plant consciousness?
back in 1966, a scientist by the name of Clive Backster stumbled on an interesting finding on one of those slow going days. as a scientist employed by the FBI, he was constantly working with lie detectors, to the point where he started having fun and experimenting with them.
he connected a lie detector to a house plant (a dracena cane plant) in order to measure its rate of water consumption. he didn't succeed in this attempt, but he did find something a little more exciting.
normally, when humans detect a threat to their well-being they produce a physiological response that the lie detector is able to pick up. Clive found that plants also produce such physiological responses to potential threats.
he found this by dipping one of the plant's leaves in his coffee. this made the pen on the chart fluctuate. this got him going. he started thinking of other ways to threaten the plant. he thought of burning one of the leaves.
" Then at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds chart time, the imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf I was testing. I didn't verbalize, I didn't touch the plant, I didn't touch the equipment. The only new thing that could have been a stimulus for the plant was the mental image. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart.”after this, Backster started getting creative with his experiments in order to solidify his findings. he would go on walks, while the plants were hooked up back in his lab (which was also his permanent home) and as soon as he turned around and started walking back, the plants would show a reaction.
after a slew of such experiments, Backster concluded that plants pick up human thinking and emotional responses. he called this ‘primary perception’. he doesn't call it extra-sensory perception since plants do not have the other basic senses.
the scientific community has obviously rejected his findings, saying that they are too spontaneous and not repeatable.
repeatable or not, i think that the land's alive and we humans aren't so superior after all.
further glimpses of such wild ideas:
A Language Older Than Words --Derrick Jensen
http://www.ahpweb.org/pub/perspective/dec%202003/dec03review.html
Archaic Revival --Terence McKenna
posted by Kozi Wolf @ 5:27 p.m.
5 comments
5 Comments:
Hullo! Thanks for this very interesting post. Many years ago, I attended a lecture by a biologist who spoke about how plants attacked by a herd of grazing animals in south Africa transmitted a message to similar plants far away ... Mysterious is the world around us, we know so little!
Best, rama
hey rama,
thanks for sharing a secret from that mysterious world around us.
And there's also the secret of communication between humans and other living beings. St Francis of Assisi is remembered as having been able to communicate with birds and animals (including a wild ferocious wolf which he tamed). The secret of course is love. Again, in humans, there is post-verbal cognition, where names and words are alotogether dispensed with, in favour of feelings, images, senses. These are surely likely to enable communication with other sentient beings.
I like your post. I go walking a lot amongst plants and animals and certainly experience that all the animals are interested in knowing me especially when they overcome fear. They use their own senses in their own way of course, like smell or taste. A horse or cow wants to lick you.
"plants do not have the other basic senses". Well this isn't quite true. A sunflower follows the sun, and a sensitive plant (mimosa pudica) immediately folds up its leaves when you touch it, and so on. I would not be surprised if all plants have a full range of senses, for they respond so much to stimuli of many kinds both above and below ground.
hey yves,
good observations
i guess we try to define the environment by our own standards and overlook the subtleties of the plants and animals.
also, about the environment overcoming fear, perhaps, humans too are in a way scared or closed off to experiencing that sort of communication.
thanks for sharing.
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