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Sensing Plants – the Backster Effect


crystal sage

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http://en.epochtimes.com/news/5-4-22/28064.html

" A series of experiments conducted over 35 years by America’s foremost lie detector expert Cleve Backster has shown that plants can sense and respond to external stimuli.

Backster’s School of Lie Detection, San Diego, specialises in training intelligence organisations and police departments in the use of lie detectors.

One part of a lie detector measures the galvanic skin response (GSR) of a subject. The GSR is a measure of the resistance of the subject’s skin to a small electrical current, indicating a change in their level of physiological arousal.

Early one morning in October 1966, Mr Backster connected the polygraph’s GSR electrodes to the leaf of a Dragon plant and then watered the base of the plant. His intention was to measure the amount of time it would take for water to reach the leaf and change its electrical resistance.

While expecting a drop in resistance as the water entered the leaf, Mr Baxter was not prepared for what followed – the resistance instead increased, and according to the polygraph results, the plant generated a curve similar to that of a human being experiencing happiness.

Mr Backster then tried another experiment. “It was early in the morning and no other person was in the laboratory. My thought and intent was: ‘I’m going to burn that leaf!’” Backster recorded, “The very moment the imagery of burning that leaf entered my mind, the polygraph recording pen moved rapidly to the top of the chart.”

He went to get a box of matches and returned, but realised the polygraph was already so agitated that there would be no observable response. So he took the matches back to his secretary’s office. According to Mr Backster, when he returned to the polygraph “the thing just evened right out again, which really rounded it out and gave me a very, very high quality observation.”

Over the next 35 years Mr Backster performed repeated blind, controlled and automated experiments to examine this phenomenon, which he calls “Primary Perception Biocommunication”, and others know as “the Backster Effect”.

His research found, among other things, that plants can perceive and measurably respond to intentional human thought and actions. Allegedly, Mr Backster’s experiments have been duplicated by scientists thousands of times using many variations."

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.

http://www.derrickjensen.org/backster.html

.."DJ: Primary perception?

CB: I couldn't call what I was witnessing extrasensory perception, because plants don't have most of the first five senses to start with. This perception on the part of the plant seemed to take place at a much more basic, or primary, level. Thus the name.

Anyway, what emerged was an experiment in which I arranged for shrimp to be dropped automatically at random intervals into simmering water, while recording the reaction of plants at the other end of the lab.

DJ: How did you tell whether the plants were responding to the death of the shrimp, or to your emotions?

CB: It is very very hard to eliminate the interconnection between the experimenter and the plants being tested. Even the briefest association with the plants--just a few hours--is enough to let them become attuned to you. Then, even though you automate the experiment and leave the laboratory, and even though you set a time delay switch for random intervals, guaranteeing you are entirely unaware of when the experiment starts, the plants will remain attuned to you, no matter where you go. At first, my partner and I used to go to a bar a block away, and after a time we began to grow suspicious that the plants were not responding to the death of the brine shrimp at all, but instead to the rising and falling levels of excitement in our conversations. Finally, we came up with a way around this. We had someone else buy the plants, and store them in another part of the building we didn't frequent. On the day of the experiment we went to the holding area, brought the plants in, hooked them up, and left. This meant the plants were in a strange environment, they had the pressure of the electrodes, they had a little trickle of electricity going through their leaves, and they'd been deserted. Because they were not attuned to us or to anyone else, they began "looking around" for anything that would acquaint them with their environment. Then, and only then, did something so subtle as the deaths of the brine shrimp get picked up by the plants.

DJ: Do plants become attuned over time only to humans, or do they become attuned to others in their environment as well?

CB: I'll answer that with an example. Often I hook up a plant and just go about my business, then observe what makes it respond. One day back in New York City I was making coffee. The coffee maker we had in the lab was a dripolater, where you put a teakettle on, boil the water, pour it in, and it drips down. We normally didn't empty the teakettle, but just topped it off later. This particular day, however, I needed the teakettle for something else, and so poured the scalding water down the sink. The plant being monitored showed huge reactions. It turns out that if you don't put chemicals or very hot water down the sink for a long time, a little jungle begins to grow down there. Under a microscope it's almost as scary as the bar scene in Star Wars. Well, the plant was responding to the death of the microbes. "

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the mythbusters did an experiment on this, and they got some positive results from the plants when they had thoughts of hurting them

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This makes me wonder. How would the plant respond if it noticed me eating a salad? Would it respond to different salad dressings? That's actually very interesting. I haven't heard of this until this thread.

