Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to use Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series talking about the winners of the twenty twenty four ig Nobel Prizes. The Ignobels are awards given out each year by a scientific humor magazine called The Annals of Improbable Research to both satirize and honor scientific achievements that are likely to strike people as funny for one reason or another. We cover the winners
most years, and this year is no exception. So on Tuesday in part one of this series, which, by the way, if you haven't listened yet, maybe go check that one out first. But in Tuesday's episode, we talked about the twenty twenty four Physiology Prize winner, which was a study on using the a to deliver supplemental oxygen to pigs, mice,
and potentially one day, human beings. And we also talked about a classic experiment from the history of dairy science, which involved trying to stack cats on top of cows and get them all freaked out with exploding paper bags in order to understand something about milk production.
Yeah, and you know, if you were, if you're impatient and you're like, just give me the full list. Don't want the fullest of winners from this year and every other year that there's been an ig Nobel Prize. You can go to Improbable dot com. That is, that's the official website, and it's all all laid out for you in a very handy format.
That's right, And we're not going to be talking about all of this year's winners. We most years we don't talk about all the winners. We're just we read through them and pick out some that are especially interesting to us and focus on those to try to get into more depth.
Yeah.
All right, So to kick things off today, I'm going to start by talking about the twenty twenty four prize in the arena of Medicine. And this selection is one of those where the nature of the experiment is funny, but I think it actually reveals something fairly profound, in
this case about medicine, medical science, and human psychology. So the prize was awarded to and as always I apologize if I'm mispronouncing anything here, but it was awarded to Leaven A. Shank Tamine Fedai and Christian Bukele, for quote demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side effects.
Huh, well, this is funny this. I believe we've touched on this idea before, like, how do you know your how do you come to believe your fake medicine is doing anything if it doesn't cause you some sort of sensation? Right?
Yeah, Well, we've talked about this without necessarily having a solid empirical backing for it. Just kind of like the suspicion that if you're taking some kind of pseudo scientific cure or some snake oil or something that, if I don't know, makes you it real bad, or it gives you an upset stomach or something like that, it might help sell the idea while it's doing something.
In my house, my wife and I have been watching the recent twenty twenty four comedy series on Netflix based on the de Cameron, and there is a character in that who is regularly being poisoned by his personal physician for a bunch of health maladies that he I think mostly doesn't have, maybe some of them he has but you know, he's kind of a hypochondriac, and he's enabled by this doctor who's always giving him various tonics and potions.
Enjoying this mercury. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he's constantly in ill health and in large part due to these treatments, and people at times pointed out to him it's like like this guy's been poisoning you. Like, of course you feel bad. What did he give you to have today? And he's like, well, well, yes, I vomited, Yes I had uncontrollable diary. But that's what healing is, like, that's the sickness leaving your body. You know.
Wow.
And he's really slow to doubt this position at all.
Well, it's amazing how well that exact situation will play into the study and into legitimate medical uses of place. Ebos So the authors of this paper, which by the way, for the citation, the paper was called how side Effects can Improve Treatment Efficacy a randomized Trial. This was in the journal Brain in twenty twenty four, and the authors start by pointing out the obvious side effects from medical treatments are generally bad. We don't want them. You don't
want them as a patient. You don't want your patients to have them. As a doctor, side effects can cause pain, discomfort, inconvenience, and concern, and in a lot of cases there if you think about the second order effects, they're not only bad because of the direct subjective unpleasantness of them. They
can also lead to discontinuation of treatment itself. So if you're taking something, you know, a medicine that is very important, that's you know, helping treat your cancer or something like that, but the side effects are really bad in some cases, that can lead people to discontinue treatment that is working.
So you want to avoid side effects most of the time, obviously, and this means that the researcher is developing new drugs, surgeries, and other types of treatments are always looking to find a treatment with fewer or less severe side effects on average. Furthermore, avoiding side effects also factors into which treatments doctors will prescribe or recommend to their patients, or even into how doctors sort of mentally or conversationally prepare their patients for
treatments that they do prescribe. Because much in the same way that there is a placebo effect, and the placebo effect is the effect in which the belief that you are receiving an effective treatment can by itself improve outcomes. There is also the evil twin of the placebo effect, the no cibo effect, in which the mere belief that a treatment will cause pain or other negative side effects does actually cause them. That makes sense, So it works
both ways. You know, I give you a sugar pill that does nothing, but I tell you it's going to treat your pain. In a lot of cases, people will actually feel less pain. There's a psychological effect going on that causes them to subjectively feel relief. Same thing happens the other way. I give you an inert sugar pill and tell you it's likely to cause severe abdominal pain. A lot of people probably will feel severe abdominal pain even though the pill isn't actually doing it.
