by Lyall Watson
The story of how Cleve Backster discovered that plants were able to respond to other species has now become almost part of folklore, but it is worth repeating the details of his first experiment. In 1966 Backster found that plants attached to an instrument designed to measure electrical resistance were producing measurable responses in certain situations. He put this to objective test by designing automatic randomizing equipment that would drop small crustaceans one by one into boiling water in one room while a potted plant in another was attached via the usual electrodes to a polygraph. [7] He found that the plant was producing significant electrical changes at the precise moments that the brine shrimp fell and that there was no equivalent readout on the recording tape When the machine dropped dried or salted shrimp.
These findings were published in 1968 and created so much interest that Backster now leads a double life. By day his offices near Times Square in New York carry on their old function of training police officers in the use of sophisticated electronic equipment, but at night the lie detectors and electroencephalographs are wheeled into new positions to monitor organisms not even remotely suspected of a crime.
Backster found that his plants not only were tuned in to dying shrimp but responded to all kinds of life. They re- acted wildly to an egg being broken in the room. [76] This suggested that the plant was aware of life and the damage to life around it and that the egg might be actively involved and could itself be producing some kind of transmission. The fact that a nonfertile hen's egg consists of a single cell showed that the signal and the response might occur at a cellular level, so he began experimenting with simpler biological material. A single egg was attached to an electroencephalograph and balanced into the circuitry, and then, at 6:44 a.m. on April 11, 1972, a second egg was dropped into boiling water twenty-five feet away. [8] Exactly five seconds later, the flat line recording on the tape flickered into a sudden crescendo that took the pen almost off the edge of the paper. The egg reacted at the precise moment that something happened to another of its kind.
This fellowship of sensitivity seems to be most marked between samples of living material taken from the same source. On December 3, 1972, Backster put silver-wire electrodes into a sample of fresh human semen. [8] At 8:51 a.m. the donor, sitting forty feet away, crushed a glass phial of amyl nitrite and sniffed the corrosive contents. Two seconds later, as the chemical damaged cells in the sensitive mucous membrane of the man's nose, his isolated sperm reacted in sympathy. In control tests it has been found that sperm produce no response to nonrelated humans. I have myself tried similar experiments, both with blood samples and with epithelial cells taken from the roof of my mouth. If one separates these samples into two parts and treats one with concentrated nitric acid, the other will often produce a measurable response on sensitive electrical equipment.
There is only one thing that rubber plants, brine shrimp, vultures, eggs, and sperm have in common -- they consist of cells, so it is fascinating to find that these responses occur at a cellular level. If, as I suspect, the signal is one accessible to all life, then it would have to be produced and perceived at this level of the lowest common denominator. I believe that it probably began as a comparatively simple pattern of communication between separate cells within a single organism, perhaps before the development of a proper nervous system. Plants lack co-ordinating nerve networks and yet some of them are able to orchestrate their cells into such precise harmony that whole batteries of thousands will respond simultaneously with a movement fast enough to catch a fly. The mechanism producing this response is still a mystery, but Backster may have found the answer.
The next step could have been for cells, such as pollen grains or sperm, to carry this sensitivity beyond the bounds of the organism to produce new individuals that could enjoy an independent existence and yet still maintain vital contacts with others of their kind. Then it is possible that compromise signals were developed among groups of closely related species, perhaps in response to a common predator. The predator would then find it necessary to tune in to the same wavelength in order to be able to detect these signals and thus anticipate their effect on the behavior of his prey. Finally, both predator and prey would find the signal useful in giving warning of some natural catastrophe that could affect them all. This scenario for the development of what Backster calls primary consciousness in all living things is purely theoretical, but it is the kind of path that evolution often takes. It is seldom that a need is allowed to exist for very long without nature taking some steps to meet it.
If a network of communication does exist between all living things, one would expect to see it most dramatically manifest in times of crisis. Spontaneous human telepathic contacts most often occur when one of the people involved is in danger or dying. The death signal may be just the "loudest sound" in this universal language and therefore the one first to come to our attention. There is evidence to show that it is more than just a simple on-off alarm system.
When Backster was doing the brine shrimp experiment, he noticed that the plants became increasingly unresponsive to the shrimp. It seemed to him that the plants "realized" that what was happening to the shrimp in no way threatened them and that they became habituated and just stopped listening. [76] This makes biological sense. In other aspects of Backster's work he has found that plants also tend to become positively or negatively conditioned to other individual organisms depending on their experience with them.
