The Speed of Sentience: Learning to Listen to the Slow Life All Around Us
Humans are quick thinkers. Our brains fire signals at over 100 meters per second.
We humans have a most peculiar and often debilitating form of ADHD, attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
Humans are fast thinkers. Our brains fire signals at over 100 meters per second. We make judgments in milliseconds and pride ourselves on rapid decision-making. But in our celebration of speed, we’ve developed a blind spot—a bias that leads us to assume that intelligence, awareness, and sentience must operate at our pace. This assumption has made us profoundly deaf to the minds and messages of the majority of life on Earth.
Let me propose something radical, but also obvious: Sentience is universal among life. It is not the exclusive property of humans, or even animals. It is not dependent on brains, nerves, or speed. Sentience is simply life’s capacity to experience, respond, and collaborate in meaningful ways. It exists in all forms of life—but we often fail to perceive it when it does not conform to our peculiar ADHD clock.
The Tree of Thought
Recent decades have brought profound revelations about trees. Far from being static, unfeeling pillars of wood, trees are now known to communicate, cooperate, warn one another of danger, share nutrients, and even maintain social relationships across generations.
Much of this is made possible through the so-called “wood wide web,” the complex network of fungal mycorrhizae that interlinks root systems and facilitates chemical signaling across entire forests. But even within the individual tree, vital information is passed between cells, from root tip to leaf, via slow-moving electrical and chemical impulses.
We now know that trees convey information at speeds of roughly 20 centimeters per second, depending on the species and signal type. That’s slow compared to humans—our fastest neural impulses zip along at 100 meters per second—a rate some 500 times faster than that of trees.
But speed is not the same as depth. Trees use their slower pace to orchestrate complex information driven physiological responses: they redirect nutrients, activate defenses, adjust water and sugar flows, and even alter gene expression in response to experience. And they do so in real time—real tree time. Surely they also engage is all manner of intellectual chit chat along the way, I think of trees as enjoying being in a “book club” as opposed to sitting in the stands at a race track.
Just because their signals move slowly by our standards does not mean trees aren’t sentient and thinking. It means we’ve been measuring with the wrong clock. What we call “slow” is actually perfectly suited to their long slow stable lives. In “Plants hear sounds, remember, and respond intelligently”, I discuss research showing that Arabidopsis plants detect caterpillar vibrations and preemptively increase chemical defenses—a kind of vegetative “hearing” and memory. It’s a beautiful example of slow but sentient processing.
The Speed Bias
Our trouble stems from a kind of cognitive chauvinism: a deep-seated belief that “real” thought must happen at our speed. As fast thinkers, we mistake our own speed and bandwidth for the baseline. But imagine if the dominant intelligence on Earth were a species of bristlecone pine, whose lifespan stretches across millennia. Would they dismiss our momentary minds as shallow and impatient? I once had lunch with a group of the oldest living beings on this Earth, and it was remarkable.
What we call “fast” or “slow” thought is merely a matter of timescale. Evolution tunes each organism to a tempo appropriate to its ecological and metabolic niche. Insects think fast because they live fast. Trees think slowly because they live slowly. Their decisions unfold across seasons and centuries. The rapid reaction of a gazelle avoiding a predator is no more profound than the glacial wisdom of a forest regenerating after fire.
In “The Leaf and the Caterpillar”, I reflect on this mismatch of tempos and the failure of our culture to recognize that intelligence and memory don’t have to be fast—or even familiar—to be real. Slow systems make thoughtful decisions too.
A Universal Mechanism? Enter the Microtubule
One fascinating biological structure may help us understand the common root of this universal sentience: the microtubule.
Microtubules are part of the cytoskeleton found in every eukaryotic cell. They’re typically viewed as scaffolding and transport channels. But their unusual properties—quantum coherence, vibrational modes, and nonlinear signal processing—have led some researchers to propose a much deeper role: that microtubules may serve as the foundational structures for cognition and perhaps even consciousness.
