Plant perception (paranormal)

Plant perception or biocommunication is the paranormal idea that plants are sentient, that they respond to humans in a manner that amounts to ESP, and that they experience pain and fear. The idea is not accepted, as plants lack a nervous system. Paranormal claims in regard to plant perception are considered to be pseudoscience by many in the scientific community.

The idea is distinct from measured plant perception and chemical communication.

The notion that plants are capable of feeling emotions was first recorded in 1848, when Gustav Fechner, a German experimental psychologist, suggested that plants are capable of emotions and that one could promote healthy growth with talk, attention, attitude, and affection.

Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, began to conduct experiments on plants in the year 1900. Bose invented various devices and instruments to measure electrical responses in plants. He stated from his experiments that an electrical spasm occurs during the end of life for a plant.

According to biologist Patrick Geddes "In his investigations on response in general Bose had found that even ordinary plants and their different organs were sensitive— exhibiting, under mechanical or other stimuli, an electric response, indicative of excitation." 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.

In the 1960s 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".

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