A plant’s existence may seem rather uneventful, spending its days rooted to the spot, seemingly at the mercy of the things around it.

Can plants think? Well, plants are intelligent creatures able to adapt in ways we animals can only imagine. Rather than having a brain, a central decision making centre, they can alter their entire body in response to their surroundings.

Dame Ottoline Leyser has spent her career passionately unearthing the mysterious mechanisms that underpin this process – and in this special talk she’ll be sharing them.

She’s pieced together the finely-tuned network of signals which plants use for distributed decisions making processes.

These new insights into what plants get up to are so remarkable that Ottoline is determined to change the way we think about them.

Speaker: Dame Ottoline Leyser
Regius Professor of Botany
Clare College
Cambridge University

Venue: Studio 74, Exeter Phoenix

*Subject to a £1.50 ticketing system charge. We don’t charge this to make a profit. Find out more >>