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Be Well.
David
The Secret Life of Life (Part 2)
An interview with Cleve Backster and a look at his seminal work on primary perception
Cleve Backster published a book called Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells in 2003, the first comprehensive account of his work that he authored himself. In it he details all the different things he monitored—up the line from plants, bacteria, and eggs to animal cells such as blood from beefsteak, to human cells.
“There are so many implications here, it sort of amazes me that people don’t get fired up in the scientific community,” he says while laughing.
He has faced decades of cold responses from the academic community, despite presenting his evidence at many conferences and various scientists around the world having replicated his results. His spirits have not let up—he is a man convinced that he has found something important, and won’t let the well-known frailty of human beings’ ability to accept new ideas put him down.
“And also everything I said in the book is true,” he says with a chuckle. “I was very careful about that, that anything in that book is established on fact. I didn’t want people to find a little technicality that wasn’t accurate and then say, well, the rest of your work isn’t accurate.”
He has also followed the same approach when it comes to the reasons why this phenomenon exists. By not engaging in theorizing that might be shown to be incorrect, he has hoped to avoid scenarios where people throw out his data with his speculations.
Potential explanations from physics
Though Backster doesn’t publish speculation concerning an explanation for primary perception, one of the more promising leads for understanding primary perception in terms of existing theories has to do with a phenomenon in quantum physics known as nonlocality.
Nonlocality is something predicted by quantum physics that Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”—the idea that particles may somehow be connected with each other across space.
It has been shown in experiments that when a pair of photons (packets of light) is emitted from an excited atom, when experimenters change the polarity of one photon (by passing it through a sort of filter), the polarity of the other is also affected, and the change takes place in less time than it would take for light to travel from one particle to the other.
When photons show this relationship, they are said to be entangled. So one might wonder, how far does nonlocality go? Is it only for small particles, or could larger systems possibly be entangled, too? And if life forms might be entangled with each other, what would it look like?
If nonlocality does extend to the level of life and mind, then what has been called primary perception may be evidence of exactly this: Backster’s findings show a signal that appears not to be affected by distance or intervening material that would block electromagnetic waves.
Reception
Though there was great popular interest in Backster’s results in the 1970s, the scientific community has still not warmed to the idea. One ostensible reason was a failed attempt to replicate Backster’s first published experiment by another group of scientists, which was then published in the prominent journal Science in 1975.
But according to Backster in his book, the scientists (and others who have tried but failed) did not observe all the proper scientific controls.
One particularly important control that Backster discovered was necessary was that one cannot look at the output from the plant (or whatever else one might be monitoring) while it is occurring—observing it in progress blocks the responses.
With an unusual phenomenon such as primary perception, not observing all the controls that the original investigator found were required to elicit the effect amounts to sloppy science.
However, the possibility that looking at the output would affect the results does not make sense within the modern paradigms of science, so those carrying out the replications likely did not think such controls would make any difference.
It has been said that plant biologists tend to be a particularly conservative lot, and some prominent scientists at the time rejected the possibility that plants could exhibit any sort of electrical activity, much less have any perceptual capabilities.
“When you are talking with those individuals [the skeptics], the implications are profound and it really puts them to the test whether they want to be a true scientist and explore it or whether they sort of want to stay away from it,” Backster says.
“You don’t have that problem [resolute skepticism] with someone who isn’t in a position of having to defend the body of scientific knowledge,” Backster says.
Today, however, the presence of electrical activity in plants is increasingly accepted. Scientists in the field of plant neurobiology have found that plants exhibit signals that look much like neuronal activity in animals. However, these are not the same signals that Backster has investigated.
Though Backster does not have a Ph.D., his attitude and investigations have shown him to be much more in the spirit of true science than those who have rejected his work out of hand.
The findings have been replicated by others, including Russian scientist Alexander Dubrov and Marcel Vogel, who was at IBM at the time of his studies, as reported in The Secret Life of Plants.
The author also completed his undergraduate honor’s thesis on the topic, showing significant results pointing toward plant sensitivity to human interaction.
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