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In the study of paranormal phenomenon Plant perception, or biocommunication in plant cells, has come to mean a belief thatplants are sentient, that they experience pain, pleasure, or emotions such as fear and affection, and that they have the ability tocommunicate with humans and other forms of life in a recognizable manner.^[1] While plants can communicate through chemical signals, and certainly have complex responses to stimuli, the belief that they possess advanced affective or cognitive abilities receives recent support.^[2] In contrast to these results of biological research this is believed also in the parapsychology studies community and among believers in the Gaia hypothesis.

Research

The notion that plants are capable of feeling emotions was first recorded in 1848, when Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German professor, suggested the idea in his bookNanna. He believed that plants are capable of emotions, just like humans or animals, and that one could promote healthy growth by showering plants with talk, attention, and affection.[1]

One of the first to research the concept was the Indian scientist Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, who began to conduct experiments on plants in the year 1900. He found that every plant and every part of a plant appeared to have a sensitive nervous system and responded to shock by a spasm just as an animal muscle does. One visitor to his laboratory, the vegetarian playwright George Bernard Shaw, was intensely disturbed upon witnessing a demonstration in which a cabbage had violent convulsions as it boiled to death.Bose found that the effect of manures, drugs, and poisons could be determined within minutes, providing plant control with a new precision. In addition, Bose found that plants grew more quickly amidst pleasant music and more slowly amidst loud noise or harsh sounds. He also claimed that plants can “feel pain, understand affection etc.,” from the analysis of the nature of variation of the cell membrane potential of plants, under different circumstances. According to him, a plant treated with care and affection gives out a different vibration compared to a plant subjected to torture. In conclusion, he said: “Do not these records tell us of some property of matter common and persistent? That there is no abrupt break, but a uniform and continuous march of law?”

Bose’s experiments stopped at this conclusion, but Cleve Backster, an American scientist, conducted research that led him to believe that plants can communicate with other lifeforms. Backster’s interest in the subject began in February 1966, when Backster wondered if he could measure the rate at which water rises from a philodendron’s root area into its leaves. Because apolygraph or ‘lie detector’ can measure electrical resistance, and water would alter the resistance of the leaf, he decided that this was the correct instrument to use. After attaching a polygraph to one of the plant’s leaves, Backster claimed that, to his immense surprise, “the tracing began to show a pattern typical of the response you get when you subject a human to emotional stimulation of short duration”.

Led by curiosity, Backster went in search of other reactions, and decided to burn a leaf of the plant. Apparently, while he was musing upon this, there was a dramatic upward sweep in the tracing pattern. He had not moved or even touched the plant. Backster was certain that he had somehow inspired fear in the plant with his decision to burn it. He came to the resolution that, if he was correct, plants can not only feel things, but can also, in effect, perceive a persons intent as it relates to the plant itself.
In 1975, three scientists (K.A. Horowitz, D.C. Lewis, and E.L. Gasteiger) published an article in Science with their results when repeating Backster’s investigation of plant response to the killing of brine shrimp in boiling water. In this investigation, the researchers took into consideration control factors such as grounding the plants to reduce electrical interference and rinsing the plants to remove dust particles. Three of five pipettes contained brine shrimp while the remaining two only had water. These acted as a control because the pipettes were delivered to the boiling water at random. In addition, this investigation used a total of 60 brine shrimp deliveries to boiling water while Backster’s investigation had 13. While this experiment did show a few positive correlations, they did not occur at a rate great enough to be considered statistically viable. These experimental conditions were more rigorous from a traditional scientific paradigm and did not produce the same results, however Backster himself criticized them for misunderstanding certain fundamentals of primary perception (e.g. the time spent rinsing the plants affected their relationship to the experimenters).

More recently, the television show MythBusters performed an experiment aiming to either verify or disprove the concept. The tests were done by connecting plants to a polygraph’s galvanometer, and then employing both actual and imagined harm upon the plants, or upon others in the plant’s vicinity. The galvanometer showed some readings which surprised the researchers initially, showing some kind of reaction about one third of the time. However, the experimenters were in the room with the plant and noted that the vibrations inherent to either their actions or the room could have had an effect on the polygraph. After leaving the room and performing the same experiments, the polygraph showed a response one third of the time again. The results were inconclusive as to whether the experiment or external influences were causing the results. Later experiments, which used an EEG for greater accuracy, failed to detect anything unusual. When the presenters used a machine that dropped eggs randomly into boiling water, the plant had no reaction whatsoever. The show concluded that the theory was not true. Further, the anonymous readings were unable to be repeated during their tests, and stated that “if it’s not repeatable, it’s not science.”

Skepticism

In the scientific community as a whole, paranormal biocommunication has been subjected to much criticism, and is largely regarded as a pseudoscience. Overall, there is little concrete, universally verified evidence suggesting that there is any truth to the theory, and it is therefore apt to receive a great deal of contempt among scientific circles, often disdainfully called ‘the Backster Effect’. Skeptics typically criticize the fact that many experiments into ‘plant perception’ are not taken in controlled conditions and that therefore their results are not verifiable evidence of its existence. Many skeptics of the theory also state that, since plants lack nervous or sensory systems, they are not capable of having feelings, or perceiving human emotions or intentions, which would require a complex nervous system. [2][3]The primary emotional center in the animal brain is believed to be the limbic system which is absent in plants, just like the rest of the nervous system. ^[3]

Miscellaneous

• English author Roald Dahl wrote a short story entitled The Sound Machine dealing with the theory, in which the protagonist develops a machine that enables him to hear the sound of plants, especially when they are under pain. With the machine he hears the scream of roses being cut, and the moan of a tree when he strikes it with an axe.

• Stevie Wonder sang of Bose findings in the song “Same Old Story” on the Secret Life of Plants album for the movie of the same name. The lyrics are as follows: “for most felt it was mad to conceive/that plants thought, felt, and moved quite like we/but with instruments Bose would devise/would take science itself by surprise.” The song also includes references to George Washington Carver and his advocacy of crop rotation.

References

1. ^ Baluska F, Mancuso s, Volkmann D. (2006) Communication in Plants. Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life. Springer, Berlin
2. ^ Trewavas A. (2005). Green plants as intelligent organisms. Trends in Plant Science 10: 413-419.
3. ^ Tortora, Gerard J. Principles of Human Anatomy – Tenth Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005.

• The Reader’s Digest, Wonders of the Natural World, The Reader’s Digest Association Ltd., 1975
• Stone, Robert The Secret Life of Your Cells, Whitford Press, 1994
• Jensen, D., The Plants Respond: An Interview with Cleve Backster, 2006, www.derrickjensen.org/backster.html, Accessed 30 Nov 2006
• Horowitz, K.A., Lewis, D.C, and Gasteiger, E.L. Plant ‘Primary Perception’: Electrophysiological Unresponsiveness to Brine Shrimp Killing, Science, New Series, Vol. 189, No. 4201 (Aug 8, 1975), pp. 478-480
• Carey, S.S. A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Method – Third Edition,Thomson-Wadsworth, 2004
• Carroll, R.T. Plant Perception (a.k.a The Backster Effect), 2005, www.skepdic.com/plants.html, Accessed 30 Nov 2006
• Tortora, Gerard J. Principles of Human Anatomy – Tenth Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005.

See also

• The Secret Life of Plants
• Cleve Backster
• Fruitarianism

External links

• Interview with Cleve Backster
• Plant Perception at the Skeptic’s Dictionary
• Primary Perception.com
• An article on the subject from Sunrise Magazine
• Episode of The Outer Limit and telephone conversation with Cleve Backster

Tags: paranormal, perception, plant, plant perception paranomral

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