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But there’s another potential application: When your housemates hound you for being a fridge slob, try telling them you’re observing gravitropism at work.

Although quite different from one another, humans, plants and some fungi share gravitropism, the ability to know up from down.

For me, part of the weird fun of this story was trying to imagine what a plant might articulate to itself, if it were suddenly folded into a human consciousness, and could translate certain programmed inclinations, like phototropism and gravitropism, into the language of thought.

Much remains to be investigated about gravitropism, Dr. Pell said, and even the theory of the role the amyloplasts play has been brought into question by some studies, according to a June 2010 review article in The Annual Review of Plant Biology.

The phenomenon is gravitropism, the ability of plants to sense and alter their growth in response to gravity, said Susan K. Pell, director of science at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.