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I remember watching a show on the Discovery channel a few years back that documented research of plants communicating. It seemed that they sort of communicate through low frequency sounds through their roots. If one of the plants caught a disease than it would send messages to other plants to create more of a certain chemical.

You know, they always say you should talk to your plants in a friendly manner, but not yell to make them grow better.

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I remember watching a show on the Discovery channel a few years back that documented research of plants communicating. It seemed that they sort of communicate through low frequency sounds through their roots. If one of the plants caught a disease than it would send messages to other plants to create more of a certain chemical.

You know, they always say you should talk to your plants in a friendly manner, but not yell to make them grow better.

Before I read this, I thought that was just the carbon dioxide from your breath causing the plants to be healthier. At least that's what we were taught in school anyhow.

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:) This new awareness of the life force of the plant life...brings a new understandings and respect to consuming foods!!!

So that also points out the remarkable understanding of the ancients.. in the 'chi'..energy of the foods!! and how it's preparation affected the consumers!!

obviously stressed out veges...and foods..wouldn't be as beneficial for the consumer or as 'tasty' ,as foods cooked with love and respect for the ingredients.... eg home cooking or a great chef... also I suppose that brings an understanding of the intuitive reasoning of saying 'Grace'... of giving thanks to God..or nature for our foods... or the religous preparations of some of our foods..eg Kosher preparations... it is calming..or gently releasing the life force of the foods...or gently assimilating them to our 'life forces'... why eating when you are angry or stressed can cause indigestion .,..etc...

So Mass produced foods... How would that rate... ??? Would it automatically switch off..aneasthetize the feelings of the plant life...then too we must think of the stress levels/emotions of the meats we consume!!!

Gives another reasoning for consuming free range foods!!!

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Thats very interesting...

But I hope it's not true, because I've got a couple of Poinsettas experiencing a sloww and painful death right now... I'm feeling really guilty! :( Do they know of all the other house plants that have met their demise in my care? :o I've got one that has been through alot and I've had it forever, it has witnessed it all. Is it telling my other plants what I have done? :no:

(5 minutes later)

I just watered my plants (and sang them a song)... :innocent:

Edited by Violet_Blue
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I don't see why plants can't communicate with each other, human telepathy may be pushing the boundaries a little though. I'm not 100% certain on that.

Sounds like you need to weed out that traitor Violet :w00t:

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Hate to be the one to do this, but Mr. Backster, did not use any controls in his "experiment" and has been debunked. The myth busters Busted him as well.

http://skepdic.com/plants.html

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/15726/

\

"n 1969 Marcel [Joseph Vogel] gave a course in creativity for engineers at IBM. It was at this time that he read an article in Argosy magazine entitled “Do Plants Have Emotions?” about the work of polygraph expert Cleve Backster into the responsiveness of plants to human interaction. Despite initial rejection of the concept of human-plant communication, he decided to explore these strange claims.

He was able to duplicate the Backster effect of using plants as transducers for bio-energetic fields that the human mind releases, demonstrating that plants respond to thought. He used split leaf philodendrons connected to a Wheatstone Bridge that would compare a known resistance to an unknown resistance. He learned that when he released his breath slowly there was virtually no response from the plant. When he pulsed his breath through the nostrils, as he held a thought in mind, the plant would respond dramatically. It was also found that these fields, linked to the action of breath and thought, do not have a significant time domain to them. The responsiveness of the plants to thought was also the same whether eight inches away, eight feet, or eight thousand miles! Based on the results of the experiments the inverse square law does not apply to thought. This was the beginning of Marcel’s transformation from being a purely rational scientist to becoming a spiritual or mystical scientist.

Basically it was found that plants respond more to the thought of being cut, burned, or torn than to the actual act. He discovered that if he tore a leaf from one plant a second plant would respond, but only if he was paying attention to it. The plants seemed to be mirroring his own mental responses. He concluded that the plants were acting like batteries, storing the energy of his thoughts and intentions. He said of these experiments: “I learned that there is energy connected with thought. Thought can be pulsed and the energy connected with it becomes coherent and has a laser-like power.”(Rumi Da, purveyor of fine crystals).*"

"Although similar experiments [to Backster's] have been repeated thousands of times, all over the world, for more than 15 years, we have failed to grasp the implications. Part of the problem is that Backster is not a "scientist" and those guys don't like to admit that anyone else knows anything. That's pride and arrogance at its worst, but not so unusual in the laboratory. Even the rest of us find it hard to believe that the "primitives" were actually communicating with their plants through rituals and sacrifice. We simply refuse to believe that there could be any "intelligence" around here but us, while we live in a world smarter than us at every turn. It is obvious that our collective view of primitive religion is in need of some revision.*"

It seems believable to me!!!

this is what scientists are discovering...

