Plant-ation

My roommate returned today with stories of plant perception and alleged that even discussing this subject was setting any plant hooked up to a lie detector in the tri-state area off the charts. This was all reported from a zine he picked up on his travels chronicling the discovery of Cleve Backster that plants hooked up to a GSR (galvanic skin response) analyzer registered huge spikes when you even thought about... lots of stuff: fire, not watering them, watering them, undressing them, etc. The plants, Backster found, could pick human thoughts out of the ether. This would give much credence to such theories as divining, lay lines, auras, and energy fields. He also thought that yogurt (of the same culture) could communicate.

I was intrigued. I've been reading a bit about the nature of time, and the possibility that linear time might not exist. Read about entangled particles and try and go to sleep. But anyway,I decided that that would be my knowledge for the night. After spending the day reading and viewing various skeptical publications, I jumped into the so-called Backster Effect.

Unbelievably, it seems his finding are highly dubious.

Basically it was found that plants respond more to the thought of being cut, burned, or torn than to the actual act. He discovered that if he tore a leaf from one plant a second plant would respond, but only if he was paying attention to it. The plants seemed to be mirroring his own mental responses. He concluded that the plants were acting like batteries, storing the energy of his thoughts and intentions. He said of these experiments: “I learned that there is energy connected with thought. Thought can be pulsed and the energy connected with it becomes coherent and has a laser-like power

He has been debunked numerous times since, "The Secret Life of Plants" was published in 1973. Most recently by the Mythbusters. It appears his findings could never be satisfactorily replicated in control experiments, to which he would contest that the plants were not properly attuned to the environment or researchers. He seems to be guilty of the blunder of false correlation. There is nothing to suggest that the plants were reacting to human thought; only human thought connects the two.

Now if we could just figure out this time thing...

more at:
Wikipedia: Plant Perception
James Randi Encyclopedia
Skeptics Dictonary
A pro-Backster Article