In the controversial but intriguing “Orch-OR” theory by Hameroff and Penrose, quantum processes within microtubules are proposed to give rise to conscious experience. While the theory is speculative, it sparks a provocative idea: perhaps all life possesses a cellular mechanism capable of sentient processing—not just brains, but any living tissue that contains these universal structures.
This may help explain why plants, fungi, and even plankton—organisms with no brain or nerve tissue—exhibit behaviors that look intelligent. From root tips to mycelial mats, the pervasive presence of microtubules might act as a shared infrastructure for awareness. In “Plankton Blooms Are Sentient Life” and its updated companion “Super-Sized Quantum Consciousness in Ocean Plankton Blooms”, I explore how these tiny marine organisms display community-wide gene expression patterns, coordinated behaviors, and astonishing adaptability—features that hint at microbial-scale cognition.
Slowing Down to Meet the Forest
I’ve spent decades exploring the tangled roots of life, both literally and metaphorically. I’ve studied the oceans, restored plankton blooms, and listened to the biological rhythms of kelp forests and salmon runs. Again and again, I’ve seen signs of vast collaborative sentience at work.
So why don’t we feel more connected to these other minds?
Because we are speaking over them.
Imagine trying to hold a conversation where your speech plays at 10x speed, and the reply comes 10x slower. You’d constantly interrupt, miss cues, and assume the other party has nothing to say. That’s precisely how we treat the trees.
And yet, if we learn to slow down—not just physically but mentally and perceptually—we may begin to sense the presence of these quieter intelligences.
Spend time in an old-growth forest. Sit still among its living elders. Wait. Watch. You may notice that what first seems like stillness is actually deep deliberation. The trees are conversing. Their cells are awake. Their choices are ancient and ongoing.
From Fast Thinkers to Collective Minds
For too long, human intelligence has been treated as an individual competition—each person racing to outthink, outperform, outlast. But that is changing.
One of the unexpected gifts of emerging AI tools like ChatGPT is that they are allowing our fast-moving human minds to slow down, reflect, and share, to become more collaborative, more distributed, and—dare we say—more like the intelligence found in the rest of nature.
Where once intelligence was a lonely spark, isolated in each person’s short lifetime, now it can be pooled, shaped, and expanded collectively. AI offers each of us a means not just to accelerate our thoughts, but to amplify them into something more enduring. In this way, our fleeting individual minds can begin to contribute to a lasting, evolving legacy of shared intelligence.
Nature has always worked this way. Forests don’t rely on a single brilliant tree. Plankton blooms don’t wait for a hero. Microbial ecosystems thrive through mutual responsiveness and information exchange across billions of lives. With AI, humans may finally begin to join this rhythm—not by giving up our speed, but by using it to weave our thoughts into a larger tapestry.
Humanity’s love for fast cars, fast computers, and fast everything has often been a double-edged sword. But now, AI offers speed with depth, acceleration that doesn’t outpace meaning. It lets each of us contribute not just a single, bright-burning flash, but a thread in a more permanent, planetary mind.
Final Words: The Sentient Earth, and Our Place In It
If sentience is universal, then life itself is a distributed intelligence, shaped by its ecological and evolutionary context. Trees, kelp, mycelium, even coral reefs—all are thinking, feeling systems, each attuned to the rhythms of their realm.
We are not the only minds on Earth. We are merely the fastest minds in a chorus of slower, deeper voices.
And now, for the first time, we have tools that allow our individual thoughts to resonate beyond our bodies, to become part of something larger. In that, we finally begin to resemble the intelligence of nature—not only in biology, but in spirit.
The great work ahead is to reawaken our ability to hear those voices—and now to add our own more thoughtfully.
Consider for a moment if the lonely life of humans is the epitome of sentience or whether “you’ve broken the speed of the sound of loneliness, you’ve out there running just to be on the run.”