The Plant Consciousness Wars

Their opinions against plant consciousness do nothing to invalidate all of the other studies showing that plants possess an awareness of their surroundings.

The most prominent of which are Cleve Backster's research, I think.

 But, in 1966 this changed. Cleve Backster, at the time our nation's foremost lie detector examiner, had been up all night at his school for polygraph examiners and on impulse he hooked up the electrodes of a lie detector to a leaf of his dracaena plant, a tropical plant with large leaves. He poured water onto the roots of the plant to see if the plant would be affected by this and to his surprise the plant gave a reading similar to a human experiencing a short emotional stimulus. What happened next set him on a life-long quest for information and answers. He took a match, determined to burn the leaf with the electrodes on it to see if the plant would react again. But, all he had to do was picture the flame in his mind and the plant reacted, causing a large upward sweep of the detector pen.  When he merely pretended to burn the leaf it showed no reaction at all. Backster and his collaborators, all over the US, using 25 different plants, obtained similar and even more astonishing results. 

 http://bionutrient.org/site/library/revi...ife-plants

OH YEAH.

 “I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.' A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. 'For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.”  -Treeberard
(― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers) 

Here's a new video documentary by Keith Parsons, entitled "Are Plants Conscious, Intelligent and Aware?"

 http://bionutrient.org/site/library/revi...ife-plants

 "He took a match, determined to burn the leaf with the electrodes on it to see if the plant would react again. But, all he had to do was picture the flame in his mind and the plant reacted, causing a large upward sweep of the detector pen.  When he merely pretended to burn the leaf it showed no reaction at all. Backster and his collaborators, all over the US, using 25 different plants, obtained similar and even more astonishing results." 

It's too bad that all attempts to scientifically replicate these sorts of findings failed. Presumably, the reasons could be either that the investigators varied from Backster's exact procedures too much, or they followed them closely enough but something about the mental conditions of strictly using the scientific method and striving to be objective just inhibited results. In other words, maybe consciousness just doesn't like being probed by the scientific method. Something like the well-known "experimenter effect" inhibiting results in paranormal research.

It's too bad that all attempts to scientifically replicate these sorts of findings failed. Presumably, the reasons could be either that the investigators varied from Backster's exact procedures too much, or they followed them closely enough but something about the mental conditions of strictly using the scientific method and striving to be objective just inhibited results. In other words, maybe consciousness just doesn't like being probed by the scientific method. Something like the well-known "experimenter effect" inhibiting results in paranormal research.

I'd say it has to be approached like a paranormal experiment, with the same sorts of rules.

Because, as research like Backster's has shown, plants can indeed react to the thoughts, intentions, and emotions of those around them, therefore affecting the experiment.

So those must therefore be properly accounted for, for accurate and reproduceable results.

[Laird]

It's too bad that all attempts to scientifically replicate these sorts of findings failed.

Not all of them have failed. Check out the video by Dr Keith Parsons which Chris posted a few back, which describes, with video, Russian replications which succeeded, and also describes similar successful experiments by Dr Jagadish Chandra Bose. Also, check out this successful direct replication of Backster's original experiment by Mythbusters, which I've posted several times already, I think even once earlier in this thread (note though that in the same episode they failed to replicate other of Backster's experiments, thus concluding that the "myth" was "busted"):

Do Plants Have Something to Say? One Scientist is Listening

Ellie Shechet

Monica Gagliano says that she has received Yoda-like advice from trees and shrubbery. She recalls being rocked like a baby by the spirit of a fern. She has ridden on the back of an invisible bear conjured by an osha root. She once accidentally bent space and time while playing the ocarina, an ancient wind instrument, in a redwood forest. “Oryngham,” she says, means “thank you” in plant language. These interactions have taken place in dreams, visions, songs and telekinetic interactions, sometimes with the help of shamans or ayahuasca.

This has all gone on around the same time as Dr. Gagliano’s scientific research, which has broken boundaries in the field of plant behavior and signaling. Currently at the University of Sydney in Australia, she has published a number of studies that support the view that plants are, to some extent, intelligent. Her experiments suggest that they can learn behaviors and remember them. Her work also suggests that plants can “hear” running water and even produce clicking noises, perhaps to communicate.

Plants have directly shaped her experiments and career path. In 2012, she says, an oak tree assured her that a risky grant application — proposing research on sound communication in plants — would be successful. “You are here to tell our stories,” the tree told her...

