Vegetable I.Q. ?

[RascalPuff]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Published in 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. It is described as "A fascinating account of the physical, emotional, and spiritual relations between plants and man."
Essentially, the subject of the book is the idea that plants may be sentient, despite their lack of a nervous system. This sentience is observed primarily through changes in the plant's conductivity, as through a polygraph, as pioneered by Cleve Backster. The book also contains a summary of Goethe's theory of plant metamorphosis.
With that being said, this book is about much more than just plants, and delves quite deeply into such topics as the aura, psychophysics, orgone, radionics, kirlian photography, magnetism / magnetotropism, bioelectrics, dowsing, and the history of science.

The notion that plants are capable of feeling emotions was first recorded in
1848, when Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German professor, suggested the idea in his book Nanna. He believed that plants are capable of emotions, just like humans or animals, and that one could promote healthy growth by showering plants with talk, attention, and affection.[1]
One of the first to research the concept was the Indian scientist Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, who began to conduct experiments on plants in the year 1900. He found that every plant and every part of a plant appeared to have a sensitive nervous system and responded to shock by a spasm just as an animal muscle does. One visitor to his laboratory, the vegetarian playwright George Bernard Shaw, was intensely disturbed upon witnessing a demonstration in which a cabbage had violent convulsions as it boiled to death. Bose found that the effect of manures, drugs, and poisons could be determined within minutes, providing plant control with a new precision. In addition, Bose found that plants grew more quickly amidst pleasant music and more slowly amidst loud noise or harsh sounds. He also claimed that plants can "feel pain, understand affection etc.," from the analysis of the nature of variation of the cell membrane potential of plants, under different circumstances. According to him, a plant treated with care and affection gives out a different vibration compared to a plant subjected to torture. In conclusion, he said: "Do not these records tell us of some property of matter common and persistent? That there is noabrupt break, but a uniform and continuous march of law?

Bose's experiments stopped at this conclusion, but Cleve Backster, an American scientist, conducted research that led him to believe that plants can communicate with other lifeforms. Backster's interest in the subject began in February 1966, when Backster wondered if he could measure the rate at which water rises from a philodendron's root area into its leaves. Because a polygraph or 'lie detector' can measure electrical resistance, and water would alter the resistance of the leaf, he decided that this was the correct instrument to use. After attaching a polygraph to one of the plant's leaves, Backster claimed that, to his immense surprise, "the tracing began to show a pattern typical of the response you get when you subject a human to emotional stimulation of short duration".
Led by curiosity, Backster went in search of other reactions, and decided to burn a leaf of the plant. Apparently, while he was musing upon this, there was a dramatic upward sweep in the tracing pattern. He had not moved or even touched the plant. Backster was certain that he had somehow inspired fear in the plant with his decision to burn it. He came to the resolution that, if he was correct, plants can not only feel things, but can also, in effect, read people's minds.
In the United Kingdom, the Bognor Regis Electronic Development Corporation of Sussex conducted a similar experiment. The Corporation found that their secretaries were much too busy to care for their plants, and, following the death of several of the plants through lack of water, they attached some electrodes to the plant. They reportedly discovered that the plants emitted sounds that came out through loudspeakers as mournful cries when they were in need of watering.
In 1975, three scientists (K.A. Horowitz, D.C. Lewis, and E.L. Gasteiger) published an article in Science with their results when repeating Backster's investigation of plant response to the killing of brine shrimp in boiling water. In this investigation, the researchers took into consideration control factors such as grounding the plants to reduce electrical interference and rinsing the plants to remove dust particles. Three of five pipettes contained brine shrimp while the remaining two only had water. These acted as a control because the pipettes were delivered to the boiling water at random. In addition, this investigaton used a total of 60 brine shrimp deliveries to boiling water while Backster's investigation had 13. While this experiment did show a few positive correlations, they did not occur at a rate great enough to be considered statistically viable. These experimental conditions were more rigorous from a traditional scientific paradigm and did not produce the same results, however Backster himself criticized them for misunderstanding certain fundamentals of primary perception (e.g. the time spent rinsing the plants affected their relationship to the experimenters). - Wikipedia (Plant perception)
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In the microscopic world, the transition from vegetable to animal is so subtle that there is ongoing controversy about when, where, how, why and what are the stages of transmutation from vegetable evolution to animal evolution.
Among the primary forms of life is the vegetable. This connects vegetable to animal and human beings to the latter forms of life. Does human intelligence underestimate vegetable intelligence?
Just how conscious are various forms of vegetation (how much is scientifically pursued and established about this issue), anyway?

[mkirkpatrick]

Many thanks RP,wonderful thread starter,plants have feelings too! I seem to remember
experiments done many years ago regarding plants and polygraph machines,it seemed
to suggest that plants can experience fear,and respond to love/kindness/harmonic music.



regards michael.

[labelwench]

I followed an Adspider to this thread and thought it quite fascinating as I have an interest in container and short-season growing, even in mid-winter have fresh parsley under lights and soon time to start some early flowers and mesclun greens indoors.

For the thread, this piece of commentary and the link to the rest of the information:

From pages: 188 - 189

Although green plants have no nervous system, they can transmit messages through the length of the plant body. It has long been thought that the stomata open and close solely in response to what they sense, but we now know that they can also be controlled from as far away as the tips of the roots. During periods of drought, the water flow up a plant diminishes and the stomata close down to minimise water loss. It has long been believed that it was the closure of these pores in the leaf which reduced the water flow. In the 1980s it was discovered that the stomata start to close down the moment the roots detect dry soil, and long before there is any change in the water reaching the leaves. The plants are anticipating a threat before it arises. The mechanism seems to be some form of chemical signal which the plants can send to the leaves, and which leads to the closure of the stomata before the plant experiences water loss.

One of the simplest methods of demonstrating this effect is the split-root experiment. A plant is induced to share its root system between two pots, which can be independently supplied with water. If the soil in one of the pots dries out, the stomata over the whole plant tend to close. This occurs even if there is a plentiful supply of water to the second pot. The crucial role of the roots can be demonstrated by watering the dry soil, for the stomata immediately open. Confirmation is obtained by cutting off the roots to the dry pot. As soon as the roots are detached, the signalling system is severed and the stomata open. The control of the stomata by the roots may be by means of abscisic acid, a hormone which can cause stomata to close if present in very small amounts. One part of abscisic acid in a billion parts of water is enough to make them shut. Analysis of roots from split-root plant experiments substantiates the possibility, for there is always much more abscisic acid in the dry roots than in the moist ones.

Plants are subject to a great range of stimuli, and have fine tuned senses to optimise their behaviour. Inside a plant there is ceaseless activity. Microscopic particles within each cell are moving around to catch the light to the best advantage, and cytoplasm inside the cells is streaming from one place to another. Water is drawn up through the stem, and elaborated foodstuffs pass down like a nourishing blood supply. A plant in woodland may seem static to the casual observer, but inside it is a hive of activity.

http://www.brianjford.com/soulsa.htm

Many plants are sensitive to the touch or to daylight. I recall returning home one cloudy afternoon and wondering where all of the bright yellow dandelions had gone in a matter of a few hours. Turns out, they are light sensitive and close down tight when the sun goes down or is completely obscured, as was the case that day. Amazing how often we do not observe what is right before our eyes....can't believe that I had never noticed it prior. Then, when I remarked on it to others, I soon realized that no one else had been paying any attention either, barring those few in the field of such studies.

Makes me wonder just how many 'ordinary' things we are overlooking, that could have far-reaching implications.....