In my own work I have come across a situation that suggests that plants do have the ability not only to respond to other life nearby but to remember the conditions associated with that response. On a number of occasions, in different laboratories and with different equipment, I have played a botanical version of the old parlor game called Murder. Six subjects are chosen at random and told the rules of the game. They draw lots and the one who receives the marked card becomes the culprit, but keeps his identity secret. Two potted plants of any species, although they must be of the same species, are set up in a room, and each of the six subjects is allowed ten minutes alone with them. During his period, the culprit attacks one of the plants in any way he likes. So at the end of the test hour, the foul deed has been done and one of the plants lies mortally wounded, perhaps torn from its pot and trampled into the floor. But there is a witness. The surviving plant is attached to an electroencephalograph or a polygraph, and each of the six suspects is brought in briefly to stand near the plant. To five of these, the plant shows no response despite the fact that some of them may have spent their periods in the room after the deed had been done; but when confronted with the guilty party, the plant will almost always produce a measurably different response on the recording tape.
It is entirely possible that the machine, or the combination of the plant and machine, are responding to an electrical signal produced by the culprit's knowledge of his own guilt. It is also possible, because I have always been present at these tests, that I may be influencing the machine in some way; but on one occasion there was a result that seems to show that these are not the answers. During that particular experiment in Florida, the potted cyclamen accused two of the six suspects. I called these two back for further questioning and discovered that one was indeed the culprit, but that the other had spent an hour earlier that same morning mowing his lawn. He came in, with no guilt feelings, but to the plant it was apparent that be had "blood on his hands!"
This experiment does not work every time, but it has now been successful sufficiently often for me to be certain in my own mind not only that plants respond to other living matter around them but that they can distinguish between individual organisms and make an apparently lasting association between a signal and a particular individual. The response so far observed is not sufficiently reliable for it to be used as evidence in a court of law, but with more sophisticated equipment the incredible possibility exists that we might yet see plants being taken from the scene of a crime and held in protective custody as material witnesses.
Scient
ific attempts to assess the possibility of a universal language of life began early this century in India with Jagadis Chandra Bose. The publicity given Backster's discoveries has provided a new impetus during the last five years, and now students everywhere are toying with the consequences of loving, talking to, praying over, caressing, or just looking admiringly at plants. The Findhorn Community in the United States claim to commune directly with the spirits of their plants -- and they are actually growing bigger and better vegetables. At the Institute of Psychological Sciences in Moscow an attempt has been made to put this interaction on a more quantitative experimental basis. [223]
Tanya, a good hypnotic subject, was chosen for this work because under hypnosis it was possible to make her produce experimental, but otherwise apparently real, quantities of emotions like fear, happiness, anger, and grief on demand. She was placed just eighty centimeters from a flowering geranium connected to an electroencephalograph. During the series of tests, when Tanya shivered with cold, cringed with fear, laughed with joy, or cried with sadness, the plant produced a whole range of electrical responses in time with her behavior. She could never produce any response on the machine when the plant was not present and the readings obtained from the electroencephalograph could not be attributed to stray electrical interference because the plant-instrument combination was kept running and there was no deviation from the normal base line when it was kept running in the gaps between her emotional displays.
One test produced particularly interesting results for those who, like Backster, began their work with lie detec- tors. Under hypnosis, Tanya was asked to think of a number between one and ten and told never to reveal it. A new experimenter then counted slowly from one to ten and she answered each number with a decisive no, but the flower identified the lie and the chosen number by responding only to the number five.
In Backster's later work we find more evidence of the sophistication of the universal language and begin to get some idea of its scope. Following his discovery of the egg-to-egg connection, Backster tried to eliminate the possibility of his own emotions playing any part in the reaction, by automating the experiment. [8] He built a turntable that carried eighteen eggs and moved around slowly to drop the eggs, one at a time at random intervals, through a hatch into boiling water. He found that the receiver egg attached to the electroencephalograph registered a marked response to the dropping of the first turntable egg, but that there was no response to any of the other seventeen unless the gap between their deaths was more than fifteen minutes long. I have repeated this experiment myself and find that the blockage is not at the receiving end, because the egg on the electroencephalograph will respond just five minutes later to a new egg brought in from outside the experimental area. It seems that the fault lies with the eggs on the turntable, which stops transmitting after the first one falls. The only possible explanation that comes to mind is that when the first egg falls into the boiling water and produces its alarm call, the other seventeen eggs waiting their turn all "faint" -- and that it takes fifteen minutes for them to recover.
