Plant Blindness- and why plant id should be the drug of choice

Try this! Can you recall the last face you saw? Think about it for a moment. Can you remember some prominent features? The person’s name?  How about the last plant you saw? Characteristics? Name of the plant? Chances are, you find the latter much more difficult than the former.  And that’s because people, in general, are becoming less aware of the plants around them. So much so, that there’s now a term for it, “plant blindness”.  

In the study from the link above, everyone from highschool students to biology teachers in London had difficulty identifying even 10 common wildflowers.  

Geret Quealy in his book, Botanical Shakespeare: An Illustrated Compendium of All the Flowers, Fruits, Herbs, Trees, Seeds, and Grasses Cited by the World’s Greatest Playwright, writes that Shakespeare made 175 references to various plants in his writing. All of these would have been quite familiar to his audiance.  

Botanists, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, who first coined the phrase plant blindness, postulate that our inability to notice plants is because they don’t have a face, don’t move and aren’t immediately threatening. But, of course, they were never any of those things, even when we humans had a much greater familiarity with the plants surrounding us. 

When people were more directly dependent on plants for food and medicine, life forced us to have a keen eye and understanding for what the plant could do.  And, we were richly rewarded for it with that feel-good neurotransmitter behind so many of our reward pathways: Dopamine. 

We modern humans have learned to hijack the brain’s dopamine producing machinery with medications, drugs, fast food, alcohol, and pretty much any addictive activity you can think of. But, originally, dopamine was secreted in the brain to reward us for finding useful things in nature. 

We would get a little dopamine hit when we found a tree with honey, or an herb that we knew to help a cough, or a mushroom. And it wasn’t just to make us feel good. A dopamine reward for useful behavior leaves a stamp in our memory of the thing we were doing and where we were doing it.  In other words, we would feel great having found that medicinal or delicious plant and the release of dopamine at that moment ensured that we would remember how to return to that tree or to search out that herb.

Giving dopamine to ants supports this connection between dopamine and foraging.  When ants were given extra dopamine in the study above, they actually went on more foraging trips to look for food. 

So, the bottom line is that the more you know about the plants around you, the more pleasure you’ll get from spending time outdoors.

Don’t know where to get started? Start with today’s meditation, getting to know your weeds (should be up shortly).