Yeah, I feel myself wrestling with this every time I get said, like my annual flu shot, you know, and you know, I have that day after where I'm I might have some flu like you know, symptoms as part of that. But then I'm like wrestling with it. It's like, okay, but is this really happening? Like how much of this is real? How much of this is my mind? You know, engaging in the no cebo effect. So yeah, it is a real, real.
Thing, absolutely, And so this leads back to this question about you know, doctors prescribing their patients treatments that do have known side effects. Because with the knowledge that the expectation of bad side effects can actually make people feel bad side effects or make bad side effects worse, doctors have to be careful like how they approach the topic. You have to be honest with patients. You know, you
want transparency and full disclosure about common side effects. So good, good doctors aren't going to try to hide to the fact that there are no known side effects, but also talking about side effects the wrong way in a way that maybe increases their salience could kind of no sebo effect conjure them into a painful reality for the patient.
So it's a delicate balance. You know, if you're a doctor, you have to be honest about what side effects are, but you don't want to make them worse by emphasizing them in scary ways to the patient. So anyway, that's all the background. Side effects are something that are a very important part of medicine and something that doctors have to take a lot of care about but while acknowledging
that side effects are generally bad the author's right quote. Here, we challenge this view and ask whether some side effects could actually lead to better treatment outcomes. This idea is motivated by the observation that side effects themselves can contribute to treatment expectations. Our hypothesis posits that even mild side effects can be indirect indicators of treatment potent c e g. Side Effects are unavoidable with a powerful drug, which can
lead to positive treatment expectations. These treatment expectations are the basis for non specific therapeutic effects i e. The placebo effect that have substantial impact on treatment outcomes. So, to paraphrase, this is sort of coming back on the other side and saying we think that negative side effects could in some cases perversely lead to better outcomes for people overall, because certain side effects might make it really feel like
the drug is working. Wow, it's in there, it's really doing something, and I can tell because of the way I'm feeling because of that, you know, tingling or whatever, which increases the positive contribution of placebo effects to the overall improvement in well being you get from a treatment.
And this is backed up by the fact that various non therapeutic characteristics of placebos, like the color of a pill, or the understood price of a pill, or the taste of a pill, have all been shown in previous experiments to have effect an effect on outcomes, presumably through the
placebo effect. Now, in their introduction, the author's right about how there's already some reason to think this hypothesis could be true, in part because of the use of what are called active placebos over inert placebos in clinical practice. So in both cases, the drug being prescribed is a placebo. It does not act directly on the underlying issue. It's not assumed to have a biological effect. It works by
triggering the psychological placebo effect. So when you give somebody a placebo, you could give them a treatment that does basically nothing in reality other than trigger the psychological effect. That would be an inert placebo. Maybe it's a sugar pill or something. Or you could give somebody a pill that does something that the patient can sense, and this
would be an active placebo. The preference for active placebos indicates that internal feedback from the body telling the patient that the drug is doing something may help amplify good placebo effects overall. The author's raise another important issue, which is that if side effect do have an effect on treatment outcomes, for example, by increasing the placebo effect of a given treatment, this is useful useful information in designing
randomized clinical trials. You would need to take that fact into account in designing your experiments and evaluating results when testing actual drug treatments. We can talk more about this when we get to their conclusions. Anyway, the author is designed an experiment to test whether mild negative side effects would increase the placebo effect of a fake treatment, specifically
a fake pain medication. So this study involved a preregistered trial of seventy seven healthy participants who would be subjected to non injurious pain from what's called a thermode, which is a device that stimulates the skin with heat or cold used for experiments like this. It can stimulate with heat or cold that will be unpleasant. It will cause
a painful reaction, but doesn't hurt you. Before getting stuck with the thermo, the participants here were given a nasal spray and told that the spray might or might not include a dose of the painkiller fentanyl. Now, in fact, none of the sprays included any pain medication instead, the independent variable was whether the spray was relatively inert saline or whether it contained capsaisin, the alkaloid found in chili peppers, which of course causes a burning sensation, so in this
case it would cause some burning and irritation in the nose. Now, the researchers tested this across several different experiments with some different conditions, with later phases involving a functional MRI evaluation as well as a control group who were told that there was actually no pain medication in any of the
spray and so what did they find? Bingo? Even though none of the sprays actually had painkillers in them, the spray that caused a burning sensation in the nose due to this chili pepper alkaloid also apparently caused the people who received it, believing it might be a painkiller, to experience less pain from the thermode. Now, there was a commentary piece accompanying this study, also published in Brain in twenty twenty four by Kacia Witch, Helena Hartman, and Ulrique
Bingle called side effects are often a curse? Can they also be a blessing? And the authors of the commentary piece right quote crucially, this greater analgesic effect, meaning pain numbing effect. This greater analgesic effect was dependent on participants believing that the occurrence of side effects indicates a more potent treatment, with this belief leading to more positive treatment expectations, which in turn resulted in increased analgesia. So does that
make sense. In order for this effect to work, the patients had to believe that the burning sensation in the knows was an indicator that the drug was really working.
