Jensen: How has the scientific community received your work?

Backster: With the exception of marginalized scientists like Sheldrake, the response has been first derision, then hostility, and now mostly silence.

At first, scientists called primary perception “the Backster effect,” perhaps hoping they could trivialize the observations by naming them after this wild man who claimed to see things that had been missed by mainstream science. The name stuck, but because primary perception can’t readily be dismissed, it is no longer a term of contempt.

At the same time that scientists were ridiculing my work, the popular press was paying very close attention to it, in dozens of articles and in books, such as Peter Tompkins’ The Secret Life of Plants. I never asked for any of the attention, and have never profited from it. People have always come to me seeking information.

Meanwhile, the botanical community was getting pretty upset. They wanted to “get to the bottom of all this
nonsense,” and planned to resolve the issue at the 1975 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York City. Arthur Galston, a well-known botanist at Yale University, got together a select group of scientists to, in my opinion, try to discredit my work; this is a typical response by the scientific community to controversial theories. I had already learned that you don’t go into these fights to win; you go in to survive. And I was able to do just that.

They’ve now gotten to where they can’t counter my research, so their strategy has been just to ignore me and hope I’ll go away. Of course, that’s not working either.

Jensen: What is their main criticism?

Backster: The big problem — and this is a big problem as far as consciousness research in general is concerned — is repeatability. The events I’ve observed have all been spontaneous. They have to be. If you plan them out in advance, you’ve already changed them. It all boils down to this: repeatability and spontaneity do not go together, and as long as members of the scientific community overemphasize repeatability in scientific methodology, they’re not going to get very far in consciousness research.

Not only is spontaneity important, but so is intent. You can’t pretend. If you say you are going to burn a leaf on the plant, but don’t mean it, nothing will happen. I hear constantly from people all over the country who want to know how to cause plant reactions. I tell them, “Don’t do anything. Go about your work; keep notes on what you are doing at specific times, and later compare them to your chart recording. But don’t plan anything, or the experiment won’t work.” People who do this often get the same results I have gotten, and win first prize at science fairs. But when they get to Biology 101, they’re told that what they have experienced is not important.

There have been a few attempts by scientists to replicate my experiment with the brine shrimp, but these have all been methodologically inadequate. When they learned that they had to automate the experiment, they merely went to the other side of a wall and used closed-circuit television to watch what occurred. Clearly, they weren’t removing their consciousness from the experiment, so it was very easy for them to fail. And let’s be honest: some of the scientists were relieved when they failed, because success would have gone against the body of scientific knowledge.

Jensen: The emphasis on repeatability seems antilife, because life itself is not repeatable. As Francis Bacon made clear, repeatability is inextricably tied to control, and control is fundamentally what Western science is all about, what Western culture is all about. For scientists to give up repeatability, they would have to give up control, which means they would have to give up Western culture, and that isn’t going to happen until this civilization collapses under the weight of its own ecological excesses.

Backster: I have given up trying to fight other scientists on this. But I know that, if they perform my experiment, even if it fails they will still see things that will change their consciousness. They will never be quite the same.

People who would not have said anything twenty years ago often say to me, “I think I can safely tell you now how you really changed my life with what you were doing back in the early seventies.” These scientists didn’t feel they had the luxury back then to rock the boat; their credibility, and thus their grant requests, would have been affected.

Jensen: Looking at your work, we are faced with several options: We can believe you are lying, along with everyone else who has ever made similar observations. We can believe that what you are saying is true, which would require that the whole notion of repeatability in scientific method be reworked, along with our notions of consciousness, communication, perception, and so on. Or we can believe that you have made a mistake. Is it possible that you’ve overlooked some strictly mechanistic explanation for your observations? One scientist has said there must be a loose wire in your lie detector.

Backster: In thirty-one years of research, I’ve found all my “loose wires.” No, I can’t see any mechanistic solution. Some parapsychologists believe I’ve mastered the art of psychokinesis, that I move the pen with my mind — which would be a pretty good trick in itself. But they overlook the fact that I’ve automated and randomized many of the experiments so that I’m not even aware of what’s going on until later, when I study the resulting charts and videotapes. The conventional explanations have worn pretty thin. One such explanation, proposed in an article in Harper’s, was static electricity: if you scuffle across the room and touch the plant, you get a response. But of course I seldom touch the plant during the observation, and in any case that response would be totally different.

Jensen: So what is the signal picked up by the plant?

Backster: I don’t know. Whatever it is, I don’t believe the signal dissipates over distance, which it would if we were dealing with an electromagnetic phenomenon. The signal from Phoenix, for example, was just as strong as if Brian O’Leary had been in the next room.

