I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
Subscribe and Save up to 55%
Sometimes it happens that a person can name the exact moment when his or her life changed irrevocably. For Cleve Backster, it was early in the morning of February 2, 1966, at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds into a polygraph test he was administering. Backster, a leading polygraph expert whose Backster Zone Comparison Test is the worldwide standard for lie detection, had at that moment threatened his test subject’s well-being. The subject had responded electrochemically to his threat. The subject was a plant.
Since then, Backster has conducted hundreds of experiments demonstrating not only that plants respond to our emotions and intents, but so do severed leaves, eggs (fertilized or not), yogurt, and human cell samples. He’s found, for example, that white cells taken from a person’s mouth and placed in a test tube still respond electrochemically to the donor’s emotional states, even when the donor is out of the room, out of the building, or out of the state.
I first read about Backster’s work when I was a kid. His observations verified an understanding I had then, an understanding not even a degree in physics could later eradicate: that the world is alive and sentient.
I spoke with Backster in San Diego, thirty-one years and twenty-two days after his original observation, and a full continent away from the office on Times Square in New York City where he had once worked and lived. Before we began, he placed some yogurt into a sterilized test tube, inserted two gold electrodes, and turned on the recording chart. I was excited, yet dubious. We began to talk, and the pen wriggled up and down. Then, just as I took in my breath prior to disagreeing with something he’d said, the pen seemed to lurch. But did it really jump, or was I only seeing what I wanted to see?
At one point, while Backster was out of the room, I tried to muster up some anger by thinking of clear-cut forests and the politicians who sanction them, of abused children and their abusers. But the line depicting the electrochemical response of the yogurt remained perfectly flat. Perhaps the yogurt wasn’t interested in me. Losing interest myself, I began to wander around the lab. My eyes fell on a calendar, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be an advertisement for a shipping company. I felt a sudden surge of anger at the ubiquity of advertising. Then I realized — a spontaneous emotion! I dashed over to the chart, and saw on it a sudden spike apparently corresponding to the moment I’d seen the ad.
When Backster returned, I continued the interview, still excited, and perhaps a little less skeptical.
Jensen: Can you tell us in detail how you first noticed an electrochemical reaction in a plant?
Backster: The initial observation involved a dracaena cane plant I had in my lab in Manhattan. I wasn’t particularly interested in plants, but there was a going-out-of-business sale at a florist on the ground floor of the building, and the secretary had bought a couple of plants for the office: a rubber plant and this dracaena cane. I had done a saturation watering of these plants — putting them under the faucet until the water ran out the bottom of the pots — and was curious to see how long it would take the moisture to get to the top. I was especially interested in the dracaena, because the water had to climb up a long trunk, then out to the end of the long leaves. I thought that if I put the galvanic-skin-response detector of the polygraph at the end of the leaf, a drop in resistance would be recorded on the paper as the moisture arrived between the electrodes.
That, at least, is my cover story. I’m not sure whether there was another, more profound, reason for my action. It could be that my subconscious was nudging me into doing this — I don’t know.
In any case, I noticed something on the chart that resembled a human response on a polygraph: not at all what I would have expected from water entering a leaf. Lie detectors work on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they respond physiologically in predictable ways. For instance, if you were conducting a polygraph test as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a suspect, “Was it you who fired the fatal shot?” If the true answer were yes, the suspect would fear getting caught in a lie, and the electrodes on his or her skin would pick up the physiological response to that fear. So I began to think of ways to threaten the well-being of the plant. First, I tried dipping one of its leaves into a cup of warm coffee. The plant, if anything, showed boredom — the line on the chart kept trending downward.
Then, at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds chart time, the thought entered my mind to burn the leaf. I didn’t verbalize the idea; I didn’t touch the plant; I didn’t touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart. The only thing it could have been reacting to was the mental image.
Next, I got some matches from my secretary’s desk and, lighting one, made a few passes at the leaf. I realized, though, that I was already seeing such an extreme reaction that any increase wouldn’t be noticeable. So I tried a different approach: I removed the threat by returning the matches to the secretary’s desk. The plant calmed right back down.
