“Have You Heard The News? Plants Can Feel! They Can Feel The Pain! They Cry Out! Plants Remember Everything!” – Vladimir Soloukhin
In 1972 Vladimir Soloukhin published his book “Grass” after becoming fascinated by the magic and mystery of plants partly as a result of scientific experiments done with an ordinary potted geranium which was connected to an encephalograph. Pushkin, a professor and doctor of psychological sciences and his colleague, Fetisov were keen to get a response from Fetisov’s pet plant, a geranium and to show this via the recorded patterns on a graph when the plant, attached to an encephalograph was stimulated.
Involving a hypnotist they set out to show that whilst in a pure state under hypnosis their subject, Tanya would change moods and that the encephalograph attached to the plant would record any responses with an appropriate pattern on the graph. It soon became obvious that Tanya’s moods were reflected by the plant with an electrical reaction.
At first they implanted in her that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, then another that she was freezing in harsh raw weather. At each change of the mood the plant responded appropriately. “We were able”, says Pushkin, “to get an electrical reaction as many times as we worked, even to the most arbitrary commands.”
Next they decided to test whether the plant could detect a lie as claimed by an American criminologist, Backster. So they asked Tanya to choose a number between 1 and 10 and told her not to reveal the number she had chosen, even when pressed to do so. Then they went through the numbers slowly and asked her each time if it was the number she had chosen. To each number Tanya said “No” and whilst Pushkin and Fetisov could not distinguish which number she had chosen, the plant gave a specific and clear reaction when the number 5 was counted. It was the number that she had chosen and promised not to reveal.
In his conclusion, Pushkin speculated that the vegetal cells in the plant react to processes taking place in the human nervous system. He stated that “Perhaps between two informational systems, the plant cells and the nervous system, a specific link exists. The language of the plant cell may be related to that of the nerve cell. These wholly different living cells seemed to be able to ‘understand’ one another.”
These experiments and many others excited Soloukhin who found another research scientist had experimented with a geranium.
To be continued
Ref: The Secret Life of Plants Peter Tomkins & Christopher Bird p. 70 – 73
