The Plants Respond-Cleve Backster

In the study of paranormal phenomenon Plant perception, or biocommunication in plant cells, has come to mean abelief that plants feel emotions such as fear and affection. Believers hold that plants have the ability to communicate with humans and other forms of life in a recognizable manner. While plants can communicate through chemical signals, and certainly have complex responses to stimuli, the belief that they possess advanced cognitive abilities receives little support except in the parapsychology studies community and among believers in the Gaia hypothesis.

Published in 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. It is described as "A fascinating account of the physical, emotional, and spiritual relations between plants and man."

Essentially, the subject of the book is the idea that plants may be sentient, despite their lack of a nervous system. This sentience is observed primarily through changes in the plant's conductivity, as through a polygraph, as pioneered by Cleve Backster. The book also contains a summary of Goethe's theory of plant metamorphosis.

Cleve Backster interview:

Backster: Next, I noticed something on the chart that resembled a human response on a polygraph. In other words, the contour of the pen tracing was not what I would expect from water entering a leaf, but instead what I would expect from a person taking a lie-detector test. Lie detectors work on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they physiologically respond in predictable ways. If you were conducting a polygraph as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a suspect, "Was it you who fired the shot that was fatal to so and so?" If the true answer is yes, the suspect will fear getting caught lying, and electrodes on their skin will pick up the response to that fear. So I began to think about how I could threaten the well-being of the plant. First I tried putting a neighboring leaf in a cup of warm coffee. The plant, if anything, showed what I now recognize as boredom--it just kept trending downward.

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.