Do Plants Sense, Think, and Feel?

Do Plants Sense, Think, and Feel

On a night in 1966, interrogation specialist Cleve Backster discovered, by accident, that plants could have emotional responses to stimuli. Backster perceived these responses as similar to those of humans. He then formulated ideas about the thoughts and feelings of plants, and became a pioneer of what is now known as “plant science”.

A few years later, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird began to perform research to know if plants could detect, understand, and pinpoint pain. The findings where publish in 1973, on a book called “The Secret Life of Plants”. Unfortunately, the collective agreement by the scientific communicate was that Backster’s results were impossible to replicate. Soon after that, plant sentiency and plant science turned into a joke in the field of plant biology. (1)

Thankfully, a few researchers kept exploring how plants behave and communicate. They found plants can indeed talk, see, and smell, similar to how humans do. These are now considered plant senses by respected members of the scientific community. (2)

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