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5762/812

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~jvivanco/paper...harsh_trend.pdf

"RALEIGH, N.C. – Hardly articulate, the tiny strangleweed, a pale parasitic plant, can sense the presence of friends, foes, and food, and make adroit decisions on how to approach them....But the late Nobel Prize-winning plant geneticist Barbara McClintock called plant cells "thoughtful." Darwin wrote about root-tip "brains." Not only can plants communicate with each other and with insects by coded gas exhalations, scientists say now, they can perform Euclidean geometry calculations through cellular computations and, like a peeved boss, remember the tiniest transgression for months.

To a growing number of biologists, the fact that plants are now known to challenge and exert power over other species is proof of a basic intellect.......

"If intelligence is the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, then, absolutely, plants are intelligent," agrees Leslie Sieburth, a biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

For philosophers, one of the key findings is that two cuttings, or clones, taken from the same "mother plant" behave differently even when planted in identical conditions.

"We now know there's an ability of self-recognition in plants, which is highly unusual and quite extraordinary that it's actually there," says Dr. Trewavas. "But why has no one come to grips with it? Because the prevailing view of a plant, even among plant biologists, is that it's a simple organism that grows reproducibly in a flower pot."

...Still, a new NASA grant awarded to the university to study gravitational effects on crop plants came in part due to new findings that plants have neurotransmitters very similar to humans' - capable, perhaps, of offering clues on how gravity affects more sentient beings. The National Science Foundation has awarded a $5 million research grant to pinpoint the molecular clockwork by which plants know when to grow and when to flower.

The new field of plant neurobiology holds its first conference - The First Symposium on Plant Neurobiology - in May in Florence, Italy."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0303/p01s03-usgn.html

http://discover.com/issues/apr-02/features/featplants/

"Some of the most complex studies came out of these controlled environments. In 1988 Marcel Dicke and his colleagues at Wageningen University in the Netherlands offered evidence that plants under insect attack could enlist help from the enemies of their enemies. Dicke found that when spider mites attack lima bean plants, the plants release a chemical SOS that attracts another mite that preys on the spider mite. Mechanically damaged plants do not produce the cues; most likely, only elicitors in the saliva of the insect can trigger the plant to produce the right molecules. "Today," Dicke says, "the scientific community agrees that plants talking to their bodyguards is likely to be a characteristic of most, if not all, plant species." Even the gingko—a species that has been around for 150 million years—can communicate chemically with insects, he adds. "

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http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_articl...0010-001034.htm

:DB) Or as many frustrated gardeners may be able to verify.... the number of times after a bad harvest... or a well nurtured fruit tree in the garden continually gives a disapointing crop... and you start threatening the plant... giving it one more year to grow a decent crop...or else an axe will be taken to it...

and low and behold... the threat works!!! and a bumper crop is harvested with the juiciest fruits ever!!!

:tu: I've wittnessed this several times!!!

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Water responds the same way as well...I read a book on it but I forget what it was titled. I'll look it up when I'm feeling less lazy :)

I don't think that the plants has as complex emotions as humans, but I do think that they record and absorb any energy around them, bad or good.

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Plants seem to operate on chemical messaging/sensing... just like animals and sense the chemicals emmited in fear... anger...peace...

plants also appear to respond to music.... so sound waves are important... is it all about vibration??

http://www.earthpulse.com/src/subcategory....&subcatid=6

"Playing the right tune stimulates the formation of a plant's protein. "The length of a note corresponds to the real time it takes for each amino acid to come after the next," according to Sternheimer, who studied quantum physics and mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey.

In experiments by Sternheimer, he claims that tomatoes exposed to his melodies grew two-and-a-half times as large as those which were untreated. Some of the treated plants were sweeter in addition to being significantly larger. The musical sequences stimulated three tomato growth promoters, cytochrome C, and thaumatin (a flavoring compound). According to Sternheimer in the New Scientist, "Six molecules were being played to the tomatoes for a total of three minutes a day."