Yes, yeah, Like, I think we've referenced this in the in the past. You know, this idea that you're taking something it is you know, it is a placebo or a snake oil if you will, but something is happening, and then you can connect that's something to what you are promised the substance will do.
Yeah.
Like, I always think back to an old episode of the Andy Griffith Show that I remember watching as a kid where Aunt b is buying some sort of a medicine from some guy. You know, it's a typical typical Andy Griffith Show format where there's some sort of outsider in town doing something and people were buying into their their act and then Andy Griffith has to, you know, investigate figure it out, and it turns out it's like
the substance is like eighty five percent alcohol. So the various you know, old ladies around town that are that this guy's selling to, you know, they're just enjoying a little like moonshine or something. Yeah, but since it is alcohol, they are experiencing an effect. That effect is not really curing anything, but they can associate that sensation with the idea that it is working.
Yes, exactly, and that connects to something that Whych and co authors in this commentary piece right about they say quote speaking of the authors of this study, they suggest that during treatment, our assessment of drug effects may be guided by simple heuristics e g. More potent treatments have more side effects, which may not always hold true, but
are often a reasonable first approximation. So this might not be a true generalizable statement about medicine, but it works well enough that many of us just operate on this assumption big side effects, very potent cure. Coming back to the quote from Whychet. Although quote remarkably, Shank and colleagues found that the latter belief was strong enough to resurface even after participants had been briefed about the active placebo manipulation.
While the analgesia enhancing effect of side effects disappeared immediately after the debriefing prior to the second session, it re emerged in a follow up session conducted about a week later. So they had a condition where you know that people had been doing these trials and then with one group they explained to them, Okay, here's what's going on. You're not actually getting any painkiller. This is not really happening, and so that immediately killed the effect. It broke the
illusion for the people in that group. But then the people in that group who had had the illusion already broken, they came back a week later, and then the effect was working again, even though they knew what was going on at that point. It's like the time lag just allowed the somehow allowed that the magic to re coalesce or something.
Oh wow, that's impressive. Like it's like there's still like a subconscious level, like there's still like an A and a B connecting there for them and they're like, yeah, yeah, made me itch or it made me sneeze. It's working.
That's a right. So the authors say that this suggests it may just be a kind of deeply conditioned general association between stronger side effects a and stronger potency as a cure. So to temper these results a bit, one thing worth noting is that the effect observed from having side effects was not huge. It was not like a you know, life changing kind of difference in how effective
these placebos were. But it was a statistically significant difference, and so this could potentially be influential in treatment settings and in clinical trials. So in the end, the authors say their experiments show that mild negative side effects can make a treatment or a placebo feel subjectively more powerful and effective at its desired goal. And this leads to
some kind of wild sounding suggestions in their conclusion. First of all, they write, quote one could even think of artificially changing the formulation of an established drug to include mild side effects to increase treatment expectations. However, while research on open label placebo provides the idea that this effect could be used without deception, great care would be necessary
to avoid any unintended harm. So I don't know. To stick with the capsaosm theme, maybe you like you smear all pills with ghost pepper juice to make sure they burn a little bit going down.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I was thinking along these lines as well, but I guess, yeah, it raises a number of questions, like what if by doing this or something like this, this actually made the individual a little less likely to take the medicine or a little more likely to reject the medicine. Yeah, you know that could be
a factor. Also, It's like anytime you add any substance to a medication, that open potentially opens up the space for various other health scenarios to come into play, allergies and so forth, right, exactly.
