One botanist who studies how sagebrush send distress signals to each other has found that individual plants appear to have different risk tolerance — a metric of personality, the very notion of which in an organism without a brain-based mind challenges our central assumptions about consciousness.

Split gills – which grow on decaying wood, and whose fruiting bodies resemble undulating waves of tightly packed coral – generated the most complex “sentences” of all.

Backster achieved his notoriety from a series of experiments that purported to demonstrate that living organisms read and respond to a person’s thoughts.