I immediately understood something important was going on. I could think of no conventional scientific explanation. There was no one else in the lab suite, and I wasn’t doing anything that might have provided a mechanistic trigger. From that moment on, my consciousness hasn’t been the same. My whole life has been devoted to looking into this phenomenon.
After that first observation, I talked to scientists from different fields, to get their explanations for what was happening. But it was totally foreign to them. So I designed an experiment to explore in greater depth what I began to call primary perception.
At thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds chart time, the thought entered my mind to burn the leaf. I didn’t verbalize the idea; I didn’t touch the plant; I didn’t touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild.
Jensen: Why “primary perception”?
Backster: I couldn’t call what I was witnessing extrasensory perception, because plants don’t have most of the five senses to begin with. This perception on the part of the plant seemed to take place at a much more basic — or primary — level.
Anyway, what emerged was an experiment in which I arranged for brine shrimp to be dropped automatically, at random intervals, into simmering water, while the reaction of the plants was recorded at the other end of the lab.
Jensen: How could you tell whether the plants were responding to the death of the shrimp, or to your emotions?
Backster: It’s very hard to eliminate the connection between the experimenter and the plants being tested. Even a brief association with the plants — just a few hours — is enough for them to become attuned to you. Then, even though you automate and randomize the experiment and leave the laboratory, guaranteeing you are entirely unaware of when the experiment starts, the plants will remain attuned to you, no matter where you go. At first, my partner and I would go to a bar a block away, but after a while we began to suspect that the plants were responding, not to the death of the brine shrimp, but to the rising and falling levels of excitement in our conversations.
Finally, we had someone else buy the plants and store them in another part of the building. On the day of the experiment, we went and got the plants, brought them in, hooked them up, and left. This meant the plants were alone in a strange environment, with only the pressure of the electrodes and a little trickle of electricity going through their leaves. Because there were no humans to attune to, they began “looking around” their environment. Only then did something so subtle as the deaths of the brine shrimp get picked up by the plants.
Jensen: Do plants become attuned only to humans, or to other living creatures in their environment as well?
Backster: I’ll answer that question with an example. Often, I hook up a plant and just go about my business, then observe what makes it respond. One day, I was boiling water in a teakettle to make coffee. Then I realized I needed the teakettle for something else, so I poured the scalding water down the sink. The plant being monitored showed a huge reaction to this. Now, if you don’t put chemicals or hot water down the sink for a long time, a microscopic jungle begins to grow down there. It turned out the plant was responding to the death of the microbes in the drain.
Time and again, I’ve been amazed that the capability for perception extends right down to the bacterial level. One sample of yogurt, for example, will react when another is being fed, as if to say, “That one’s getting food. Where’s mine?” This happens with a fair degree of repeatability. Or if you drop antibiotics in the other sample, the first yogurt sample shows a huge response to the other’s death. And they needn’t even be the same kind of bacteria for this to occur. The first Siamese cat I had would eat only chicken. I’d keep a cooked bird in the lab refrigerator and pull off a piece each day to feed the cat. By the time I’d get to the end, the carcass would be pretty old, and bacteria would have started to grow on it. One day, I had some yogurt hooked up, and as I got the chicken out of the refrigerator and began pulling off strips of meat, the yogurt responded. Next, I put the chicken under a heat lamp to bring it to room temperature.
Jensen: You obviously pampered your cat.
Backster: I wouldn’t have wanted the cat to have to eat cold chicken! Anyway, the heat hitting the bacteria produced a huge reaction in the yogurt.
Jensen: How did you know you weren’t influencing this?
Backster: I was unaware of the reaction at the time. You see, I had pip switches set up all over the lab; whenever I performed an action, I hit a switch, which placed a mark on a remote chart. Only later did I compare the reaction of the yogurt to what had been happening in the lab.
Jensen: And when the cat started to ingest the chicken?
