are included in this theory as well; researchers believe plants are aware of their environment, meaning they can recognize others around them.
Human beings tend to be anthropocentric. That is, we often see ourselves as evolution’s magnum opus despite the fact that, as biomass goes, we’re insignificant compared to plants and other animals. We’re also one of the youngest species—if Earth’s history was an hour long, we arrived eight seconds ago. Nonetheless, many of us assume that we are the smartest, most conscious beings on Earth.
Meanwhile, phytoplankton emerged over a billion years ago. These are photosynthesizers who live in the water. Most are single-celled plants, but some are bacteria, and others protists. Few people would suggest that these phytoplankton are conscious. But there are two problems with that: One, no one knows what consciousness is. Two, most people agree that self-awareness is a key component of consciousness. And even single-celled beings demonstrate a measure of self-awareness.
So what if consciousness isn’t a feature limited solely to humans—and what if we’re actually wildly outnumbered by a planet full of other conscious beings?
As it turns out, a handful of studies suggest that might just be the case. In fact, some researchers believe that every cellular being in the universe, no matter how big or small—from the simplest prokaryotic cells to entire forests of trees—may be conscious, since we all share fundamental similarities on a microscopic level.
In the 1990s, a theory emerged called the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), which states that life and sentience are basically the same thing. According to the theory, “All living organisms are conscious, self-aware, and have valenced sensory and perceptual experiences.” CBC argues that unicellular prokaryotes—or the simplest form of unicellular life, such as common bacteria—engage in associative learning, stable memory formation, route navigation and decision-making. “They anticipate upcoming events and readily create functional social collectives, within which they display both cooperation and competition and, fascinatingly, a primitive form of altruism where some cells in a colony put themselves at risk to support the life functions of other cells in distress.”
For example, unicellular eukaryotes—or cells with nuclei—such as Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold known as “the blob,” can solve math problems and find its way out of a maze without chemical inducements like food.
Likewise, there are also bacteria that can sense when there are enough of them to take a collective action. One marine bioluminescent bacterium emits a molecule that stimulates glowing, but only when the bacteria has reached a certain population density. Princeton University molecular biologist Bonnie Lynn Bassler, PhD, says the way bacteria do this is through “talking, counting, and carrying out tasks in groups.”
The difference between what these unicellular beings experience as consciousness and what humans experience as consciousness, researchers say, is that their version of consciousness would feel to us like intuition rather than a full experience of self.
Plants also count in this theory.
Plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, PhD, notes that plants respond to anesthesia the same way humans do—they become nonresponsive. Humans tend to think of plants as nonresponsive anyway, because they don’t generally move in human timescales. But when scientists have administered anesthesia to plants that do operate “quickly” by human measures, such as the Venus Flytrap, the plant stops responding when flies land on them. And while you won’t see a plant fleeing danger the way we do, some have been found to be gradually migrating north as the planet warms, just as animals are changing their migratory patterns.
To test the spatial awareness and intentionality of a bean plant, Mancuso did an experiment, placing a potted bean plant in his lab about a meter from a metal rod. In a time-lapse video, he showed that the bean plant, having reached the top of its support pole, sent out a long, hooked shoot that repeatedly swung out and back, trying to hook the metal pole and eventually catching hold of it. In short: the bean plant “knew” where the pole was. Mancuso also conducted research demonstrating that, when two bean plants reach a support, one recognizes the other plant got there first and begins to look for a different support.
“What is interesting is the behaviour of the loser: it immediately sensed the other plant had reached the pole and started to find an alternative,” he wrote in the study. “This was astonishing and it demonstrates the plants were aware of their physical environment and the behaviour of the other plant. In animals we call this consciousness.”
His colleague, Monica Gagliano, PhD, did a series of experiments with mimosas—a genus often called the “sensitive plant” because its leaves fold up quickly when touched. She placed the mimosa in a basket and dropped it several inches, causing the mimosa to close its leaves. But after she had repeated this many times, the mimosa seemed to “get used to” the experience and stopped responding when the drop came. She tried the experiment again a few weeks later, and the mimosas still didn’t react to the drop, suggesting that plants can remember.