Yeah, So the authors acknowledge that is a very controversial suggestion, and it would be it would face strong ethical considerations. You'd really have to think about what are the costs and benefits of doing something like that, And of course they acknowledge, like you couldn't do that secretly, Like you'd have to find a way of being transparent about the fact that like there, yeah, there's some spicy juice on this pill or something without it destroying the placebo effect
benefit that you would get from it. Yeah, it's kind of hard to work out how you would balance that.
Yeah.
The authors also point out that there are probably limits as to how severe the side effects could be to trigger this effect, Like we don't know because it hasn't been tested yet, but like extreme pain and discomfort would
likely not produce the same outcomes. In addition to being undesirable in the first place, there's probably like a sweet spot of some kind of I don't know, mildly irritating side effect that really makes it feel like the drug is more powerful, makes you feel subjectively better overall, but is not annoying or painful enough on its own to counteract that. Maybe something in the mild tingling zone.
Now I don't think they got into this, but it does make me wonder about like just sort of like the bitter taste of a pill, you know, yeah, like like something that simple as sort of reminding you, oh, yeah, this is medicine I'm taking.
Yeah. However, they offer so you know, the author, the original authors, and the people in the commentary piece, they're all saying, like, Okay, that idea is a little bit wild. That's kind of controversial to say you would intentionally increase mild negative side effects to make the placebo aspects of
a treatment better. So they offer a different idea, which is you could potentially capitalize on this discovery by saying, when side effects are already present in a drug, doctors could try to increase the positive salience of known side effects, unavoidable known side effects instead of trying to decrease the
salience of those side effects. So, you know, we talked at the beginning about how a lot of doctors know about no cebo effects, and so they will often try to frame the possibility of negative side effects in a delicate way to try to prevent them from you know, prevent them from over manifesting due to no sebo expectations.
The authors here are saying, well, what if you kind of do the opposite, maybe kind of elevate the salience of mild, known unavoidable side effects of drugs, but you frame them in a positive way instead of a negative way. So you frame unavoidable pre existing side effects of drugs as a sign that it's working.
All right, all right, I can I can see. This is just more about the messaging and turning the potential negative into.
A positive exactly. Yeah, So being honest about what the side effects are, but framing it in a way that emphasizes these positive placebo effects, you would get from those side effects. Yeah, However, all the authors involved here clearly acknowledge that this is a delicate, tricky subject area because, as the authors of the commentary piece right quote, the framing of side effects must respect ethical standards and should
not jeopardize patient autonomy and the patient practitioner relationship. It's therefore crucial for patients and practitioners to engage in joint decision making about the use of positive framing as part of the treatment. So, you know, they're saying there, like, you want to be as transparent as possible while doing this because if the patient, I mean, for one thing,
that's just like baseline what a doctor should do. But also if the patient gets the feeling that they're being manipulated or the doctor is not being honest with them, then also this could lead to more negative treatment outcomes and everything. So, like, I don't know, it's a difficult thing to work out here because there the placebo effect, no cebo effect. It all necessarily relies on some amount
of illusion. But you can't let that manifest as dishonesty in the clinical setting or any kind of lack of trust between the doctor and the patient.
Yeah, that's a great point because you're you're you're in this realm where on one hand, you have you know, pretty hard lines concerning you know, ethical medicine and doing no harm and being transparent. But then also you were you were in that space of bedside manner, which can be kind of subjective, and it's going to may vary from patient to patient. You know, one patient may be like, you know, tell it to me straight, doc, don't sugarcoat it.
Other you know, I like a little sugarcoating. Sugarcoat it for me a little bit, doc. You know, I want to feel okay when I leave. You know, in.
Research shows sometimes sugarcoating can literally help.
Yeah. Yeah, So I mean it's you can you can imagine it's going to differ from persons. And then on top of all this, as you've been pointing out, like there's an illusion that is taking place, But to what extent, sorry for this, can doctors use that illusion to their benefit?