Backster: Interestingly enough, bacteria appear to have a defense mechanism such that extreme danger causes them to go into a state similar to shock: in effect, they pass out. Many plants do this as well; if you hassle them enough, they flat-line. The bacteria apparently did this, because as soon as they hit the cat’s digestive system, the signal went out. There was a flat line from then on.
Jensen: Dr. David Livingstone, the African explorer, was mauled by a lion. He later said that, during the attack, he hadn’t felt pain, but rather a sense of bliss. He said it would have been no problem to give himself up to the lion.
Backster: Once, I was on an airplane and had with me a little battery-powered galvanic-response meter. Just as the flight attendants started serving lunch, I said to the man sitting next to me, “You want to see something interesting?” I put a piece of lettuce between the electrodes, and when people started to eat their salads we got some reactions, but they stopped as the leaves went into shock. “Wait until they pick up the trays,” I said, “and see what happens.” When the attendants removed our meals, the lettuce got back its reactivity. The point is that the lettuce was going into a protective state so it would not suffer. When the danger left, the reactivity returned. This ceasing of electrical energy at the cellular level ties in, I believe, to the state of shock in humans.
Cells outside the body still react to the emotions you feel, even though you may be miles away. The greatest distance we’ve tested is about three hundred miles.
Jensen: So you’ve tested plants, bacteria, lettuce leaves . . .
Backster: And eggs. I had a Doberman pinscher for a while that I used to feed an egg a day. One day, I had a plant hooked up to a large galvanic-response meter, and as I cracked an egg to feed the dog, the meter went crazy. After that, I spent hundreds of hours monitoring eggs, both fertilized and unfertilized. Turns out it doesn’t matter; it’s still a living cell.
After working with plants, bacteria, and eggs, I started to wonder how animals would react. But I couldn’t get a cat or dog to hold still long enough to do any meaningful monitoring. So I thought I’d try human sperm cells, which are capable of staying alive outside the body for long periods, and are certainly easy enough to obtain. In this experiment, the sample from the donor was put in a test tube with electrodes, and the donor was separated from the sperm by several rooms. Then the donor inhaled amyl nitrite, which dilates the blood vessels and is conventionally used to stop a stroke. Just crushing the amyl nitrite caused a big reaction in the sperm, and when the donor inhaled, the sperm went wild.
There was no way, however, that I could continue that research. It would have been scientifically sound, but politically stupid. The dedicated skeptics would undoubtedly have ridiculed me, asking where my masturbatorium was, and so on.
Then I met a dental researcher who had perfected a method of gathering white blood cells from the mouth. This was politically feasible, easy to do, and required no medical supervision. I started doing split-screen videotaped experiments, with the chart readout superimposed at the bottom of a screen showing the donor’s activities. We took the white-cell samples, then sent the people home to watch a preselected television program likely to elicit an emotional response — for example, showing a veteran of Pearl Harbor a documentary on Japanese air attacks. What we found was that cells outside the body still react to the emotions you feel, even though you may be miles away.
The greatest distance we’ve tested is about three hundred miles. Brian O’Leary, who wrote Exploring Inner and Outer Space, left his white cells here in San Diego, then flew home to Phoenix. On the way, he kept track of events that aggravated him, carefully logging the time of each. The correlation remained, even over that distance.
Jensen: The implications of all this —
Backster: — are staggering, yes. I have file drawers full of high-quality anecdotal data showing time and again how bacteria, plants, and so on are all fantastically in tune with each other. Human cells, too, have this primary-perception capability, but somehow it’s gotten lost at the conscious level. Or perhaps we never had such a talent.
I suspect that when a person is spiritually advanced enough to handle such perceptions, she or he will become properly tuned in. Until then it might be best not to be tuned in, because of the damage we could cause by mishandling the received information.
