Abstract
We study the emission of photons from germinating seeds. We make the assumption that the germination process is a spontaneous transition to criticality and we show that the statistical analysis of the photon emission leads to a deviation from the ordinary processes of statistical physics compatible with that assumption. The method of statistical analysis adopted has been used in the past to analyze the human brain dynamics and the music of Mozart. It is surprising that the germinating seeds share the same complexity as the human brain and the music of Mozart.
Author summary There exists a widespread and increasing conviction that cognition is not just limited to human beings, but rather it emerges with life itself. We believe that cognition is the result of a self-organization process generating intermittent chaos, i.e., extended time regions of order are separated by rare and short chaotic bursts called crucial events. These fluctuations that generate a compressible time series can be reproduced along with the information transmitted using a computer program based on a finite number of instructions. We focus our attention on an elementary but fundamental biological process; the germination of lentils to show that during germination they emit photons called biophotons. We make a statistical analysis of the time series representing the number of biophotons emitted per unit of time. This analysis was used in the recent past to study the prototype of intelligent systems-the human brain. The result of this analysis is that the complexity of the germination-induced crucial events is the same as that of the human brain. This result confirms the conjecture that cognition is a universal biological property and sheds light into the cell to cell communication through biophotons.
