The Secret Life of Plants

E

EndLightEnd

This too shall pass.
Registered Senior Member
http://www.raven1.net/seclife.htm

After I read a brief overview of this book which the link above directs to, I was astonished. Especially since this seems to be scientifically proven.

Some quotes:
The 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
Click to expand...

Backster ... then conceived a worse threat: he would burn the actual leaf to which the electrodes were attached. The INSTANT he got the PICTURE OF A 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.
Click to expand...

Backster has no idea what kind of energy wave may carry man's thoughts or internal feelings to a plant. He has TRIED TO SCREEN A PLANT BY PLACING IT IN A FARADAY CAGE AS WELL AS IN A LEAD CONTAINER. Neither shield appeared IN ANY WAY to block or jam the communication channel linking the plant to the human being. The carrier wave equivalent, whatever it might be, Backster concluded, must somehow operate BEYOND the electromagnetic spectrum. It also appeared to operate from the macrocosm down to the microcosm.
Click to expand...

In another experiment, Vogel wired two plants to the same recording machine and snipped a leaf from the first plant. The second plant responded to the hurt being inflicted on its neighbour but only when Vogel was paying attention to it! If Vogel cut off a leaf while ignoring the second plant, the response was lacking.
Click to expand...

With nothing but his will power, Swann has been able to affect a mechanism in the university's most thoroughly shielded "quark" chamber, buried deep underground in a vault of liquid helium, IMPENETRABLE TO ANY KNOWN WAVELENGTHS OF THE ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM, astonishing the academic physicists who watched him perform what they considered to be an impossible feat.
Click to expand...

Like Backster, Byrd found that MERELY BY THINKING OF HARMING A PLANT'S LEAF IT WAS POSSIBLE TO MAKE A POLYGRAPH NEEDLE JUMP. Byrd's experiments involved monitoring a plant's reaction to stimuli from water, infrared and ultraviolet light, fire, physical stres, and dismemberment.
Click to expand...

and maybe most amazingly:
A fortuitous occurrence led Backster into another whole realm of research. One evening, as he was about to feed a raw egg into his Doberman pinscher, Backster noticed that as he cracked the egg one of his plants attached to a polygraph reacted strenuously. The next evening he watched again as the same thing happened. Curious to see what the egg might be feeling, Backster attached it to a galvanometer, and was once more up to his ears in research.

For nine hours Backster got an active chart recording from an egg, corresponding to the rhythm of the heartbeats of the chicken embryo, the frequency being between 160 and 170 beats per minute, appropriate for an embryo three or four days along in incubation. Only the egg was store bought, acquired at the local delicatessen, and was UNfertilized. Later, breaking the egg and dissecting it, Backster was astonished to find that it contained no physical circulatory structure of any sort to account for the [electrical] pulsation. He appeared to have tapped into some sort of force field not conventionally understood within the present body of scientific knowledge.
Click to expand...

Id suggesting reading the whole page to get the whole effect.

Share your thoughts please.
 
You deny knowledge despite extensive research...simply because you did not do the experiments yourself?
 
I would say there is definately some useful information here, if only to get the ball rolling on another branch of science. But to say exactly what is happening here is beyond our ability at this point. In short, its interesting, but we don't have enough information.

As a side note, to all you nay sayers, it would benefit you and everyone else to at least look into it rather than shrug it off as another wing-nut's 'premonitions'. Even if it sounds loony and the way they say it is absurd, you have to admit that something is occuring and if you don't figure it out, then they will go on believing whatever preconceived idea jumps to the mind first. Who knows, maybe in a way, he is right.
 
Feel free to believe that. The problem is actually that pseudoscience proponents can't distinguish between science and pseudoscience and insist that anything they find on the internet or in a random book they just read has merit beyond what scientists actually know about a topic.
 
spuriousmonkey said:
Feel free to believe that. The problem is actually that pseudoscience proponents can't distinguish between science and pseudoscience and insist that anything they find on the internet or in a random book they just read has merit beyond what scientists actually know about a topic.
Click to expand...