Even as I write this, I can feel scientific toes the world over curling up in horror at the whole idea. I know that it sounds absurd and whimsical and I appreciate the dangers of making such wide-ranging suggestions on the basis of so little evidence, but the deeper one delves into this whole area, the more difficult it becomes to keep one's feet on the ground. Every new investigation opens Pandora's box a little wider and lets loose a further flurry of little demons, every one of them inimical to scientific tradition and demanding some radical new approach. To help myself live with this idea of fainting eggs, I grasp in desperation at all available straws and come up (as I do more and more often these days) with something from an anthropological stockpile.
The Sioux, like many North American Indians, have a totem pole tradition. [259] These poles serve a vital function in the lives of the community, and the cutting and carving of a new one is attended by all kinds of elaborate ceremony. Before any of this begins, the elders of the tribe get together and go out into the forest until they find a tree of the right size and shape. Then they gather in a semicircle around the tree and say, "Now look, tree, we are sorry about all this, but you know how important our totem is to us and the old one is all worn out. We need a new pole and you are it." Then, without a backward glance, the elders rush on into the forest and cut the very next tree of the same size and shape. To my knowledge, nobody has ever asked the Sioux why they do this, but knowing what I now do about those eggs, I begin to understand. Perhaps the trees in that part of the forest faint when the first one is threatened? Perhaps by the time the elders cut the second one, it has not yet revived?
This is all very nebulous. Too little is known and too little real research has been done for any firm conclusions to be drawn. Yet in the lives and ways of those who live in close touch with the natural world, I keep finding notions that feel right, ideas that fit; but intuition is no substitute for precise, clearly defined, repeatable experiment. Or is it?
At this moment, at any rate, we are left with the following situation: Death has proved to be impossible to diagnose. None of the traditional signs is valid and history is full of examples that show that reliance on any or all of them inevitably leads to confusion in which the living are sentenced unwittingly to fates worse than death. Life and death blend almost imperceptibly into each other, and with life extending its limits all the time, it becomes clear that there are degrees of death and that most (or perhaps even all) of these are reversible. Death comes to seem less permanent and more like a temporary disorder. Children show no innate response to the states of death, but tend on the contrary to behave as though it did not exist. Regardless of their origins, they persist in crediting all objects with life and the ability to interact -- and the latest research suggests that they may well be right.
I believe they are. I am becoming convinced that it no longer makes biological sense even to try to discriminate between life and death at any level.
Chapter Three: DYING as part of the death cycle
There is a record of a captive chaffinch that lived for twenty-six years. Eventually the little bird died of old age, but in the wild there is no such thing as an old chaffinch. Small birds and mammals never age, simply because they never live long enough to do so. With an annual mortality rate of over 50 per cent, no individual can expect to live more than a few years. Everyone dies young.
The human situation differs in that many reach old age. Even three thousand years ago, when the average life expectancy was less than thirty, there were those that lived for "three score years and ten." Today medicine has lifted the average until, in some countries at least, it nears the biblical limit, but it has so far proved to be impossible to extend the limit itself. We have changed the shape of the curve of survival so that practically everyone has the chance of getting through infancy and adulthood to seventy, but even in countries with the highest life expectancy, only one in every ten thousand will reach ninety years. Our species, like all others, has a typical and fixed life-span.
Biology sees this as a circular rather than a linear pattern and describes it as a series of changes or a life cycle. At any given point on this cycle there is a definite chance that an individual can die, but as the circle turns, the level of probability increases. A man of seventy is about three times as likely to die during his next year as a man of thirty, and about fifty times as likely as a boy of ten. This is what we call aging. Much of our social planning and all our assessment of life insurance are built around an awareness of such a decline. The process of dying is therefore not confined to old age, but something that starts right at the beginning of a life cycle and follows it all the way, passing through a series of recognizable and definable stages.
The traditional definition of a life cycle is "a progressive series of changes undergone by an organism from fertiliza- tion to death." Now that we have questioned the validity of death as a fixed point and shown that it exists throughout
life, we need a new definition. It should be one that includes the notion of change in state and recognizes the possibility of the cycle extending beyond the equivocal condition we have been calling clinical death. Perhaps we could define the cycle as "a series of changes in the organization of matter from fertilization to goth."
The development of an organism proceeds according to a schedule geared to the cycle, but in man a point is eventually reached when we become aware that the balance has shifted from prevailing order to a dominance of disorder. It is at this moment that we acknowledge that we are dying. The most revealing insights into this state of mind come from those who have been very close to sudden death. In 1892 Albert Heim, a Swiss geologist, fell while climbing in the Alps and was prompted by his experience to collect information from thirty others who, like himself, had survived mountain falls. [208] Heim found that all of them had similar reactions to their seemingly inevitable deaths, and on this basis he divided the seconds just before the end into three distinct phases of dying.