IDEAS

The long, strange quest to detect plant consciousness

Charles Darwin and L. Ron Hubbard have something in common: they wanted to know what was going on between the leaves.

(ISTOCKPHOTO/GLOBE STAFF ILLUSTRATIONS)

Nicholas Humphrey’s Soul-Dust: The Magic of Consciousness tells its story from the beginning. Humphrey, an eminent English psychologist, aims to explain what a soul is, and to show, from an evolutionary perspective, why it’s useful to have one.