The Secret Life of Plants

Below is a book extract from an absolutely amazing book - The Secret Life of Plants by
Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. In this book you will discover how amazing plants really are - they have a type of consciousness and reading this book will make you more respectful and aware of Nature. Below is the account of how Backster discovered that plants react to our thoughts.

Some reviews about this book:

“Once in a while you find a book that stuns you. Its scope leaves
you breathless. This is such a book.” - John White, San Francisco Chronicle

"Plenty of hard facts and astounding scientific and practical lore." Newsweek

Book Extract: The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins & Christopher Bird, based on the research of Cleve Backster and others.

Backster's antics with his plants, headlined in the world press, became
the subject of skits, cartoons, and lampoons; but the Pandora's box
which he opened for science may never again be closed. Backster's
discovery that plants appear to be sentient caused strong and varied
reaction round the globe, despite the fact that Backster never claimed
a discovery, only an uncovering of what has been known and forgotten.
Wisely he chose to avoid publicity, and concentrated on establishing the
absolute scientific bona fides of what has come to be known as the
"Backster Effect. "


His adventure started in 1966. Backster had been up all night in his
school for polygraph examiners, where he teaches the art of lie detection
to policemen and security agents from around the world. On impulse
he decided to attach the electrodes of one of his lie detectors to the leaf
of his dracaena. The dracaena is a tropical plant similar to a palm tree,
with large leaves and a dense cluster of small flowers; it is known as the
dragon tree (Latin draco) because of the popular myth that its resin
yields dragon blood.


Backster was curious to see if the leaf would be affected by water poured
on its roots, and if so, how, and how soon.
As the plant thirstily sucked water up its stem, the galvanometer, to
Backster's surprise, did not indicate less resistance, as might have been
expected by the greater electrical conductivity of the moister plant. The
pen on the graph paper, instead of trending upward, was trending
downward, with a lot of sawtooth motion on the tracing.


A galvanometer is that part of a polygraph lie detector which, when
attached to a human being by wires through which a weak current of
electricity is run, will cause a needle to move, or a pen to make a tracing
on a moving graph of paper, in response to mental images, or the
slightest surges of human emotion. Invented at the end of the eighteenth
century by a Viennese priest, Father Maximilian Hell, S.)., court
astronomer to the Empress Maria Theresa, it was named after Luigi
Calvani, the Italian physicist and physiologist who discovered "animal
electricity." The galvanometer is now used in conjunction with an
electrical circuit called a "Wheatstone bridge," in honor of the English
physicist and inventor of the automatic telegraph, Sir Charles Wheatstone.


4 MODERN RESEARCH
In simple terms, the bridge balances resistance, so that the human
body's electrical potential or basic charge can be measured as it
fluctuates under the stimulus of thought and emotion. The standard usage is to
feed "carefully structured" questions to a suspect and watch for those which
cause the needle to Jump. Veteran examiners, such as Backster, claim they can
identify deception from the patterns produced on the graph.
Backster's dragon tree, to his amazement, was giving him a reaction
very similar to that of a human being experiencing an emotional stimulus
of short duration. Could the plant be displaying emotion?
What happened to Backster in the next ten minutes was to revolutionize
his life.


The most effective way to trigger in a human being a reaction strong
enough to make the galvanometer jump is to threaten his or her wellbeing.
Backster decided to do just that to the plant: he dunked a leaf
of the dracaena in the cup of hot coffee perennially in his hand. There
was no reaction to speak of on the meter. Backster studied the problem
several minutes, then conceived a worse threat: he would burn the actual
leaf to which the electrodes were attached. The instant he got the
picture of flame in his mind, and before he could move for a match,
there was a dramatic change in the tracing pattern on the graph in the
form of a prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen. Backster had
not moved, either toward the plant or toward the recording machine.


Could the plant have been reading his mind?
When Backster left the room and returned with some matches, he
found another sudden surge had registered on the chart, evidently
caused by his determination to carry out the threat. Reluctantly he set
about burning the leaf. This time there was a lower peak of reaction on
the graph. Later, as he went through the motions of pretending he
would burn the leaf, there was no reaction whatsoever. The plant appeared
to be able to differentiate between real and pretended intent.
Backster felt like running into the street and shouting to the world,
"Plants can think!" Instead he plunged into the most meticulous investigation
of the phenomena in order to establish just how the plant was
reacting to his thoughts, and through what medium.

...

The rest of the book is fascinating - plants that form bonds with their owners, plants that open electrically operated garage doors - a must read!