We have a tendency to see ourselves as the most highly evolved life form on the planet. It’s true, we’re very successful at intellectual endeavors. But that may not be the ultimate standard by which to judge. It could be that other life forms are more advanced spiritually. It could also be that we are approaching a place where we’ll be able safely to enhance our perception. More and more people are openly working in these still-marginalized areas of research. For instance, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake’s work with dogs? He puts a time-recording camera on both the dog at home and the human companion at work. He has discovered that, even if people come home from work at a different time each day, at the moment the person leaves work, the dog at home heads for the door.
Jensen: How has the scientific community received your work?
Backster: With the exception of marginalized scientists like Sheldrake, the response has been first derision, then hostility, and now mostly silence.
At first, scientists called primary perception “the Backster effect,” perhaps hoping they could trivialize the observations by naming them after this wild man who claimed to see things that had been missed by mainstream science. The name stuck, but because primary perception can’t readily be dismissed, it is no longer a term of contempt.
At the same time that scientists were ridiculing my work, the popular press was paying very close attention to it, in dozens of articles and in books, such as Peter Tompkins’ The Secret Life of Plants. I never asked for any of the attention, and have never profited from it. People have always come to me seeking information.
Meanwhile, the botanical community was getting pretty upset. They wanted to “get to the bottom of all this nonsense,” and planned to resolve the issue at the 1975 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York City. Arthur Galston, a well-known botanist at Yale University, got together a select group of scientists to, in my opinion, try to discredit my work; this is a typical response by the scientific community to controversial theories. I had already learned that you don’t go into these fights to win; you go in to survive. And I was able to do just that.
They’ve now gotten to where they can’t counter my research, so their strategy has been just to ignore me and hope I’ll go away. Of course, that’s not working either.
Jensen: What is their main criticism?
Backster: The big problem — and this is a big problem as far as consciousness research in general is concerned — is repeatability. The events I’ve observed have all been spontaneous. They have to be. If you plan them out in advance, you’ve already changed them. It all boils down to this: repeatability and spontaneity do not go together, and as long as members of the scientific community overemphasize repeatability in scientific methodology, they’re not going to get very far in consciousness research.
Not only is spontaneity important, but so is intent. You can’t pretend. If you say you are going to burn a leaf on the plant, but don’t mean it, nothing will happen. I hear constantly from people all over the country who want to know how to cause plant reactions. I tell them, “Don’t do anything. Go about your work; keep notes on what you are doing at specific times, and later compare them to your chart recording. But don’t plan anything, or the experiment won’t work.” People who do this often get the same results I have gotten, and win first prize at science fairs. But when they get to Biology 101, they’re told that what they have experienced is not important.
There have been a few attempts by scientists to replicate my experiment with the brine shrimp, but these have all been methodologically inadequate. When they learned that they had to automate the experiment, they merely went to the other side of a wall and used closed-circuit television to watch what occurred. Clearly, they weren’t removing their consciousness from the experiment, so it was very easy for them to fail. And let’s be honest: some of the scientists were relieved when they failed, because success would have gone against the body of scientific knowledge.
Jensen: The emphasis on repeatability seems antilife, because life itself is not repeatable. As Francis Bacon made clear, repeatability is inextricably tied to control, and control is fundamentally what Western science is all about, what Western culture is all about. For scientists to give up repeatability, they would have to give up control, which means they would have to give up Western culture, and that isn’t going to happen until this civilization collapses under the weight of its own ecological excesses.
Backster: I have given up trying to fight other scientists on this. But I know that, if they perform my experiment, even if it fails they will still see things that will change their consciousness. They will never be quite the same.
People who would not have said anything twenty years ago often say to me, “I think I can safely tell you now how you really changed my life with what you were doing back in the early seventies.” These scientists didn’t feel they had the luxury back then to rock the boat; their credibility, and thus their grant requests, would have been affected.
Jensen: Looking at your work, we are faced with several options: We can believe you are lying, along with everyone else who has ever made similar observations. We can believe that what you are saying is true, which would require that the whole notion of repeatability in scientific method be reworked, along with our notions of consciousness, communication, perception, and so on. Or we can believe that you have made a mistake. Is it possible that you’ve overlooked some strictly mechanistic explanation for your observations? One scientist has said there must be a loose wire in your lie detector.