Sternheimer also claims to have stopped the mosaic virus by playing note sequences that inhibited enzymes required by the virus. This virus would have harmed the tomato plants.

The note sequences used by the inventor are very short and need only be played one time. For example, the sequence for for cytochrome C lasts just 29 seconds. According to Sternheimer, "on average, you get four amino acids played per second" in this series.

The inventor also issued a warning for those repeating his experiments. He warns to be careful with the sound sequences because they can affect people. "Don't ask a musician to play them," he says. Sternheimer indicated that one of his musicians had difficulty breathing after playing the tune for cytochrome C."

sound..chemicals... moods all have vibration.....and all seem to be detectable at some level...conscious or subconscious maybe only at DNA level for some...who are so distracted with life and living, that there awareness levels are desensitized....

Hence the modern push towards meditation...and to accasionally 'stop and smell the roses'...take stock....

Edited by crystal sage
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There is a book about it titled: The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I've read it many times as a kid and it's at least 25 years old cos my dad had it for ages. I highly recommend it to anyone inerested in the subject.

Edit: I remember seeing a documentary about the songs of plants. The scientists somehow managed to record the sounds plants made. Often all the plants of one area sang together. It was extraordinary and breathtaking.

And LOL @ Razer, I'm a vegetarian ;):P:lol:

Edited by Alara
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A lot of the time crystal sage, I do not agree with you, but that last post of yours is what I have been trying to tell everyone.

It's all about vibrations. higher pitch is better, to a certain extent. Noticing them in the first place is the important part.

I stopped meditating because it messed with me to much, but now I am getting back into it. I seem to have lost my skill though.

-Muddy

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A lot of the time crystal sage, I do not agree with you, but that last post of yours is what I have been trying to tell everyone.

It's all about vibrations. higher pitch is better, to a certain extent. Noticing them in the first place is the important part.

I stopped meditating because it messed with me to much, but now I am getting back into it. I seem to have lost my skill though.

-Muddy

''

You might think this is pretty weird.,.. but about 15 years ago... when I'd gone thru this really weird experience with plants ( it started in 1985 after a bout of the flu....could hardly move for about 6 weeks..) after further reading it was ... could have been the awakening of the Kundalini.... I ,who hadn't heard of the thing, before thought I was going crazy... :blush: )when I could see auras around people etc...and do a little of this telekenises stuff of making the mind move things etc..just thru concentration... I could also hear this high pitched scream from the plants when they needed water.... it sounded similar to when you switched the old tv's off.....

So this vibration idea...and sound waves idea therefore rang true with me too...

Edited by crystal sage
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The whole world seems to have a hum or buzz. I sense "hear" this all the time if I listen.

People have a buzz, but it's much higher pitched. It sounds like TVs with the volume all the way up, but on mute. I sense this only in deep meditation.

I was meditating one time and lost control of my body. My arms outstreched and my head looking up. Me going what in the world is going on. then my mouth says "hi god." that is when this huge surge of energy shot up my spine. At first after doing a lot of research I thought I may have awakened the kundalini. Now though I am not so sure. And if I did I definately didn't utilize it the right way lol. It just kind of happened.

That is what made me stop meditating. Now I find it hard to get to the deeper parts as fast as I used to.

Would people believe me if I said why I came to this thread in the first place? NO. I guess I will say anyway though. One time in meditation I got this feeling. I looked in the direction it came from and then started a 2 sec. "conversation" with a plant... It wasn't words... It was feeling. It only "said" one thing... It "sent" a loving feeling at me, and so I did the same to it. That day was about 2 years ago. After that I could feel different energies from different plants. I can sense it much stronger in forests and away from other people.

I think this hum to the world around me that I am sensing could be consciousness itself...

-Muddy

Edited by muddyfrog
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The whole world seems to have a hum or buzz. I sense "hear" this all the time if I listen.

People have a buzz, but it's much higher pitched. It sounds like TVs with the volume all the way up, but on mute. I sense this only in deep meditation.

I was meditating one time and lost control of my body. My arms outstreched and my head looking up. Me going what in the world is going on. then my mouth says "hi god." that is when this huge surge of energy shot up my spine. At first after doing a lot of research I thought I may have awakened the kundalini. Now though I am not so sure. And if I did I definately didn't utilize it the right way lol. It just kind of happened.

That is what made me stop meditating. Now I find it hard to get to the deeper parts as fast as I used to.

