Many apparently supernatural abilities sooner or later turn out to be due to hyperacuity of an existing sense system and in no way extrasensory ...

 On a February morning in 1966 Cleve Backster made a discovery that changed his life and could have far-reaching effects on ours. Backster was at that time an interrogation specialist who left the CIA to operate a New York school for training policemen in the techniques of using the polygraph, or ‘lie detector’. This instrument normally measures the electrical resistance of the human skin, but on that morning he extended its possibilities. Immediately after watering an office plant, he wondered if it would be possible to measure the rate at which water rose in the plant from the root to the leaf by recording the increase in leaf-moisture content on a polygraph tape. Backster placed the two psychogalvanic-reflex (PGR) electrodes on either side of the leaf of Dracaena massangeana, a potted rubber plant, and balanced the leaf into the circuitry before watering the plant again. There was no marked reaction to this stimulus, so Backster decided to try what he calls ‘the threat-to-well-being principle, a well-established method of triggering emotionality in humans’. In other words he decided to torture the plant. First of all he dipped one of its leaves into a cup of hot coffee, but there was no reaction, so he decided to get a match and burn the leaf properly. ‘At the instant of this decision, at 13 minutes and 55 seconds of chart time, there was a dramatic change in the PGR tracing pattern in the form of an abrupt and prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen. I had not moved, or touched the plant, so the timing of the PGR pen activity suggested to me that the tracing might have been triggered by the mere thought of the harm I intended to inflict on the plant.’

Backster went on to explore the possibility of such perception in the plant by bringing some live brine shrimp into his office and dropping them one by one into boiling water. Every time he killed a shrimp, the polygraph recording needle attached to the plant jumped violently. To eliminate the possibility of his own emotions producing this reaction, he completely automated the whole experiment so that an electronic randomiser chose odd moments to dump the shrimp into hot water when no human was in the laboratory at all. The plant continued to respond in sympathy to the death of every shrimp and failed to register any change when the machine dropped already dead shrimp into the water.

Impressed by the plant’s apparent sensitivity to stress, Backster collected specimens of other species and discovered that a philodendron seemed to be particularly attached to him. He no longer handles this plant with anything but the greatest care, and whenever it is necessary to stimulate it in order to produce a reaction, his assistant, Bob Henson, ‘plays the heavy’. Now the plant produces an agitated polygraph response every time Henson comes into the room, and seems to ‘relax’ when Backster comes near or even speaks in an adjoining room. (10) Enclosing the plant in a Faraday screen or a lead container has no effect, and it seems that the signals to which it responds do not fall within the normal electromagnetic spectrum. In more recent experiments Backster has found that fresh fruit and vegetables, mold cultures, amoebae, paramecia, yeast, blood, and even scrapings from the roof of a man’s mouth all show similar sensitivity to other life in distress.

This phenomenon, which Backster calls ‘primary perception’, has been substantiated by repetition of his work in other laboratories. (86) It raises awesome biological and moral questions; since thinking about it, I for one have had to give up mowing lawns altogether, but if it were to be taken to its logical limits we would end up, like the community in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, eating nothing but cabbages that have been certified to have died a natural death. The answer to the moral problem lies in treating all life with respect, and killing, with real reluctance, only that which is necessary for survival – but the biological problems are not as easily resolved.

If dying cells send out a signal to which other life responds, why do they do so? And why should such signals be more important to a potted plant than they are to us? Alarm signals are common to all social vertebrates at least. Sea gulls have specific calls that warn their breeding colonies of the approach of predators; ground squirrels and prairie marmots have an early-warning system that alerts their colonies to the danger of air raids by birds of prey. The function of the signals is so clear that those of crows and gulls have been recorded and broadcast across airfields to frighten these birds off the runways just before a plane is due to land. Very often the alarm is interspecific – terns, starlings, and pigeons feeding with gulls all take to flight at the sound of the gull alarm call; and seals dive into the water when nearby colonies of cormorants give notice of approaching danger. (69)

