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We sometimes refer to people in comas as “vegetables,” a word choice that’s begun to fall out of favor, for understandable reasons — a person, even one who has lost his or her sensory and motor capabilities, is still a person. And at the risk of sounding like a parody of political correctness, the term isn’t really fair to vegetables, either.

So argues Stefano Mancuso, a Florence-based plant physiologist whom Michael Pollan dubbed the “poet-philosopher” of the plant intelligence movement. Plants, as Mancuso and co-author Allesandra Viola write in “Brilliant Green,” a short primer/manifesto on the history and science of this emerging field, can move — with intention. They have the same five senses as we humans, along with 15 others: along with being able to detect light and smells, they can sense the presence of water, for one, as well as chemical signals sent from other plants.

That’s right — according to Mancuso, plants have social lives, too.

You’re permitted some time to wrap your mind around this — the mainstream scientific community certainly still […]