Content area
Full Text
PRIMARY PERCEPTION: BIOCOMMUNICATION WITH PLANTS, LIVING FOODS, AND HUMAN CELLS by Cleve Backster. Anza, CA: White Rose Millennium Press, 2003. Pp. 168. $15.95 (paperback). ISBN: 0966435435.
The part of me that is attracted to clever, multileveled titles wants to call this book "Tracings," because it reads like a cumulative polygraph tracing of Cleve Backster's public life. Backster's writing is so direct and straightforward that one gets the impression of reading the undistorted truth, WYSIWYG, emerging directly from his viscera. But like a polygraph tracing, this book only reports the surface activities - leaving the reader to infer Backster's personal biases, hopes, or expectations, from the surface tracings. Fortunately for the reader, Backster's tracings are not difficult to interpret.
Cleve Backster is a nicely credentialed expert on human polygraph testing (lie detection). He was a pioneer in that area with the CIA, ran a private sector polygraph business and school, and contributed key techniques and methods to the field during its development. In 1966 he whimsically attached GSR electrodes to a newly watered dracaena plant in his laboratory to see if the polygraph recording would be affected as the water rose in the plant. Instead, he found serendipitously that the chart-recording pen jumped in synchrony with a rather vicious thought that entered his mind - to burn a leaf of the plant. This was his "Aha!" experience, after which he attached electrophysiological electrodes to a variety of nonhuman things in search of "primary perception," which is his term for psi. This book summarizes these years of mostly informal experimentation.
Be clear - this is not a scientific treatise! Those interested in the science of biocommunication are advised to go elsewhere. Backster provides only the skimpiest of literature reviews, mentioning the names of Jagdish Chandra Bose and Harry Saxton Burr without even providing details or commentary on their works. He does not include the details of his own peer-reviewed experimental study (Backster, 1968). He briefly mentions but doesn't describe the failed replication attempts by others (Galston & Slayman, 1979; Horowitz, Lewis, & Gasteiger, 1975; Kmetz, 1977), arguing that they didn't sufficiently nurture the plant-experimenter relationship. And Backster offers no critical comments regarding his results or observations, such as their shortcomings, rival hypotheses, need for additional controls, or...