Backster: In thirty-one years of research, I’ve found all my “loose wires.” No, I can’t see any mechanistic solution. Some parapsychologists believe I’ve mastered the art of psychokinesis, that I move the pen with my mind — which would be a pretty good trick in itself. But they overlook the fact that I’ve automated and randomized many of the experiments so that I’m not even aware of what’s going on until later, when I study the resulting charts and videotapes. The conventional explanations have worn pretty thin. One such explanation, proposed in an article in Harper’s, was static electricity: if you scuffle across the room and touch the plant, you get a response. But of course I seldom touch the plant during the observation, and in any case that response would be totally different.
Jensen: So what is the signal picked up by the plant?
Backster: I don’t know. Whatever it is, I don’t believe the signal dissipates over distance, which it would if we were dealing with an electromagnetic phenomenon. The signal from Phoenix, for example, was just as strong as if Brian O’Leary had been in the next room.
Also, we’ve attempted to obstruct the signal using lead and other materials, but we can’t shut it out. This makes me think the signal doesn’t actually go from here to there, but instead manifests itself in different places. I suspect that it takes no time for the signal to travel. There is no way, using earth distances, that we could test this, because if the signal were electromagnetic it would travel at the speed of light, and biological delays would consume more than the fraction of a second it would take for the signal to travel. The only way to test this would be in outer space.
I get support for this belief — that the signal is dependent on neither time nor distance — from some quantum physicists. There is a quantum theory called the Bell theorem, which states that two atoms distant from each other will sometimes change the direction of their spin simultaneously.
All this, of course, lands us firmly in the territory of the metaphysical, the spiritual. Think about prayer, for instance. If you were to pray to God, and God were on the far side of the galaxy, and your prayer traveled at the speed of light, your bones would long since be dust before God could respond. But if God — however you define God — is everywhere, the prayer doesn’t have to travel.
Jensen: Let’s get more concrete. You have a mental image of burning the plant, and the plant reacts. What, precisely, happens in that instant? How does the plant know to react?
Backster: I don’t claim to know. In fact, I have attributed a lot of my success at remaining active in this field — at not having been discredited — to the fact that I make no claim to know. You see, if I give a faulty explanation, it doesn’t matter how much data I have, or how many quality observations I’ve made. The mainstream scientific community will use the incorrect explanation as an excuse to throw out my data and observations. So I’ve always said that I don’t know how this happens. I’m an experimentalist, not a theorist.
I think Western science exaggerates the role of the brain in consciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level.
Jensen: The plants’ capacity to perceive intent suggests to me a radical redefinition of consciousness.
Backster: You mean it would do away with the notion of consciousness as something on which humans have a monopoly?
Jensen: Humans and other so-called higher animals. According to Western thought, because plants don’t have brains, they cannot have consciousness.
Backster: I think Western science exaggerates the role of the brain in consciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level. Some very good research has been done on the survival of consciousness after bodily death. All of it points toward the notion that consciousness need not be specifically linked with gray matter. That notion is another straitjacket we need to discard. The brain may have something to do with memory, but a strong case can be made that much of our memory is not stored there.
Jensen: The notion of bodily memory is familiar to any athlete: when you practice, you are trying to build up memories in your muscles.
Backster: The brain might not even be part of that loop.
Jensen: I’ve also read articles on the physiological aftereffects of trauma — child abuse, rape, war. A lot of research shows that trauma imprints itself on different parts of the body; a rape victim might later feel a burning in her vagina, for example.
Backster: If I bump myself, I explain to the tissue in that area what happened. I don’t know how effective this method of healing is, but it can’t hurt.
Jensen: Have you also worked with what would normally be called inanimate materials?
Backster: I’ve shredded some substances and suspended them in agar. I get electric signals, but they’re not necessarily related to anything going on in the environment. The patterns are too crude for me to decipher. But I do suspect that consciousness is more widespread.
