What if trees could talk?
It is a question that has quietly found its way into popular culture. The upcoming anime ‘Fool Night’ imagines a world where humans transform into trees, while its protagonist can hear the thoughts and emotions of these silent beings. Meanwhile, the 2025 film ‘Silent Friend’ follows a neurologist who applies neuroscience to a centuries-old ginkgo tree, hoping to uncover evidence of plant consciousness.
Although both stories venture into science fiction, they touch on a scientific question that researchers are trying to uncover: not whether plants possess human-like consciousness, but how living organisms communicate and respond to the world around them.
Recent discoveries suggest that the language of life may be far richer than we once imagined.
Forests Are Far From Silent
For decades, plants were largely viewed as passive organisms. Today, research paints a much more dynamic picture.
As highlighted in a recent review by ZME Science, scientists have discovered that plants exchange information through multiple signaling systems. Trees release airborne volatile chemicals to warn neighboring plants of insect attacks, communicate through underground fungal networks that connect entire forests, transmit electrical signals following injury, and alter root chemistry in response to environmental stress. These interactions allow plants to coordinate defense responses, share resources, and adapt collectively to changing conditions.¹
None of these findings demonstrate that plants are conscious in the neurological sense. Plants lack neurons, brains, and synapses—the biological machinery responsible for cognition in animals. Yet they illustrate an important principle: sophisticated communication does not necessarily require a nervous system.
The Brain Is More Than Conscious Thought
Neuroscience is arriving at a surprising similar conclusion from the opposite direction.
A recent study led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine found that patients under general anesthesia continued to process spoken language in unexpectedly sophisticated ways.² Although participants were unconscious, brain recordings revealed that they could still distinguish grammatical categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives while listening to stories.
Even more remarkably, neural activity suggested that the brain was predicting upcoming words before they were spoken.
The findings challenge the traditional assumption that complex language processing only occurs during conscious awareness. Rather than redefining consciousness, the study suggests that information processing within the brain extends beyond our subjective experience of being awake.
Communication Before Consciousness?
Viewed together, these discoveries invite a subtle but fascinating shift in perspective.
‘Fool Night’ is asking a question whether trees can think like humans.
Science is thinking one step ahead. Instead of searching for consciousness in trees, researchers are uncovering the many ways living systems receive, transmit, and respond to information.
In forests, that information travels through chemical, electrical, and fungal signaling networks.
In the human brain, information continues to flow through neural circuits even when conscious awareness is temporarily absent.
The mechanisms are fundamentally different, but both challenge long-held assumptions about where meaningful biological communication begins and ends. Perhaps communication itself—not consciousness—is the more universal property of life.
Rethinking What It Means to Communicate
Working in the field of science, we all have a habit of challenging the boundaries we once thought were fixed: not long ago, forests were regarded as collections of individual trees. Today, they are understood as dynamic ecosystems connected through networks of chemical, electrical, and fungal signaling. Likewise, consciousness was once considered the defining prerequisite for sophisticated information processing. Yet recent neuroscience suggests that the brain continues to analyze language and anticipate future information even when conscious awareness is temporarily absent.
Neither discovery tells us that trees possess minds or that unconscious brains are somehow “awake”. Instead, they encourage a more careful distinction between communication and consciousness—two concepts that are often intertwined in everyday conversation but are, now scientifically proven, not necessarily the same biological phenomenon.
Perhaps this is where stories like ‘Fool Night’ and ‘Silent Friend’ become most valuable. Rather than predicting the future, they invite us to ask better questions. If living systems can exchange information in ways we are only beginning to understand, then the most exciting discoveries may not come from proving that plants think like humans, but from uncovering the remarkable diversity of ways life senses, communicates, and adapts.
As neuroscience and plant biology continue to advance, one lesson is becoming increasingly clear: the language of life is far richer than we once imagined.
And we are only beginning to learn how to listen.
References
1. ZME Science. The more we study forests, the more it seems like plants might be cooperating and talking to each other. Based on current research in plant signaling and forest ecology.
2. Baylor College of Medicine. The unconscious brain appears to process language and predict upcoming words during general anesthesia. Reported by ScienceDaily (June 24, 2026), based on research from Baylor College of Medicine.
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