More from Dr Monica Gagliano in this thread.

[Ninshub]

The Intelligence of Plants
What if plants are smarter than we think—a lot smarter?

By Cody Delistraty
The Paris Review, September 26, 2019

Recently, more findings have seemed to support—or at least point toward—a more restrained version of plant intelligence. Plants may not be capable of identifying murderers in a lineup, but trees share their nutrients and water via underground networks of fungus, through which they can send chemical signals to the other trees, alerting them of danger. Peter Wohlleben, a forest ranger for the German government, has written extensively on trees, about diseases or insects or droughts. When Wohlleben came across a tree stump that had been felled probably half a millennium ago, he realized—scraping at it and seeing that it was still bright green beneath—that the trees around it had been keeping it alive, sending it glucose and other nutrients.

This plant communications system works similarly to the nervous system of animals. Trees can send out electrical pulse signals underground as well as signals through the air, via pheromones and gasses. When an animal, for instance, begins chewing on a tree’s leaves, the tree can release ethylene gas into the soil, alerting other trees, whereupon those nearby trees can send tannins into their leaves so that if they, too, get their leaves chewed, they might be able to poison the offending animal.

[Laird]

On her blog Cat in the Shadows, Cat Ward has a two-part series on plant consciousness. Well worth a read.

COULD PLANTS BE CONSCIOUS? PART 1- THINKING AND FEELING

A recent study, conducted by Leipzig University and the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, discovered that Beech and Maple trees can recognise the difference between whether their buds are nibbled off by a browsing Roe deer, or have been torn off by a storm or by human hand.

If a deer feeds on a tree and leaves its saliva behind, the tree will detect this, and increase its production of salicylic acid, which in turn signals the tree to increase its tannin production, making its leaves and buds bitter and unpalatable to the deer. If a bud is torn off by a storm or by human hand, the tree responds differently, and doesn't increase its production of salicylic acid or tannins- instead it produces wound-healing hormones.

Four days before the hurricane struck, Burr noted a significant variation from the baseline readings of the trees' fields, from -50 mv at 6 a.m to 169 mv at noon. The voltages eventually returned to zero. Three days before the hurricane, the voltages rose to 263 mv by noon. They returned to zero by 4 a.m the next morning, two days before the hurricane.
During that day, they rose to 318 mv by noon. The day before the hurricane struck, the same high readings occurred again, and they occurred yet again on the day the hurricane struck. The hurricane struck on the evening of that 4th day. As psychiatrist and researcher Leonard Ravitz noted:
"If these extraordinary potential shifts had been recorded in only one tree, little could have been made of them. But parallel changes occurred at the same time in both an old and a young tree, 40 miles apart. This suggested a causal relationship between the electric conditions of the troposphere, the hurricane, and the fields of living systems."

ARE PLANTS CONSCIOUS? PART 2- COMMUNICATION AND RESPONSE

Plant roots form the same type of communication network as trees do, through symbiotic relationships with bacteria and fungi, and links to other plant roots - these are called mycelial networks. In some instances, plants can be part of a mycelial network that can extend over miles..that's one very big "brain"!

This mycelial network can connect all plants in a particular area into one whole, and enable them to communicate. If plants in the network detect that another plant is ill, those able to do so send helpful compounds through the network to where they are required. Plants and trees seem to help other members of their "families" and their species, and members of other species too throughout their lives..just as we do!

He also found that morphine had the same effects on plants as on humans- it reduced the plant's pulse in proportion to the dose given. Too much brought the plant to the point of death, but the administration of Atropine revived it, as it would humans. Alcohol, he discovered, did indeed get a plant drunk. As it does in us, alcohol induced a state of excitation in the plant early on, but as intake progressed the plant began to get depressed, and with too much it "passed out". It even had a hangover the next day!

Courtesy of the Daily Grail, here's a recent article at Nautilus in which Brandon Keim interviews Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia about her research into the networks of roots and fungus that connect trees in forests. It covers the similarities between these networks and the ones in our brains, the question of whether the trees exhibit intelligence and even purposefulness and awareness, and Simard's belief that indigenous peoples knew about these issues and we are now getting back to knowledge that had been shut down for a while by "Western science":
http://nautil.us/issue/77/underworlds/ne...e-of-trees