Yeah? I don't know exactly what the answer is there. I mean it kind of makes me think of like the contract you enter into with some stage magicians. You know, like a stage magician is going to show you a bunch of tricks that appear to be magic, but you know, a lot of I don't know. Some might insist that it's really magic, but mostly stage magicians are going to overall, they will be transparent and say, no, I don't actually
have magic powers. These are all illusions, These are all tricks, and yet you get the audience to buy into them for the purpose of the entertainment, for the purpose of the show. And I guess there's a similar thing that has to go on in this doctor patient relationship. It's like, there must be transparency and honesty overall, but you have to get the patient into the mind space of being accepting of the illusion and the benefits it provides.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Now there's another consideration the authors bring up, which is clinical trials. They make the point that placebo controls are a very important part of the scientific process of testing medicine. If you want to test whether a drug is actually working, whether it's actually having a biological effect, you need to compare it not just to doing nothing, but they need to compare it to a placebo so that you can ignore the extent to which the effect you're seeing in
the trials is due to placebo effects alone. So, for example, if this may be numerically crude analogy, but just to roughly illustrate the idea. If people getting the actual drug being tested see a thirty percent improvement in symptoms, but people getting a placebo see a twenty percent improvement, then you can guess that the biological effect of the drug
only contributes the difference. Maybe it's only contributing about ten percent of an improvement, because if it's a well designed trial with randomized groups, you should expect the amount of placebo effect in the test group and the control group
to be about the same. Does that make sense? Both groups should be benefiting from about the same amount of placebo effect, but the test group should be additionally seeing any benefit that's actually provided by the therapeutic effects of the treatment the actual biological mechanism.
Yeah. Yeah, that would be measurable.
Yeah yeah. So the authors here are emphasizing the point that if side effects such as like a burning sensation, you know, these small negative side effects increase the power of the placebo effect, as this study shows, they probably do. You know, of course, we'd want to see this backed up by other studies, but this is an indication that
may be going on. This could be throwing off the results of clinical trials a little bit, because if the actual treatment under testing causes side effects and the placebo control does not cause side effects, the test group will benefit from more placebo effect than the control group and thus overestimate slightly the biological effect of the treatment. Now, to be clear, the authors here are not and are not claiming to be the first people ever to notice
this kind of confound to RCTs. The format in which I've seen it discussed more often in the past is the idea of de blinding the placebo group in double blind RCTs. So, in order to eliminate expectation effects, test subjects in clinical trials are not supposed to know if they're in the test group or the control group. Right, You're not supposed to know if you're getting the real
medicine being tested or the placebo. But if the treatment being tested takes some form that is obvious or comes with known side effects which you are obviously not experiencing in the control group, then you are effectively de blinded. You know which group you're in, and thus the result
are corrupted and less reliable. And so this is a slightly different but related issue similar to that if you don't get the side effects, your placebo effect could be comparatively lower on average than the placebo effect in the test group that is getting the side effects. So are there ways around this? Well, yeah, this comes back to something that has already been implemented in clinical trials before,
such as the use of active placebos. So the placebo group should be getting something that tries as closely as possible to mimic the mimic the effects of the actual treatment to heighten the illusion make it feel as similar as possible. They say, you could also, maybe I don't know, specially, design some kind of methods to avoid these complications and
get the cleanest state of possible. But anyway, I thought the study was really interesting because of of course, it is pretty funny, like the idea that you're like intentionally shooting chili pepper juice up somebody's nose to make it burn in order to help them feel better overall, and the fact that this does seem to be a real
significant effect that happens in our brains. I just think it's so interesting that our minds work that way, and it raises all of these difficult, really meaningful questions about treatment and about medicine, about how we do medical science and how we test new treatments and raises all these questions about how to handle the relationship between a doctor or a caregiver and their patient.
Absolutely, and I think it also reminds me that there is often a mad magazine kind of sensibility I think to the Ignobel Prize selection process, in which they do like a study that, no matter how serious it is, on some level the experimentation feels like a prank. Yeah, you know, it's like, here, take these pills and then snicker. Those are spicy pills.
Yeah, there is an alfredy Newman quality to this that the the capsay is in nasal spray. However, I did not in the text of the paper itself, I did not detect a lot of I don't know, perverse or sadistic snickering from the from the author is. It just seemed like, yeah, we got an idea, I got to find a way to test it.
