Plants Have Feelings

In February 1996, an American called Cleve Backster made a fascinating discovery. He decided that he wanted to try to measure the rate at which water rose in a plant from the root to the leaf. In order to do this, he attached an instrument to each side of a leaf of a rubber plant he owned. The instrument is able to measure electrical resistance and is sometimes used to find out when human beings are telling lies. However, when he watered the rubber plant, his instrument showed no reaction. Backster decided to hurt the plant in some way to see if this produced any electrical reaction.

First he dipped one of the leaves of the rubber plant into a cup of hot coffee and again there was no reaction. He then decided to burn the leaf of the plant with a match. At the very moment he made his decision, there was a sudden change in the instrument. It seemed that the plant had reacted to the idea that it was about to be burned. Backster was excited by this discovery and went on to test plants in other ways. He brought some live shrimps into his office and dropped them one by one into boiling water. Each time he did this the polygraph recording jumped violently. When he dropped a dead shrimp into the boiling water there was no reaction at all. Some of these findings suggest that plants do have feelings. For a long time certain tribes of North American Indians have used a ceremony whenever they chopped down trees. They believed that the trees felt pain when they did this and so they had ceremonies to "apologize" to the tree before they began to chop it down. Perhaps such ceremonies are not so crazy as they seem.

Short Answer Questions

1. What can the instrument measure?
2. What happened when Backster watered the rubber plant?
3. What else did he do in the experiment in order to get some electrical reaction from the plant?
4. What finally caused a sudden change in the instrument?
5. What did some American Indians believe?

(Keys.)