Physics of Computation and Behavior in Plants

TL;DR

This review introduces a physical framework for plant behavior, emphasizing distributed computation, mechanical intelligence, and stochasticity as key principles underlying plant problem-solving.

Contribution

It unifies physical concepts to explain plant behavior, highlighting how growth, mechanics, and noise enable decentralized computation and adaptation.

Findings

Plants encode information in biochemical and mechanical fields.

Mechanical interactions couple morphology to environmental constraints.

Stochastic fluctuations enhance sensing and collective organization.

Abstract

Plants solve complex problems without centralized control, relying instead on growth-driven dynamics to sense, navigate, and optimize resource acquisition. This review presents a unified physical framework for understanding plant behavior through three complementary principles: distributed physical computation, embodied mechanical intelligence, and functional stochasticity. Tropic responses and circumnutations are interpreted as spatio-temporal dynamical systems in which information is encoded in biochemical and mechanical fields, integrated over space and time, and translated into differential growth. Mechanical interactions couple morphology to environmental constraints, enabling computation through material properties. Stochastic fluctuations, from molecular to organismal scales, act as functional resources that enhance sensing, exploration, and collective organization. Together, these processes position plants as a model system for decentralized computation in active matter, where behavior and structure emerge from the interplay of growth, transport, mechanics, and noise.