THE NATURAL STUFF

"Hundreds of laboratory workers around the world," says Vogel, "are going to be just as frustrated and disappointed as these men until they appreciate that the empathy between plant and human is the key, andlearn how to establish it. No amount of checking in laboratories is going

to prove a thing until the experiments are done by properly trained observers. Spiritual development is indispensable. But this mils counter to the philosophy of many scientists, who do not realize that creative experimentation means that the experimenters must become part of their experiments."  Tompkins, Peter, Bird, Christopher, The Secret Life of Plants, Harper and Row, 1973. [1] (Pg., 27)

Abstract

"Plants have electrical and chemical signalling systems,may possess memory, and exhibit brainy behavior in theabsence of brains." The Intelligent Plant: Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora. [3]

Excerpts

"In 1973, a book (The Secret Life of Plants [1]) claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical musicto rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. “The Secret Life of Plants,” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, presented a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream. The most memorable passages described the experiments of a former C.I.A. polygraph expert named Cleve Backster, who, in 1966, on a whim, hooked up a galvanometer to the leaf of a dracaena, a houseplant that he kept in his office. To his astonishment, Backster found that simply by imagining the dracaena being set on fire he could make it rouse the needle of the polygraph machine, registering a surge of electrical activity suggesting that the plant felt stress. “Could the plant have been reading his mind?” the authors ask. “Backster felt like running into the street and shouting to the world, ‘Plants can think!’ ”Backster and his collaborators went on to hook up polygraph machines to dozens of plants, including lettuces, onions, oranges, and bananas. He claimed that plants reacted to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance. In one experiment designed to test plant memory, Backster found that a plant that had witnessed the murder (by stomping) of another plant could pick out the killer from a lineup of six suspects, registering a surge of electrical activity when the murderer was brought before it. Backster’s plants also displayed a strong aversion to interspecies violence. Some had a stressful response when an egg was cracked in their presence, or when live shrimp were dropped into boiling water, an experiment that Backster wrote up for the International Journal of Parapsychology, in 1968.”  The Intelligent Plant: Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora. [3]

"Others contend that The Secret Life of Plants [1] led to “self-censorship” among researchers seeking to explore the “possible homologies between neurobiology and phytobiology”; that is, the possibility that plants are much more intelligent and much more like us than most people think— capable of cognition, communication, information processing, computation, learning, and memory." The Intelligent Plant: Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora. [3]

Excerpts

"The secret life of plants [1] (1973), by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. These authors attributed to plants a plentiful of spiritual capacities, supposedly arising from a mystic dimension we might share with them, and tried to persuade the reader through the description of some ‘experiments’ that easily failed to be replicable when real botanists tried to do it." The not so secret life of plants: The emergence of plant neurobiology [5]