Well. I see similar elements in the next prize you're going to discuss here, that's the Botany Prize. Though in this case, if there is, if there is any interpretation of a prank here and likewise, it's not This is not something that is acknowledged in the paper itself, but if you were to interpret it as such, the prank is being pulled off on a plant by you. Jokes
on you, Yeah, jokes on you plant. So the Botany Prize this year went to a twenty twenty two paper published in the Gym Plant Signaling and Behavior with the title Boquilla Trifoliolata Mimics Leaves of an Artificial plastic host plant by Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita. The humor here, it would seem, is found in the idea that a living plant is mimicking a fake plant, which of course is itself a feat of mimicry carried out by humans
through their plastic technology. Wow, but this is one where okay, yeah, it makes you laugh, but then definitely makes you think, because I really have to stress that the underlying science here is really phenomenal, even just the overview of everything prior to this twenty twenty two paper, like the more generally widely accepted material, really raises so many questions about
not only be trifoliolata but also plants in general. You know, it forces you and there are a lot of subjects like this in the realm of botany that really makes you view them with new eyes because because the thing about plants is, if you're lucky, plants are all around you. You know, if you live in an environment that has a lot of flora, it's there. It's enriching your life.
But it's easy to take for granted. It's easy to not notice unless it's actually getting in your way or you know, hitting you in a weak moment where you're open to its beauty. But for the most part, yeah, it's like trees are there. We know they're alive, but we don't think of them as really active parts of the environment. We think of them as these passive things.
We underappreciate them, I think because the time scale of their activities and the physical changes triggered by their activities is longer than we're you used to with animals. So we're like really much more impressed by things that move and react quickly, and because plants don't tend to move and react quickly, like on the timescale of seconds, though in a few cases they do, you know, venus fly traps and shrinking flowers and all that, but in most cases,
they don't react on the timescale of seconds. We just tend to think of them as inanimate objects therefore, but like when you actually see how they react to things and what they do over time, they can start to feel a lot more alive. And even this could be misleading in some ways, but even in some ways intelligent.
Yeah, and that definitely plays into interpretations of this particular plant species. Now, to be clear, the plant in question here be trifoliolata, has been around for a very long time, known locally in its native regions of South America is vokey blanco or pill pill. Indigenous medicine has made use of its leaf juice, and the vines have long been used in basketry, so this is not something that is
just entirely new now. In essence, this species is a non parasitic vine that coils around other plants for structure and protection. It bears little white flowers, edible little fruits, and overall nothing is really astounding about that, right. I mean, you can look up pictures of this plant and it does not look exciting if you do not know what to look for, or you don't have things about what it's doing pointed out to you. I included a picture of it here for you, Joe. I mean, what can
you say green plants? Right?
I mean I see a nice elegant, deep green, waxy leaf arranged in a three leaf shape coming off of the stalk. Yeah, it's a pretty little plant. But it's I don't know if it would really catch my attention. It's just a little little vine with green leaves.
Yeah. Yeah, Like would you stop and look at it in a walk? Maybe not unless you really were paying close attention and you figured out what was going on here. So European descriptions of this plant date back to the late eighteenth century, but some of the most astounding discoveries are rather recent, centered around the work of plants scientists or Nesto Again and Fernando carrasco Ura and the discovery and key to all this their discovery that the plants
leaves actually mimic the leaves of nearby plants. You know, especially in this context that the plant that it is coiled around, but also just nearby plants in general. And to be clear, this is not a case in which a plant has evolved to feature leaves that mimic the leaves of a common host plant. Though this is you know, in and of itself, this would be a pretty amazing feat as well. I mean, plant mimicry of this sort of which there are some remarkable examples, is amazing.
Right, But you're not saying it's just like a static form that has evolved over time to resemble plants that it is usually around in its environment.
Right right. What the researchers quickly figured out here is that this is an example of botanical mimicry that occurs as the plant grows, and it can mimic most different plants in its immediate vicinity, and nothing else like this is known to exist in the plant world.
Now, that is really interesting, and I would immediately be curious to know how does it do that? How does it how does it determine the shape of the leaves of plants around it?