Also, we’ve attempted to obstruct the signal using lead and other materials, but we can’t shut it out. This makes me think the signal doesn’t actually go from here to there, but instead manifests itself in different places. I suspect that it takes no time for the signal to travel. There is no way, using earth distances, that we could test this, because if the signal were electromagnetic it would travel at the speed of light, and biological delays would consume more than the fraction of a second it would take for the signal to travel. The only way to test this would be in outer space.

I get support for this belief — that the signal is dependent on neither time nor distance — from some quantum physicists. There is a quantum theory called the Bell theorem, which states that two atoms distant from each other will sometimes change the direction of their spin simultaneously.

All this, of course, lands us firmly in the territory of the metaphysical, the spiritual. Think about prayer, for instance. If you were to pray to God, and God were on the far side of the galaxy, and your prayer traveled at the speed of light, your bones would long since be dust before God could respond. But if God — however you define God — is everywhere, the prayer doesn’t have to travel.

Jensen: Let’s get more concrete. You have a mental image of burning the plant, and the plant reacts. What, precisely, happens in that instant? How does the plant know to react?

Backster: I don’t claim to know. In fact, I have attributed a lot of my success at remaining active in this field — at not having been discredited — to the fact that I make no claim to know. You see, if I give a faulty explanation, it doesn’t matter how much data I have, or how many quality observations I’ve made. The mainstream scientific community will use the incorrect explanation as an excuse to throw out my data and observations. So I’ve always said that I don’t know how this happens. I’m an experimentalist, not a theorist.

Jensen: The plants’ capacity to perceive intent suggests to me a radical redefinition of consciousness.

Backster: You mean it would do away with the notion of consciousness as something on which humans have a monopoly?

Jensen: Humans and other so-called higher animals. According to Western thought, because plants don’t have brains, they cannot have consciousness.

Backster: I think Western science exaggerates the role of the brain in consciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level. Some very good research has been done on the survival of consciousness after bodily death. All of it points toward the notion that consciousness need not be specifically linked with gray matter. That notion is another straitjacket we need to discard. The brain may have something to do with memory, but a strong case can be made that much of our memory is not stored there.

Jensen: The notion of bodily memory is familiar to any athlete: when you practice, you are trying to build up memories in your muscles.

Backster: The brain might not even be part of that loop.

Jensen: I’ve also read articles on the physiological aftereffects of trauma — child abuse, rape, war. A lot of research shows that trauma imprints itself on different parts of the body; a rape victim might later feel a burning in her vagina, for example.

Backster: If I bump myself, I explain to the tissue in that area what happened. I don’t know how effective this method of healing is, but it can’t hurt.

Jensen: Have you also worked with what would normally be called inanimate materials?

Backster: I’ve shredded some substances and suspended them in agar. I get electric signals, but they’re not necessarily related to anything going on in the environment. The patterns are too crude for me to decipher. But I do suspect that consciousness is more widespread.

In 1987, I participated in a University of Missouri program that included a talk by Dr. Sidney Fox, who was then connected with the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami. Fox had recorded electric signals from a proteinlike material that showed properties strikingly similar to those of living cells. The simplicity of the material he used and the self-organizing capability it displayed suggest to me that biocommunication was present at the very earliest states in the evolution of life on this planet.

Of course, the Gaia hypothesis — that the earth is a great, big, working organism — fits in nicely with this. The planet is going to have the last word concerning the damage humans are inflicting upon it. It’s only going to take so much abuse, and then it may well burp and snort a little, and destroy a good bit of the population. I don’t think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis one step further and attribute such a defense strategy to a kind of planetary intelligence.

Jensen: How has your work been received in other parts of the world?

Backster: The Russians have always been very interested, not at all afraid to venture into these areas of research. In many ways, they seem much more attuned to spiritual concepts than most scientists in the West. And whenever I talk with Indian scientists — Buddhist or Hindu — about what I do, they say, “What took you so long?” My work dovetails very well with many of the concepts embraced by Hinduism and Buddhism.

Jensen: What are we Westerners afraid of?

Backster: The fear is that, if what I am observing is accurate, many of the theories on which we’ve built our lives need complete reworking. I’ve known biologists to say, “If Backster is right, we’re in trouble.” It would mean a radical rethinking of our place in the world. I think we’re seeing it already.

Our Western scientific community in general is in a difficult spot because, in order to maintain our current mode of scientific thought, we must ignore a tremendous amount of information. And more such information is being gathered all the time. Researchers are stumbling all over this biocommunication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modem instrumentation, for them to miss this fundamental attunement between living things. Only for so long are they going to be able to pretend it’s “loose wires.”

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