Would people believe me if I said why I came to this thread in the first place? NO. I guess I will say anyway though. One time in meditation I got this feeling. I looked in the direction it came from and then started a 2 sec. "conversation" with a plant... It wasn't words... It was feeling. It only "said" one thing... It "sent" a loving feeling at me, and so I did the same to it. That day was about 2 years ago. After that I could feel different energies from different plants. I can sense it much stronger in forests and away from other people.

I think this hum to the world around me that I am sensing could be consciousness itself...

-Muddy

what you are describing feels like what others refer to as 'enlightenment'.... the soul...mind .. is momentarily freed from it's shell ( the body) I had a similar experience in 1990...when I felt myself leave my body..( astral??) and observed what I 'knew' to be my essense..soul..leave thru the top of my skull (crown chakra I learned later) like a sparkly fountain... felt release freedom... the connection to all ... including plants..( I tried a rock...as I remember reading somewhere about Buddhists becoming 'One' with a rock or a stone...it was possible!!!).. it was like your essense ..atoms. combined with all...and that what ever you focused on..you realized that you were a part of...and you could view the world from each perspective!!!! You also deep down realized this was a spiritual moment... a lesson... a reminder... when I thought of Karma... my regrets... I was immediately found myself in a buzzing pool...of consciousnesses.. observed what they say about burdens of Karma...some minds...consciousness were all melted blended together like a sea of experiences...some where still lumpy with baggage experiences they haven't let go of...refused to melt!!!...I could hear a voice that I knew was from a person I wanted to appologise to from many years ago... I started with my excuses... but she seemed to be able to look into my soul.. and knew I was sincere...and laughed and said that it had been OK for quite a while... the feeling of release... forgiveness was amazing!!!I could feel it melt!! I knew to that it was only me who created and held that knot in my soul

....

Ever since this amazing experience I have felt a closeness ...connection to all... it changes you.. Life becomes more synchronistic...magic.... often though :lol: in the normal mundane realities of life... chores... family problems... you forget a while... then.. you take a moment.mentally go back to that place.. and the smile comes back....

Edited by crystal sage
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Ever since this amazing experience I have felt a closeness ...connection to all... it changes you.. Life becomes more synchronistic...magic.... often though :lol: in the normal mundane realities of life... chores... family problems... you forget a while... then.. you take a moment.mentally go back to that place.. and the smile comes back....

That is exactly how I am. Life just gets more amazing with each passing day. :yes:

My life can never go back to the way it was...

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Plants and insects

Communicating chemically ....vibrationally...

http://www.edwardwillett.com/Columns/plantcommunication.htm

"Over three seasons spanning 1996 through 1998, researchers from the University of California in Davis monitored wild tobacco plants growing near sagebrush. They clipped the leaves of some of the sagebrush plants to mimic the damage caused by insects. The sagebrush plants responded with a puff of a chemical called methyl jasmonate. In response, tobacco plants downwind immediately begin boosting the level of an enzyme called PPO that makes their leaves less tasty to plant-eating insects. Within minutes of the clipping of the sagebrush, the plants' PPO levels quadrupled.

It worked, too. Tobacco plants next to the clipped sagebrush suffered sixty percent less damage from grasshoppers and caterpillars than tobacco plants next to unclipped sagebrush.

Then, last fall, scientists at Kyoto University in Japan let spider mites loose on lima-bean plants and tracked the plants' responses. They found five different defense mechanisms. First, each injured plant released a chemical that changed its flavor, making it less attractive to the mites (although I personally nd it hard to imagine anything less attractive than the taste of a lima bean to begin with).

Then the plants released other chemicals that drifted away. Other lima bean plants received the chemical and immediately begin giving off the same chemicals, making themselves less tasty and warning still more lima bean plants, before the mites even reached them.

Most amazingly, some of the released chemicals had the effect of summoning a whole new batch of mites--mites that, rather than eating lima bean plants, preferred to eat the spider mites attacking the lima bean plants.

The Japanese researchers even found that the plants could distinguish between insect damage and crushing damage. They crushed some leaves and stems and found that although the injured plants released chemicals, the surrounding plants ignored them, somehow recognizing no real danger existed. (It appears that substances in the attacking insects' saliva are required to trigger the anti-insect chemical response in the plant.)

Other examples from agriculture are also known. Corn under attack from armyworms, for instance, puts out a chemical signal that attracts a predatory wasp. The wasp lays its eggs inside the armyworm; when they hatch, the wasp larva eat the armyworm.