Yeah, because, I mean, another thing the research has discovered is that it can mimic the leaf shape, the leafs, the leaf size, even the color. And it can do this for more than a dozen different plants. In fact, different parts of the same plant can mimic different plants. So you know, I instantly, you know, thought about horror movies and reminded me of how in John Carpenter Is the Thing, we get some of those scenes late in the film where we catch the titular alien creature mimicking
several different victims at once. You know, here's this person, here's this person, here's the dog, and so forth, and you know, but the reality is that this plant really is a shape shifter. It is really doing the shape shifting. It is just doing it on the timeframe of a plant, and just as the thing shape shifts in order to survive. That's inevitably the case here, and the exact reason. You know, it's always a little ambiguous figuring out exactly why organisms
have evolved in the things they do. But it's thought that this might be to protect itself against certain snails and beetles by resembling less tasty plants in its vicinity. So essentially a form of Batitian mimicry. But to your question, how does this work? Like, what are the possible mechanisms in play here? How do they sense the different leaves in their vicinity and then.
Copy them exactly.
Yeah, and this is where we get into some interesting hypotheses and also a pronounced divide in the world of interpreting what's going on when plants engage in this kind of behavior.
Okay, so some of the ideas we're about to get into are fairly controversial or not settled.
Right right. I was reading a great commentary on this study. This is from twenty twenty three. It appeared in Vox by Benji Jones titled the Mystery of the Mimic Plant, and Jones here stresses that you can divide the hypothesizers up into two distinct groups. Here, on one hand, you have mainstream botanist and then on the other hand, you have scientists with ideas in plant cognition and related areas that really challenge our understanding of what plants are in
how plants match up to animals. And these two groups don't necessarily see eye to eye on everything. The mainstream botanists their views are going to be more widely accepted, and people in the plant cognition area, and particularly in this area of plant neurobiology, some of their ideas are
going to be perhaps a little more out there. I don't want to dismiss what they're doing or anything, but just suffice to say there is a starch divide, and there is a you know, an area of disagree between these two camps, with the mainstream botanists being really the more widely accepted view on things as I understand.
It, So we could say among among experts there's sort of a majority position in a minority position.
Yes, So on that mainstream botany track, we have the likes of Ernesto Gianoli and Fernando carrasco Ura, who definitely lean more towards the idea that, Okay, what's going on here? We can look to a couple of primary possibilities. One is that the plant is picking up on chemical volatile signals released from the host plant. They also propose the possibility that there is horizontal gene transfer going on via microbes,
and it's also possible. They state that both of these are going on at once, and that the planned here be Trifoliolata is essentially speaking multiple plant micro languages to pull off this mimicry.
Okay, So if I'm understanding this right, it would be that the plant somehow has a it's got a plan within it that if it picks up the chemical signature of different types of other plants in its vicinity, that can trigger it to grow in different patterns that resemble those plants, and that would be some kind of evolved response, or it could be through this microbial pathway through bacteria or some other microbes, be getting genetic material from other
plants in its vicinity that are somehow contributing to this shaping process.
Right right, So that's those are some of the key hypotheses that are used by these researchers. And again, if this is indeed the case, this is already amazing. You know this, this this vine is able to do this. But then there's this additional hypothesis, and this is the one that's explored in the Agnobel winning paper, the hypothesis that the plant is truly using some form of sight or something as close to site as we can really discuss in plants versus animals, and they're able to see
what's around them. And in this we dip into the concept of plant ocelli, something that mainstream botanists tend to
view with a great deal of skepticism. Some in the plant cognition world, particularly the plant neurobiologists, however, or more open to this idea and even concepts that plants depend on something more or less like a brain not in the sense that it looks like a brain, but in the sense that, for instance, they often point to neuron like cells in parts of a plant's roots as a possible sort of cognition aticenter.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, But from what I understand, it would not be controversial to suggest that plants have some light sensing abilities. What would be more controversial would be the idea that their light sensing abilities are anything like sight, anything that could create a detailed picture of the surrounding environment from which you could actually copy growth patterns.
