We might need to reconsider our position in the consciousness hierarchy.

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. For instance, scientists estimate that there are more than three trillion trees on Earth—a number that even dwarfs the amount of stars in our galaxy. And when you add the populations of the more than 380,000 other plant species, the total becomes mind-boggling. Nonetheless, many of us assume that we’re the smartest, most conscious beings on Earth.

But 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.

For starters, 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 it. 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 plants, 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 behavior 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 behavior 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.”

Separately, there’s another idea that human-level self-awareness emerges when you have sufficient nodes—or 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? Perhaps it’s time we rethink our standing as the “most conscious” beings on planet Earth.