"Alan Gould" wrote in message
...
In article , Sacha
writes
But was it in that book that the experiment I'm thinking of was
cited? Do
you recall?

Yes, [I still have the book] there are a lot of experiments quoted
linking plants, their life, their feelings, their growth etc. to
electricity and magnetism. The one you refer to was actually a test
to
see if plants had extra-sensory perception - between them and/or to
other beings. I quote a part of the experiment:

'He [Clee Baxter, a lie detector expert]

That does not bode well for starters. Lie detectors have been shown
in controlled experiments to be totally unreliable, except insofar as
they intimidate the person being interviewed.

then conceived a worse threat:
he would burn the actual leaf to which the electrodes [of a lie
detector] were attached. The very instant he got the picture of
flame in
his mind, and before he could move for a match, there was a dramatic
change in the tracing pattern on the graph in the form of a
prolonged
upward sweep of the recording pen.

That is anecdotal. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence obtained fron
controlled experiments and therefore have exactly zero scientific
value.
Is he implying that the leaf had predictive powers?
And in any case, leaves don't have skins whose surface resistivity
behaves like that of humans.

Bakster had not moved, either towards
the plant or towards the recording machine. Could the plant have
been
reading his mind?' Later Bakster reluctantly concluded that it had.

That little lot,.I am afraid, can only be described as vintage crap.
It is on a par with the book I read which gave "evidence" that Jesus
did not in fact die on the cross, but was rescued by his close
friends, and after he had recovered from the ordeal, escaped to France
with Mary Magdalen, where they founded the Plantagenet family.

Franz