Why trees are intelligent

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]the trees then can send messages to each other. And those messages can include simple things like amino acids or sugars or they can be information chemicals that are far more complex than that. And they are sending these messages in response to each other's needs, to their presence, what's happening with them.

[00:00:22]So there's this constant back and forth going on through this mycorrhizal network. It's also going on through the soil. And I would say just to expand things a little bit, there's also communication going on through the air.

[00:00:34]Ooh, okay.

[00:00:36]So there's all these info chemicals going back. You can actually smell them when you're in the forest, right?

[00:00:40]>> smell? That resiny smell or that bouquet and those are trees that are communicating with each other about pollination or, you know, whether they're under stress. Yeah.

[00:00:52]You know, they're emanating things like terpenes that that are also sort of like insect warning signals. And so there there is this constant conversation above and below ground between these trees and plants in the forest.

[00:01:07]>> Which which feels like a form of intelligence. Which feels like a form of of intelligence. And so the, you know, when we looked at these mycorrhizal networks and we actually we made maps of them and we analyzed the mathematical pattern of the linkages and they followed a what's called a biological neural network pattern.

[00:01:26]>> Okay. So they would look like the connections in your brain. They do.

[00:01:29]Where you've got a few really large nodes and lots of little connecting nodes. Like that's what we have in our brains as well.