Plant perception or biocommunication may denote not only that plants are sentient - they can certainly communicate through chemical signals and have complex responses to stimuli - but that may respond to humans in a manner that amounts to ESP and that may be interpreted as experience of pain and fear.
The theory is apt to be received with contempt in scientific circles while skeptics criticize the conditions of many observations of 'plant perception' and state that, since plants lack a complex nervous-sensory system, they are not capable of having feelings or perceiving human emotions or intentions.[3][4]
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The notion that plants are capable of feeling emotions was first recorded in 1848, when Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German experimental psychologist, suggested that plants are capable of emotions and that one could promote healthy growth with talk, attention, and affection.
Indian scientist Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose began to conduct experiments on plants in the year 1900. He found that every plant and every part of a plant appeared to have a sensitive nervous system and responded to shock by a spasm just as an animal muscle does. In addition Bose found that plants grew more quickly amidst pleasant music and more slowly amidst loud noise or harsh sounds. He also claimed that plants can "feel pain, understand affection etc.," from the analysis of the nature of variation of the cell membrane potential of plants under different circumstances. According to him, a plant treated with care and affection gives out a different vibration compared to a plant subjected to torture.
One visitor to his laboratory, the vegetarian playwright George Bernard Shaw, was intensely disturbed upon witnessing a demonstration in which a cabbage had "convulsions" as it boiled to death.[1] Bose found that the effect of manures, drugs, and poisons could be determined within minutes, providing plant control with a new precision. He repeated his tests on metals, administering poisons to tin, zinc, and platinum, and obtained astonishing responses which, when plotted on a graph, appeared precisely like those of poisoned animals. In conclusion he said: "Do not these records tell us of some property of matter common and persistent? That there is no abrupt break, but a uniform and continuous march of law?"[2]
Bose's experiments stopped at this conclusion, but Cleve Backster an Interrogation Specialist with the CIA, conducted research that led him to believe that plants can communicate with other lifeforms. Backster's interest in the subject began in February 1966 when he tried to measure the rate at which water rises from a philodendron's root into its leaves. Because a polygraph or 'lie detector' can measure electrical resistance, which would alter when the plant was watered, he attached a polygraph to one of the plant's leaves. Backster stated that, to his immense surprise, "the tracing began to show a pattern typical of the response you get when you subject a human to emotional stimulation of short duration".
In 1975 K.A. Horowitz, D.C. Lewis and E.L. Gasteiger published an article in Science giving their results when repeating one of Backster's effects - plant response to the killing of brine shrimp in boiling water. The researchers grounded the plants to reduce electrical interference and rinsed them to remove dust particles. As a control three of five pipettes contained brine shrimp while the remaining two only had water: the pipettes were delivered to the boiling water at random. This investigation used a total of 60 brine shrimp deliveries to boiling water while Backster's had used 13. Positive correlations did not occur at a rate great enough to be considered statistically significant. Backster criticized them for misunderstanding certain fundamentals of what he termed "primary perception", such as that the time spent rinsing the plants might have affected their relationship to the experimenters.
The television show MythBusters performed an experiment to verify or disprove the concept. The tests were done by connecting plants to a polygraph galvanometer and employing actual and imagined harm upon the plants or upon others in the plant's vicinity. The galvanometer showed some kind of reaction about one third of the time. The experimenters, who were in the room with the plant, surmised that the vibrations of their actions or the room itself could have affected the polygraph. After isolating the plant the polygraph showed a response slightly less than one third of the time. Later experiments with an EEG failed to detect anything. When the presenters dropped eggs randomly into boiling water the plant had no reaction whatsoever. The show concluded that the theory was not true. The anomalous readings were unrepeated during their tests and it was stated that "if it's not repeatable it's not science." [3]