The day a plant “read” the mind of a human being

The dusty window of the office building facing New York’s Times Square reflected like a mirror an extraordinary corner of Wonderland. There was no white rabbit with his vest and watch chain, but only an individual with gnome ears, called Backster, equipped with a galvanometer and a domestic plant, called Dracaena massangeana.

The galvanometer was there because Cleve Backster was America’s most famous lie detector tester.; the dracaena, because Backster’s secretary thought there should be a touch of green in the bare office; and Backster, due to a fatal step she took in the sixties, which radically affected her life and could have affected the entire planet in the same way.

Backster’s madness with his plants, which earned huge headlines in the world’s press, ended up becoming a topic for jokes, comic strips and satires.but the Pandora’s box that opened for science may never close again. His discovery that plants seem to have sentience provoked an intense and heterogeneous reaction around the globe, even though he never boasted of having made a discovery, but rather of bringing to the surface something that was already known and known. I had forgotten. With all prudence, he preferred to avoid publicity and concentrate on formulating and demonstrating in absolute scientific good faith what has since become known as the “Backster effect.”

The adventure began in 1966. Backster had been up all night at his school for polygraph examiners, where he taught the art of lie detection to police and security agents from around the world. He suddenly felt the urge to apply the electrodes of one of his lie detectors to the leaves of his dracaena. Dracaena is a palm-like tropical plant that has large leaves and a dense cluster of small flowers. It is called the “dragon tree” (in Latin, draco), according to the popular legend that dragon blood flows from its resin.

Backster was curious to see if the leaves were affected by water poured over their roots, and if so, he wanted to know how and how quickly. While the plant greedily slurped water up its trunk, to Backster’s surprise, the galvanometer did not indicate a lower resistance, as one would have expected from the higher electrical conductivity of a wet plant.. The pen, instead of raising its strokes on the squared paper, tended to descend, describing an extremely jagged line in its movement.

The galvanometer is the part of the lie detector polygraph that, when applied to a human being by means of wires through which a weak electric current passescauses a needle or pen to move, which begins to draw lines on a moving graph paper, in reaction to mental images or any emotion, however slight, of the subject.

(…) Police commonly use it to ask “carefully structured” questions of a suspect and pay particular attention to answers that jump the needle. The veteran examiners, like Backster, they claim that they can discover that they are lying by studying the resulting graph.

Backster’s dragon tree was showing him, to his great astonishment, a reaction very similar to that of a human being who is receiving a short-term emotional stimulus. Would it be possible that the plant was capable of externalizing emotions? What happened to Backster in the next ten minutes was going to revolutionize her entire life.

The most efficient way to provoke a reaction in a human being strong enough to trigger the galvanometer is to threaten or endanger its well-being. That was precisely what Backster decided to do to the plant: He put a leaf of the dracaena in the cup of hot coffee that he had in his hand at all times. No reaction was recorded in the galvanometer.

Backster thought for several minutes about the problem, and a more serious threat occurred to him: burning the leaf to which he had applied the electrodes.

At the very moment that the image of the flame was reflected in his mind, and before he could reach for a match, a dramatic change occurred on the graph paper: the recording pen marked a long ascending line. Backster had not moved toward either the plant or the recording machine. Could it be possible that the dracena was reading his thoughts?

He left the room and returned with some matches, noting then that the graph had registered another sharp upward stroke, undoubtedly caused by his determination to carry out the threat he had thought. He prepared to burn the sheet. This time a lower reaction was marked on the graph. When, in fact, he began to go through the motions of trying to burn the blade, there was no reaction. The plant seemed capable of distinguishing between a real attempt and a simulated one.

Backster wanted to run out into the street and shout to everyone: “Plants can think!”. But, instead, he immersed himself in the most thorough investigation of the phenomena he had just witnessed to reach a conclusion about how the plant reacted to his thoughts, and by what means. The first thing he did was make sure he had not overlooked any logical explanation for what had happened. Did that plant have something extraordinary? Did he have it? Wouldn’t he have the polygraph?

When, using other plants, other instruments and other locations in different parts of the country, he and his collaborators made similar observations, he understood that the matter required further study. More than twenty-five varieties of plants and fruits were tested, including lettuce, onions, oranges and bananas.

The observations, all similar, required a new point of view on life, with some explosive implications for science. Since then A bitter debate has been unleashed between scientists and parasitologists about the existence of ESP, that is, extrasensory perception, mainly due to the difficulty of determining without a doubt when this type of phenomenon occurs.

The most that has been achieved in relation to this matter has been the verification by Dr. JB Rhine, who began his experiments on extrasensory perception at Duke University, that these phenomena occur with human beings with a greater frequency than what is known. could be attributed to mere chance.

Backster initially thought that his plants’ ability to guess his intentions was a form of ESP; He later rejected this term.

Extrasensory perception is above all the varieties of sensory perceptions, which are five: those of touch, those of sight, those of sound, those of smell and those of taste. Since plants do not have eyes, ears, nose or mouth, and according to botanists, since the time of Darwin, no nervous system has ever been attributed to them, Backster deduced that their perceptual sense had to be more basic.

This led him to hypothesize that the five senses of human beings could be limiting factors of a “more primary perception,” possibly common to all creatures. ““Perhaps plants see better without eyes,” Backster reasoned, “better than humans with them.”

(…) Plants reacted not only to threats from humans, but even to any danger not explicitly stated, such as the sudden appearance of a dog in the room. or the presentation of a person who did not like plants very much.

Backster was able to successfully demonstrate to a Yale group that the movements of a spider in the same room in which a plant was connected to its computer could cause dramatic changes in the graph produced by the plant, immediately before the spider escaped an attempt human to limit their movements. “It seemed,” Backster commented, “as if the plant picked up on each of the spider’s decisions to flee, causing a reaction in the leaf.”

(…) The complete procedure of the experiment and its results were published in a scientific essay, which was published in the winter of 1968, incorporated into volume The International Journal of Parapsychology, with the title of “Evidence of Primary Perception in Plant Life.” Other scientists could now repeat Backster’s experiment, to see if they obtained the same results. More than seven thousand scientists requested reproductions of Backster’s research report.

Students and professors at some twenty-four American universities declared that they intended to repeat Backster’s experiments as soon as they could obtain the necessary equipment.

There were foundations that expressed interest in funding subsequent experiments.

The media, which at first did not echo the work published by Backster, raised a real storm when the National Wildlife He had the courage to decide to give it notoriety with a featured article in February 1969.

Such was the attention it aroused throughout the world that Secretaries and housewives began to talk about their plants, and Dracaena massangeana was a name that became the order of the day in every home.

Readers were extremely intrigued with the idea that An oak tree could start to tremble when approached by a woodcutter with an ax in hand, or a carrot could tremble when it saw rabbits nearby, while the directors of National Wildlife They were so concerned with the fantastic possible applications of the Backster phenomenon to medical diagnosis, criminal investigation and fields of activity such as espionage that they no longer dared to talk about it again in their pages.