‘Primary Perception:’ The Secret Life of Life (Part 1)

The Window to Primary Perception: Cleve Backster started his experiments with the plant Dracaena. (Courtesy of Cleve Backster)

There exists a body of research poised to rend apart our modern paradigms—revealing consciousness in places we might not have expected it, and connections between life forms that seem startling and impossible.

Imagine coming into a laboratory with a friend, and the experimenter tells you to simply start up a conversation. After some time, the experimenter stops you and shows you a recording that was taken of the conversation. The audio is of the conversation, but the video is of a line that looks something like a seismograph—which is actually a measure of electrical activity that was taking place in a plant that had been sitting in the corner of the room.

You see, perhaps to your amazement, that with every emotional moment between you and your friend, the plant shows a reaction corresponding to the onset of, for example, surprise, disgust, or embarrassment.

And the reaction happens to look a lot like a person’s reaction to the same sort of event.

This is one variety of experiment that demonstrates the phenomenon of what has been dubbed “primary perception” by Cleve Backster, who made the discovery in 1966 in a series of experiments with plants and other life forms. His research suggests that a basic form of communication exists among all life, down to bacteria and constituent cells of larger organisms, and hence may be “primary,” compared to commonly acknowledged forms of perception such as vision or touch.

Backster, a genial and enthusiastic fellow of 85 years, is a former CIA lie detector specialist and has had a deep involvement with scientific research in the polygraph community, where he is highly regarded. He developed the Backster Zone Comparison test in the late 1950s, the technique that is still in general use in military and government agencies for reading polygraphs, and he has run the Backster School of Lie Detection in downtown San Diego, Calif., for the last 30 years.

Backster had his work popularized in the book “The Secret Life of Plants” published in 1973, though he first published his findings in 1968. After “The Secret Life of Plants” came out, Backster made appearances on several talk shows and other media, featuring his perceiving plants. But he has also lectured extensively at scientific conferences. It was his research that got people talking to their plants and spurred the phenomenon of the “houseplant.”

Read the interview and watch the video here