Yeah. Yeah, Because obviously plants have a special relationship with the sun. They like most organisms that have a relationship with the sun, they know they can't react to some light. They can detect the light via photoreceptors. That's not in question. But it comes down to this idea that they are on some level seeing and the plant o cell. The idea actually goes back to nineteen oh five and the work of Austrian botanist gautlub Haberlant, who some Ludwig, by
the way, is considered the father of hormonal contraception. But he proposed in nineteen oh five that the upper epidermis cells of a plant boast a convex shape that acts as a lens which focuses light into light sensitive sub epidermal cells, and that this would essentially serve as a form of sight. Now, this is not accepted really widely
accepted by mainstream botanists. But this is where we get into the Ignobel Award winning study from twenty twenty two with Yamashida and White, again published in Plant Signaling and Behavior. The researchers here are set out to test all of this out via the use of artificial plastic plants with
characteristic leaf shapes. And the idea here is that any mimicry that they could observe in this experiment, which would involve putting plants real and fake in a window exposed to sunlight and seeing how they responded, the idea is, Okay, if any mimicry takes place between our real living plant B. Trifoiliolata and a plastic plant, well, it can't possibly be horizontal gene transfer because plastic plant has no genes, and it can't be chemical volatile signals because again plastic plant
has none of that. It just has leaf shapes and colors.
Yeah, the only way in which it resembles a plant is by looking like one.
Yeah, And so they conducted this experiment which they lay out on the paper, and they say, yes, like, these results show that the plant in question was able to mimic the leaf shapes around it, even those of those leaf shapes were fake plastic plants.
Now I'm simultaneously thrilled by and skeptical of that. That's like, super interesting if it's true, But I feel like I would want to see that replicated a number of times.
Yeah. Yeah. And the Vox article that I referenced earlier, it points out and talks to some critics of this that points out that a lot of mainstream botanists have issues with this study and or its findings. I want to read a quick quote from it. Several scientists told Vox that there are significant issues with the study design. The authors didn't adequately control variables that can influence leaf shapes, such as the age of the leafs, for example. They said.
Mainstream researchers also challenge the underlying theory plant vision. Certain plant cells may be able to act like lenses that can focus light, but they likely can't create any sort of detailed pictures.
Well, that certainly sounds like a good reason for tempering enthusiasm about this result. But I'm interested in the open question. I would want to see the studied more.
Yeah, yeah, I would like to see some more research in this area to see exactly how far we can really go with this. But and I don't think we're there yet. But in general, I thought it was interesting that this study does highlight this divide between mainstream botany and those closer to the realm of plant neurobiologists, you know, and it raises a lot of questions, like, you know, plants are amazing, but are they more like animals than we give them credit for? On some level? Do we
need them to be more like animals? Is there a strong case to be made for something like plant sentience? Again, I don't want to dismiss the ideas of plant neurobiologists, but there does seem to be this disconnect. And I think if you think about like some of like the I guess the extreme versions of criticisms from both sides, Like one side might be saying you want plants to be too much like animals, and the other side might be saying like you were in denial that plants are
as much like animals as they are. And you know, I guess both of these ideas could be equally correct and incorrect as generalities about the way that we relate to plants.
Well, yeah, because even as I was saying at the beginning of this section, I think, without taking on any of the assumptions of plant neurobiologists, or believing that plants can see in detailed pictures, or believing that plants have a brain like you know, intelligence, organ or anything like that,
plants are still pretty amazing. And it's like I was saying, I think it's amazing to see the ways in which their growth patterns and stuff looks more like behavior if you manipulate the time factor and understanding what that means about how we interpret the concept of activity and intelligence in the relationship of that to time.
And I think this is especially you know, true when you get into the subjects like interplant communication, you know, which I think we've touched on in the show before, you know, sometimes via underground networks of fung guy connecting trees. I mean, it's it's amazing, it's very it's equally at the same time, it's like it makes them more human and more inhuman, because you know, we don't use fungal
networks to communicate with each other. But the fact that they do communicate with each other, like it puts it, it's a different way of looking at them. It's like realizing there's there's something going on here that is in many ways more like what we as humans do, though it of course is in a totally different branch of the whole tree.
Whether animal intelligence is an appropriate analogy or not, what's objectively happening is really interesting.
Yeah, absolutely so. Again like true to form, you know, made me laugh and then made me think, you know quite a bit here about about what plants are up to or not up to when they grow their leaves in particular ways. All right, we're going to go and close this episode. Let's see. We just want to remind everybody that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Wednesdays we are a short form episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Let's see. If you use Instagram, follow us on Instagram, we are STBYM podcast on there. That's our handle. Just follow us there if you are a user.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, what's the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.