A pair of vocational high-school students won a prize in the food and agriculture division of the Taiwan National Science Fair with their experiment on plant extra-sensory perception.
National Chiatung Agricultural Vocational Senior High School’s Shih Yi-ping (施依萍) and Lin Chin-hua (林慶樺), of the farm management department and commercial electronics department respectively, said they were inspired by Cleve Backster’s ideas.
In the 1960s, Backster, a CIA interrogator, claimed that plants are sentient and capable of a form of telepathy.
Photo: Chen Yen-ting, Taipei Times
Polygraph machines connected to trees detected electric impulses that suggested they possessed emotions and an ability to remotely predict human thought, Backster said.
Lin and Shih said they were intrigued by Backster’s findings, but replicating his experiments proved difficult as their school does not have polygraph machines.
The two used optical heart-rate monitors found in smartwatches to measure the state of potential energy in water stored in vanilla plants.
The monitors measure heart rate by photoplethysmography, a method that uses light to detect changes in the pressure of blood flow, they said.
The principle could be applied to measure the internal hydraulic pressure in the vascular tissues of clean and uninjured vanilla leaves, they said.
Measurements taken before and after watering the plants showed significant differences, they added.
The two measured the plants at various times, which they then correlated to the contemporaneous readings of the plant cultivator’s blood pressure levels.
The experiments confirmed that the potted vanilla plants respond to the moods of their cultivators, Shih and Lin said.
The plants’ extra-sensory perception allowed the students to teach the plants to differentiate colors, cucumbers that were raised organically from those grown with chemical fertilizers, and photographs of healthy livers and livers affected with fibrosis, they said.
Shih and Lin said they were surprised and happy to find out that their experiment supported Backster’s ideas, adding that they found plants have the ability to “communicate” fear, happiness, affirmation and negation.
Shih and Lin could have won the top prize in the botanical division at the science fair had they entered the competition, a school official said.
To the school’s knowledge, the students’ project was the only experiment in the world, other than Backster’s original experiments, that supports the theory of plant sentience and perception, the official said.
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