In 1987, I participated in a University of Missouri program that included a talk by Dr. Sidney Fox, who was then connected with the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami. Fox had recorded electric signals from a proteinlike material that showed properties strikingly similar to those of living cells. The simplicity of the material he used and the self-organizing capability it displayed suggest to me that biocommunication was present at the very earliest states in the evolution of life on this planet.
Of course, the Gaia hypothesis — that the earth is a great, big, working organism — fits in nicely with this. The planet is going to have the last word concerning the damage humans are inflicting upon it. It’s only going to take so much abuse, and then it may well burp and snort a little, and destroy a good bit of the population. I don’t think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis one step further and attribute such a defense strategy to a kind of planetary intelligence.
Jensen: How has your work been received in other parts of the world?
Backster: The Russians have always been very interested, not at all afraid to venture into these areas of research. In many ways, they seem much more attuned to spiritual concepts than most scientists in the West. And whenever I talk with Indian scientists — Buddhist or Hindu — about what I do, they say, “What took you so long?” My work dovetails very well with many of the concepts embraced by Hinduism and Buddhism.
Jensen: What are we Westerners afraid of?
Backster: The fear is that, if what I am observing is accurate, many of the theories on which we’ve built our lives need complete reworking. I’ve known biologists to say, “If Backster is right, we’re in trouble.” It would mean a radical rethinking of our place in the world. I think we’re seeing it already.
Our Western scientific community in general is in a difficult spot because, in order to maintain our current mode of scientific thought, we must ignore a tremendous amount of information. And more such information is being gathered all the time. Researchers are stumbling all over this biocommunication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for them to miss this fundamental attunement between living things. Only for so long are they going to be able to pretend it’s “loose wires.”
Derrick Jensen
I’m new to this magazine and rather astonished at the amount of hostility expressed by your readers in the Correspondence section. To those who champion the “scientific” method: The world of physics now understands that there really is no objectivity. Once you observe something, you have entered into the equation and tampered with the natural state of what you are observing. On top of this, your eyes observe with certain chemicals that are at least slightly different from everyone else’s. We think of Western medicine, for example, as concrete, but many women who get mammograms still come up with undetected breast cancer because the mammograms are read incorrectly by the radiologist: the cancer was there; it just wasn’t perceived by the doctor.
Thank you for helping me to remember to stay with gray — it is so much softer than black and white.
I would like to put in my two cents on the Cleve Backster and Blaize Clement controversy. My parents came to this country from Ireland during the Depression, when communication was much slower and more costly. Whenever anyone in my mom’s family died or became grievously ill, however, my mother knew instantly. She got the news in the form of signs and premonitions. Although she never knew the exact problem, she always knew there was one.
One day, my four-year-old cousin Frank spent the afternoon on our couch, recuperating from a broken leg. When it was time for him to go home, my father picked him up to carry him to the door. Just as my father, with Frank in his arms, turned his back to the couch, a large mirror jumped off the wall and landed in the exact spot where my cousin had been lying. The nail was still in the wall, and the wire had not broken. My mother knew it was a sign, and no one could convince her otherwise. In time, we found out that her father had been killed at that exact moment, six time zones to the east, in the old country.
Later in life, when I talked about my mother’s sensitivity outside the family, I found that not everyone thought such a thing was possible. So I decided that, if it ever happened to me, I would try to be somewhat scientific about it.
In my early twenties, I was awakened one night by someone calling my name, but there was no one there. I looked at the clock: 3:23 A.M. I woke my roommate and told him that either his sister, whom I was dating at the time, or my sister had called to me. With him as a witness, I went back to sleep. Later, I learned that my sister had had a miscarriage that night at around that time.
All of this has taught me that we know very little about reality. Yes, there are plenty of hucksters out there looking to prey on the gullible. But there are also those who see more clearly than their contemporaries, and are often ridiculed by those too afraid to open their eyes to the wonders that surround us.
I commend The Sun for being willing to go out on a limb and take the hits. Sometimes you try to light the way with luminaries, and sometimes with lunatics, but only this way do we all get to see a little farther.