Alarm calls obviously have high survival value and work well across the species line, but not all species function on the same frequencies or even with the same sense organs, so there would be a strong natural pressure toward the evolution of a common signal – a sort of all-species SOS. Pressures of this kind seldom go unnoticed, and it would seem that Backster’s discovery could be nature’s answer to exactly this need. Presumably it would begin by a compromise signal being developed among groups of closely related species in response to a common predator. Then it would be to the predator’s advantage to be able to detect the signal and anticipate its effect on his prey, and finally both predators and prey would find the signal useful in giving warning of an avalanche or flood or some natural catastrophe that could affect them all.

The search of a signal accessible to all life would naturally narrow down to the lowest common denominator. All organisms consist of cells, and the existence of a system of communication among cells would provide the final answer. We have yet to prove conclusively that such a system exists, but the odds in favor of it get better all the time.

Man’s exclusion from this warning may be only apparent. I am beginning to suspect that unconsciously we are every bit as aware of the alarm as every pigeon or potted plant. It is a well-established fact that even in sleep we respond to certain significant sounds: a mother will sleep through the roar of a passing train but wake as soon as her child cries softly in another room.

Many mothers claim to know when something is wrong even before the baby sounds his audible alarm. They may be right and tuning in to the universal alarm, but many senses are known to be particularly acute immediately after childbirth, so they could be responding to ordinary stimuli that are very subtle indeed.

The male ostrich Struthio camelus has several hens, and each of them, in strict hierarchical order starting with the dominant female, lay five or six eggs in a hollow he scrapes out on the ground. The last of a large clutch, of twenty eggs, may therefore be laid three weeks after the first one, but all hatch within a few hours of each other about six weeks later. (330) This wonderful synchronisation is vital if the cock is to look after his brood effectively, and he ensures that it occurs by listening in to the eggs as they develop. By the sounds they make, he can assess their stage of development, and if one is too far advanced, he rolls it out of the nest and buries it for a while until the others catch up. Other eggs have parents less astute, and they synchronise themselves by listening to each other. Days before hatching, the chicks of most ground-living birds, which need to hatch and run off together almost immediately, break through the small shell membrane to gain access to the air space at the blunt end. They breathe this air, and the sound of their breathing can be heard by chicks in other eggs, who know by its rate how near to hatching their brood mates are. (91) In the Japanese quail Coturnix coturnix the rate builds up to three sounds a second, and it has been shown that an artificial click at this frequency accelerates the rate of hatching of all the eggs in a nest. The embryos in most eggs make little ‘pleasure’ calls in response to a change in position when the egg is held in the hand. These can be heard with a sensitive stethoscope, but it seems certain that breeding parent birds hear these sounds quite clearly and make the appropriate response to them.

In the 1880s two French scientists discovered a boy who appeared to be able to guess correctly the page numbers of books chosen at random by another person. The condition under which the boy operated best was with the experimenter standing with the light behind him and the book open between himself and the child. It turned out that the boy was able to read the numbers from the minute back-to-front reflections on the cornea of the experimenter’s eye. (221) These reflections were only one tenth of a millimeter high, but the child’s sense of sight was so acute that this was enough to give him the information he needed. This kind of sensitivity is very rare; it is unusual for anyone to be able to see so well, but supernormal does not mean supernatural. The boy’s sight was extraordinarily good, but a powerful sense of sight is a very natural phenomenon, and a vulture could probably do as well if it could be persuaded to try.

We have not yet been able to draw any hard and fast limits to the acuity of our senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Every new probe into their potential seems to push the limits of receptivity further and further out, and new spheres of perception are continually being discovered. Many apparently supernatural abilities sooner or later turn out to be due to hyperacuity of an existing sense system and in no way extrasensory, but there is one phenomenon that keeps cropping up and has yet to be explained satisfactorily in terms of the established senses. This is ‘thought transference’, or telepathy.

Lyall Watson 

Supernature