Stephan: Forty six years of doing my own experimental research, plus reading several thousand studies done by others has convinced me -- on the basis of data, not ideology, theology, or simple speculation -- that all living beings have a measure of consciousness, and that they are all interlinked and interdependent, joined in a matrix of life.
In support of that fact here is some new data that may fascinate you as much as it did me. I remember meeting the late Cleve Backster back in the early 70s when my friends Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins, both also now gone, were working on first a Harper's article and, then, the book that grew out of it, The Secret Life of Plants. Cleve was doing research showing that plants reacted through some kind of nonlocal linkage when shrimp across the room with which they had no physical connection, were dumped into boiling water. At the time materialist biologists derided this work as "fantasy" and "nonsense for the gullible." They were wrong as several thousand studies showing nonlocal linkages between organisms across the full spectrum of life have subsequently shown. Of course that doesn't stop materialists who, like climate deniers, and creationists, are not really interested in facts on this subject, however prestigious they may be in other areas. As with the other deniers they hold their views with religious fervor.
An interesting addition to the last article we published about the Mimosa plant and memory. The evidence for plant consciousness seems to be stacking more and more each day. How fascinating.
New research from a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia will change the way you think about the difference between plants and animals. Mimosa pundica plants, they found, can learn and remember, despite not having a brain. Those active little fern-like things always did seem sort of smart, though, didn’t they?
Scientists discover plants that can learn and remember
With a name that literally means ‘shy,” the Mimosa pundica is a particularly unique piece of flora, as it responds to touch by folding inward to protect itself from predators. Wondering if this was just a straightforward reflex, the Australian researchers rigged up an apparatus that would drop water on the plant in both high- and low-light environments. Much to their surprise, they found that the plant stopped opening and closing once it learned that the drops weren’t harmful. More impressively, the plants remembered that lesson several weeks after the initial training.
The scientists are unclear on the exact biology of what makes Mimosa pundica plants learn and remember, but they […]