I just finished reading Derrick Jensen’s wonderful interview with Cleve Backster [“The Plants Respond,” July 1997], and I agree with the Buddhist and Hindu scientists who asked Backster, “What took you so long?” For me, it’s not Backster’s experiments with plant communication that are amazing, but the fact that Western scientists have generally ignored the obvious.
Shamans all over the world have known for tens of thousands of years that all matter has consciousness. The ramifications of this fact are enormous: if everything has consciousness, then we cannot continue to treat plants and animals and rocks and land (and even toasters!) as disposable objects subject to our overconsumptive whims and hungers.
If it takes a brilliant scientist like Backster to prove to the West what the wise ones have always known, then I hope someone will give him a billion dollars to fund his experiments, and fast.
I am writing to complain about the two pseudoscientific articles in the July 1997 issue: Derrick Jensen’s interview with Cleve Backster [“The Plants Respond”], and Blaize Clement’s “Which Way to Siloam?” It doesn’t take much effort to see that the ideas promulgated in both are pure horse puckey.
Backster’s claims are extraordinary, and thus require extraordinary proof; he provides none. His experiments lack repeatability and control. In his example of a plant supposedly reacting to bacteria being boiled in a nearby drain, how do we know the plant wasn’t reacting to something else of which Backster wasn’t aware? Did he eliminate all possibilities besides the drain microbes? If, as he claims, the reactions occur over vast distances, why couldn’t they have been caused by someone cutting flowers at the florist down the street, or chopping down trees in the rain forest? He offers no demonstrable evidence that plants become “attuned” to our presence, but rather simply asserts that it happens. He reminds me of people who see something strange in the sky and, rather than consulting a scientist who is familiar with atmospheric phenomena, instantly conclude that it’s an alien spaceship. Backster’s stories of being rejected by “mainstream science” were howlers: there are plenty of grad students out there who would love to earn huge grants by showing “primary perception” to be real.
Backster’s claims are bogus, but at least they’re harmless. Blaize Clement’s account of her visit to psychic surgeons, on the other hand, could lead readers to actually seek out these charlatans. Twice while reading this piece I checked the contents page to make sure it wasn’t fiction. Apart from a massage the likes of which any well-trained therapist can provide, the healers’ technique seems to consist solely of extracting evil somethings from the body — like the worn engine parts an auto mechanic shows a customer — as if to provide tangible proof of healing. What good could this do someone with Alzheimer’s, AIDS, or lung cancer? The healers are as powerless as anyone else against these diseases.
The space taken by these articles would have been better spent interviewing a thoughtful scientist about why emotions are (so far) largely resistant to the scientific method, or why it’s not (yet) possible to quantify one’s reaction to a Beethoven sonata or a Rembrandt etching. (It is not simply that these matters are being ignored, as Backster claims.) An article about real science and its limitations would have made much more engaging reading.
I wish The Sun would upgrade itself from “A Magazine of Ideas” to “A Magazine of Good Ideas.” I am often disappointed with the gullibility of its authors and editors, who need to think more critically; otherwise, they risk spreading bad ideas along with the good.
Cleve Backster, for example, claims that cells scraped from inside your mouth will respond to your mood even when you’re three hundred miles away. Why has no one else caught on to this miraculous discovery? Probably because you can’t predict the results of such an experiment.
“Which Way to Siloam?” in the same issue was a believer’s inside view that persisted to the end, even though the author had heard about how psychic surgeons use sleight of hand and chicken guts. This type of wishful thinking has caused documented fatalities.
How do you tell the difference between the truth and a mistake or a lie? Prediction. If you can’t make predictions, you don’t really know anything. These articles don’t just share personal feelings and observations; they tout claims that should at minimum allow us to predict results. But they don’t. Instead, they pillory science for not being more human.