In 2025, Mancuso worked on a paper led by Tomonori Kawano, PhD. In the article, researchers explored the idea that plants, like people, have Two Minds—or an unconscious mind that makes quick decisions and a conscious one that makes slower decisions, like humans have. In the case of Gagliano’s mimosas, for example, the more unconscious “thinking” would be to close its leaves when it’s jarred. But by remembering the experience and making a different choice, the mimosa demonstrates a more conscious and deliberate level of “thinking.”
Kawano and the rest of the research team even explored the possibility that single-celled organisms could be found to have two minds. They say that the factors involved are the same at all levels: biological materials, the flow of energy, and “information.” Several other scientists have already proposed a connection between these elements in human consciousness.
Anesthesiologist Marco Cavagliá, MD, a researcher at Polytechnic University of Turin, is working on a theory of consciousness that says our cell membranes, vicinal water (a water-like substance around the membranes), and cerebrospinal fluid resonate with Earth’s energy fields. This resonance shapes the matter that forms our brains. Humans use logic—the brain’s systems of neurochemical and electrical signaling—to form a narrative about who we are from the interactions with these energy fields.
Other animals and plants have cell membranes and vicinal water as well, though they may not be as inclined to form narratives about their existence. That might be a plus for them, though. Our stories about ourselves are often marred by self-consciousness, comparisons to others, and anxiety—what Cavagliá and his collaborators call our internal noise—which can interfere with our ability to tap into optimal energy fields.
Quantum energy, rather than electromagnetic energy, has also been proposed as a source of conscious awareness. Quantum theory says there are fields of energy in all directions that are waves of probability that collapse into a particular reality, though no one knows what makes them collapse. Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, PhD, and his research partner Stuart Hameroff, MD, believe microtubules—nanoscopic protein structures inside the cells—engage with the quantum wave function in a way that causes it to collapse over and over into what we experience as a seamless stream of consciousness.
Microtubules are exceptionally abundant in neurons. But all eukaryotic cells—including those that make up plants and animals—have microtubules. And if Penrose and Hameroff are correct and quantum energy is the ticket to consciousness, it’s also notable that we have more evidence of quantum activity in plants than in human brains. Specifically, plants “eat” photons, which are quantum packets of light energy, and many scientists believe this is a quantum process.
Separately, there’s another idea that human-level self-awareness emerges when you have sufficient nodes–points of connection–in a neural network. That’s what proponents of AI are hoping for. Systems thinking theorist Jamie Monat, PhD, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts notes that the number of nodes needed to give rise to this self awareness is about 70 billion. In a dense forest, the number of nodes between plants and fungi may easily exceed that number. If it is the cells themselves that are conscious, that increases by orders of magnitude.
“Some of earth’s forests number many billions of trees, and some of the world’s prairies and seagrass meadows also contain billions of individual plants,” Monat writes. “These plant ecosystems may thus be self-aware, and in fact there may be a multitude of self-aware plant-based ecosystems on earth already.”
In South Africa in the 1990s, wardens of a game reserve kept finding Kudu—a type of antelope—that had died with no evidence of injury or illness. It was a mystery. Then, zoologist Wouter Van Hoven found the unexpected culprit: acacia trees. A drought had reduced the amount of vegetation for grazing, and the Kudu couldn’t go elsewhere for food because they were stuck on the reserve. So the Kudu overgrazed the acacia trees to the point where they were in danger. The trees defended themselves by increasing the tannins in their leaves, becoming poisonous to the Kudu. Not only did the trees increase their own tannins, but they also sent out a chemical signal as far as 50 meters (164 feet) away to warn other trees to do the same.
Humans tend to reduce such surprising plant behavior to chemical reactions and evolutionary biology rather than intelligence and consciousness, but what is human functioning besides biology, electronic, and neurochemical firings? Meanwhile there’s the question of what we do with our consciousness.
Phytoplankton are just tiny, one-celled plants. But they serve as the foundation of the ocean’s food web. They produce more than 50% of Earth’s oxygen and capture more than 40% of atmospheric carbon dioxide—the carbon dioxide we produce from burning too many fossil fuels.
Humans have devoted so much of our creativity and complex thought to adapting our environment to ourselves, rather than the other way around, that scientists say we’re driving what is threatening to be the sixth mass extinction of the planet. Meanwhile the plants have been keeping things going collaboratively for eons before us. Maybe it’s time we rethink our opinion of ourselves.
Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She’s covered ocean wave energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery; healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.