And a study released last week shows that this kind of signaling exists not only in agricultural situations and in labs, but in the wild--which means it is likely widespread throughout the plant kingdom.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, discovered that when a species of wild tobacco plant that grows in the southwestern United States is damaged by hornworms (the larva of the hawkmoth) it releases chemicals that attract predatory insects that kill the larva."

B) Humans communicating chemically....

http://www.monell.org/chemeco.htm

Scientists have isolated the genes that encode odortypes and are investigating how the coding is accomplished. Studies are underway to explore the influence of odortypes on social interactions in animals and humans.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neur...eb2/Bartek.html

Department stores around the country are currently selling fragrances for men and women that supposedly contain pheromones, the mysterious chemicals responsible for intraspecies subliminal communication....

Pheromones are chemicals employed in intraspecies communication. Pheromones may be proteins, steroids, or any other chemical released by the body. The vomernasal organ (VNO) houses the chemoreceptors involved in detecting pheromones (3). The sensory system that perceives pheromones is similar in many ways to the olfactory system, particularly in that both systems transduce chemicals. Additionally, smell can be "emotionally potent" in humans (4) , and possibly other animals, just as pheromone detection could affect animals' emotional states, at least according to popular culture (5) .

:tu:

Ergo.... on some subconscious level all life communicates to each other thru chemical vibrations....

Chemical vibrations create various emotions in man... and emotions create neurochemicals... that have vibrations etc...

Man has developed speach..and other communcations skills to transmit these feelings...needs...so are often not as sensitive to the messages that the body is sending biochemically...neurochemically... yet it is all still functioning .. in an unconscious...subconsious manner... yet we still pick this signals up at a subconsious... intuitive level ..on accasion... as gut feelings????

I therefore suggest that we also receive and communicate these signals feelings... emotions .. on some level with all life forms... including plants... insects.. and animals.... and we in turn receive info from them... this is seen on some levels as telepathy... like radio waves...vibrational ..chemical communication...

Our link to all !!!!

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Aromatherapy is now a widely practised complementary medicine, using aromatic plant, flower, leaf, seed, bark and fruit essential oils to aid healing. The essential oils are usually extracted by a steam distillation process, and tend to be used either:

-- holistically, where the oils are used (often with massage) to treat emotional and physical complaints

-- clinically, used in combination with orthodox medical treatment (although this remains rare in the UK)

-- aesthetically, which accounts for perhaps the most widespread usage, where the oils are used on special burners or diffusers in the home, or added to baths

How does it work?

Aromatherapy works on our sense of smell and by absorption into the bloodstream. About 15 per cent of the air we inhale goes to the roof of the nose, where olfactory receptors transport odours straight to a part of the brain called the limbic system. This area is connected with instinct, mood and emotion, and it's thought that aromatherapy may stimulate the release of chemicals which in turn play a part in unlocking emotions (think how even the merest whiff of floor wax can zip you back to the classroom).

Essential oils enter the body by inhalation and by absorption through the skin. They affect our body system in three ways - pharmalogically, physiologically and psychologically:

*

Once inhaled, aromatic signals are sent to the part of the brain where they exert a direct effect on the mind and emotions

*

The chemical constituents of the oils are carried in the bloodstream to all areas of the body, where they react with chemistry in a way similar to drugs

*

Certain oils have an affinity with particular areas of the body and their properties have a balancing, sedating, or stimulating effect on the body system

*

Some of the oils leave our body system within hours (they are so-called top notes e.g. bergamot, neroli, lemon, orange, lemongrass, peppermint, thyme, cinnamon and clove),

*

Others leave within one to two days (which are middle notes e.g. geranium, lavender, rosewood, rosemary and marjoram) or

*

Within one week (which are base notes e.g. sandalwood, patchouli, myrrh, frankincense, cedarwood and vetiver).

*

Most are exhaled, others are eliminated in urine, faeces, and perspiration.

http://www.labofflowers.com/answersbook1.html

What are essential oils?

Essential oils are fragrant, highly concentrated, volatile extracts from plants. They are found in such varied parts of the plant as the leaves, spices, fruits, woods, roots, seeds and flowers. The flower is part of the plant's "communication," providing rich nectar, hallucinogenic colors, scents, varying textures and markings to entice specific insects to come and sample its splendors. Scent is the final step in the flower's ability to screen its callers.

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