The attitudes expressed here are not new to me. Unfortunately, almost without exception such criticism has come from individuals who have made no attempt to become better acquainted with my research. Since first publishing my findings in 1968, I have lectured before more than thirty-five scientific and academic groups, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
During the interview, I clearly explained that repeatability is a problem when events must occur spontaneously, as is the case with biocommunication. The cliché “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” sounds rather hollow when used to dismiss new ideas prior to widespread investigation. I see here a selective use of the principles of scientific method. A scientist is supposed to be a keen observer with an insatiable curiosity and a desire to explain ordinarily unexplainable phenomena. I believe my research reflects this principle. Yes, the scientific method’s expectation of repeatability is a problem in consciousness research. But this is no excuse for ignoring numerous high-quality observations suggesting that biocommunication exists.
If, as suggested in one letter, “there are plenty of grad students out there who would love to earn huge grants by showing ‘primary perception’ to be real,” I would like to meet them. Since 1974 I have sustained a well-equipped lab, mostly self-funded, and have always offered unlimited access to graduate students wishing to conduct biocommunication research. But because of attitudes like those exhibited here, most students are afraid to make grant requests relating to such studies. Those who do express interest are told that this research is low priority, and to some it has been implied that such activity might be risky for their future.
On a more positive note, I believe that attitudes are changing among more open-minded researchers. Here in California, I am currently active on teaching staffs and research-related advisory boards with a combined total of more than a hundred scientists.
Perhaps what is needed is a fuller appreciation of the scientific method, one that recognizes that a measure of courage is helpful when exploring the unknown.
Some readers went a little ballistic in response to the essay by Blaize Clement and the interview with Cleve Backster. But this was also the response when Copernicus suggested that Earth wasn’t the center of the Universe. The “laws” of science evolve as our understanding expands, in spite of those who would freeze knowledge at whatever level currently exists.
Just as these articles were published, Swiss researchers proved that two “entangled” atomic particles (those that share common origins and properties) can communicate with each other at speeds faster than light — a supposed impossibility — no matter how far apart they were (New York Times, July 22, 1997). This “real” science makes Backster’s claims more than plausible.
As Shakespeare, whose truths seem to last longer than those of many scientists, once wrote: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The interview with Cleve Backster struck an especially deep chord in me. I agree that we, as a culture, are unable to fully consider how our actions affect plants and other entities because it would require us to process too much information. It’s a matter of scale. The president of a large corporation can’t listen to all the grievances of every employee, because the president occupies a different level in the hierarchy and has priorities those below cannot appreciate. Similarly, I couldn’t occupy my niche in human society if I recognized the death I brought to millions of microbes, insects, plants, and animals each day.
Backster’s research raises some troubling moral issues and questions. For example, is the existence of our society — with all its dependence on paper products, toxic chemicals, destruction of natural habitat, and so on —“wrong” in a spiritual sense? I don’t think so. We as humans can’t grasp the forces that drive us any more than a tree or a yogurt bacterium can grasp its importance in a botanical garden or a research lab. Each of us — whether human, animal, plant, microbe, or atom — is simply a part of God’s consciousness.
We certainly need to reduce our consumption, destruction, and waste, and protect the ecosystems, but feeling the pain of every plant would indeed be information overload.
I am dismayed by the negative reactions in your September 1997 Correspondence to both Derrick Jensen’s interview with Cleve Backster [“The Plants Respond,” July 1997] and Blaize Clement’s fantastic essay [“Which Way to Siloam?” July 1997]. Reading those two pieces, I was overjoyed to find the veils of reality fluttering for a moment, allowing me to glimpse the mysteries that lie behind them. This world is so complex, so mysterious, and so completely beyond my comprehension that I cannot pretend to fully understand how it works. Ideas like Backster’s and writing like Clement’s serve to remind me that the boundaries I see are only as solid as I make them.
I’m sorry that some other readers felt threatened by these articles. It never ceases to amaze me how millions can believe in a being called God, a place called heaven, the value of the dollar, and the power of the President, and yet find the possibility of magical healing and plant communication totally unfeasible.
By the way, congratulations on the rest of the September issue — possibly the most depressing yet!