But at the same time, they still experience something different from what other people do. They know something that others don't, even if it is tangled in the mess of their own imagination.
 
It is my opinion that the people who appear to be weak or susceptible to belief in extraordinary ideas are really just more at the whim of their environment than other people. Their will is weaker, so information imprints their brain more readily. The reason they are seen as irrational is because their metaphors for language have been changed drastically due to the constant and deep imprinting. They are speaking in different idioms and metaphors than what we are used to using.

All experience is just a relation to what is happening between the brain and the senses. You just have to figure out the code to understand it.
 
Hercules Rockefeller said:
Yeah, right. :rolleyes:

That's better than being so open-minded that your brains fall out (as the old saying goes).
Click to expand...

Wow. You have a lot of fear about openmindedness. You mean if you met this guy and he seemed rational and he told you about what he had done, you would never ask to see more data. You wouldn't be curious to see if the experiments could be repeated?

You think insanity can only be stopped by saying it's not possible and walking away.
 
spuriousmonkey said:
Feel free to believe that. The problem is actually that pseudoscience proponents can't distinguish between science and pseudoscience and insist that anything they find on the internet or in a random book they just read has merit beyond what scientists actually know about a topic.
Click to expand...

Actually there are a range of possible reactions. But what most people here have done is to assume out of hand that the man did not have the experiences he had.

A sad lack of curiousity is being ADVOCATED let alone shown.

I mean EndLight is not saying, now it is true, now I believe. He is opening a door to a discussion about the possibility that there might be something to this. I don't see any effort to explain

WHY THESE PHENOMENA could not have happened. Or if any of them might be true. Or how one might have come to false conclusions because of this or that phenomena we do know to be true.
 
There certainly needs to be more experiments of this nature, we need more data on the mind/matter relationship. With better experiment designs and better monitoring of results.

Quantum mechanics seems to have taken the mantle for the time being though it seems. If you do a google search for 'retro-casuality' some of the new quantum experiments that are being proposed are actually not that far off from these experiments funnily enough - atempting to find a reaction to a cause that hasnt actually physically occured yet.
i.e. - you might find a photon/particle reacting to a descision that youve consciously made but not physcially made yet.
Which opens up a huge can of worms regarding predeterminism, and telepathy.
 
Im a little disappointed this got moved to the pseudoscience section, and frankly shows exactly how most of the scientific community deals with issues that are unpopular.

Let us not forget that many of the people who made history changing discoveries of the past were treated similarly (ignored outright), even treated as heretics!

To me an issue such as this is no different, and that is reason enough to consider the possibility.
 
Grantywanty said:
Actually there are a range of possible reactions. But what most people here have done is to assume out of hand that the man did not have the experiences he had.

A sad lack of curiousity is being ADVOCATED let alone shown.

I mean EndLight is not saying, now it is true, now I believe. He is opening a door to a discussion about the possibility that there might be something to this. I don't see any effort to explain

WHY THESE PHENOMENA could not have happened. Or if any of them might be true. Or how one might have come to false conclusions because of this or that phenomena we do know to be true.
Click to expand...

No, if some extraordinary claim isn't published in a peer reviewed journal it is not science.

Publishing extraordinary theories in peer reviewed journals is the litmus test. It's maybe not the most open system, but it works reasonably well.

And if your work isn't publishable than either it sucks balls, or you are the victim of injustice. However, there are so many journals around all trying to make a buck knowing that controversial stuff sells, making it improbably that it is a case of victimization.

Publishing a book is a good sign that it is not victimization.

it's just reality. I'm sure you don't like it, but I don't get all my shit published either. Unfortunately the peer-reviewed journals have some standards, even the low impact factor ones. And oh boy, have I reviewed crap for them. But personally I do not reject stuff for the really bad journals unless it is unscientific or already published material by the same group somewhere else. I do ask for corrections of course or additions.

I'm sure that the plant shit would have been accepted if they had done their experiments properly. It would have gone straight to a top journal. They like that kind of shit. Maybe the reviewers wouldn't like it, but the editor would have pushed its potential. Some papers go back and forth for a year, but still come out, although totally different.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top