The Single Life: Single-Celled Organisms

It was a rainy night in LA, and I woke up this morning to find all my plants stretching their necks into the windowpane to try and cash in...Which got me on an anthropomorphic kick & thinking about the Backster Galvanic response studies, which conjecture that microbial life responds to our emotions. When interviewed, Backster talks about what happened one time he made coffee:

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.

The death of locality? Bell's Theorem, which justifies the reciprocal spinning of a remote atom in response to a local atom, could clarify. More about microbial coups after the jump...

Though this may seem very Edward Gorey, here's what Cleve Backster observed in:

We took the white cell samples, then sent the people home to watch television. I would have preselected a program that would elicit an emotional response from them--for example, showing a veteran of Pearl Harbor a documentary of West Pacific enemy aircraft attacks--and then I taped both the program and the response of their cells. What we found was that cells outside the body still react to the emotions you feel, even though you may be miles away. The greatest distance we've tested has been about three hundred miles. Brian O'Leary, who wrote Exploring Inner and Outer Space, left his white cells here in San Diego, then flew home to Phoenix. On the way he kept careful track of different things that aggravated him, carefully logging the time of each. The correlation remained over distance.

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