Since "The secret life of the plants" by Byrd and Tompkins 1974 about the Cleve Backster effect from 1966, little influence was seen in the sciences and humanities.
i have been wondering, how little his great descriptions of the Cleve Backster effect and much more had influence on the sciences and humanities, including agriculture and biology/botanics.
In short he proved, that plants first can be influenced positively as negatively by different kinds of Music and can be made grow better. Secondly -and this is the more difficult part and maybe the reason of fear and for not continuing his research - that plants can read your mind and react , which you can be measured by an electric device which was connected to the leaf (Kind of Skin resistance measurement).
(Backster, Cleve: Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods and Human Cells. White Rose Millenium Press, Anza, CA, 2003;)
Many old cultures gave concerts in the fields to inhance the growing of their plants. They would not have done so if without success. But still our Industry prefers to sell chemical stuff and to pollute the Environment instead of giving Music to the fields. - But don´t we Need every means to feed the growing earth Population?
I invite you to answer to me what kind of agriculture you would prefer? What do you think about the whole issue?
Dear Thomas,
Dear All,
Being as ignorant as I am in this field, I know but a little bit on the impact of music on plants as well as the plants’ communication opportunities. It would be a chance to show URLs or other easily accessible places on this. As to my personnel opinion, I would prefer the musical crop production and protection if available. Of course, I downloaded “Le cru et le cuit” but to read it needs some time. Regarding the connection between science and humanities, I try to amalgamate humanities into my lectures and publications but the general lack of interest of editors and audience hamper permanently. Please, have a look at my RG contributions.
Dear all, thanks a lot for your interest and first commentaries on this subject. Especially thanks to Ivo for his example from Timor. I try to collect these and all other available material now. Not only the Romans have been giving the Music to their fields as we know.
Music itself is probabely very old. The oldest flute discovered is about 35.000 - 40.000 years old. In Paris in the museumcaves they reevaluated long Stones which were 10.000 years old and they discovered, that they were used as lithophone and even gave a concert with them. Of course we do not know if they used them in the fields as well, as unfortunately no Video was found with them.
Besides, András, this lack of interest among the Editors i know well and even that they refuse articles, if there is too much of this Kind of ideas in it. But why?
Excellent example of Signal transduction and control of gene regulation. This question links to my previously posted question in RG on" What are the boundaries of a living cell" ?
To answer this question on the role of Music in cell control, we can choose many directions but all we will conduct us to the same model (the interspace between Signal and Chromatin is the regulatory structure that mediates the link of the cell boundaries with the environment (Doucas, Nature Mic 2006).
To give one example of a concrete answer we can pick up the ubiquitin proteasome signaling which plays a key role in in eukaryotes (2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko, and Irwin Rose). In plants, the ubiquitin/26S proteosome affects a wide range of processes, including embryogenesis, hormone signaling, and senescence. The E3 ubiquitin ligases system is highly developed in plants. The E3 system and the ubiquitin/26S proteasome are coordinators that can put in “good shape” the transmitted signal and the receptor cell system. The described phenotype between Music and Plants links an acoustic wave and the acoustic theory, the field relating to mathematical description of sounds, to the regulation of cell growth in plants. This is one of the pathways that could link Classical and Quantum Mechanics to major Biological Events. Regards, Vassilis
Dear Napoleon, unfortunately the Approach by the scientific community to both sides is not the same. So to say, they have no real scientific Approach to the Musical side. It is rarely investigated and if so they do not succeed to publish the results in the papers.
Dear Thomas,
I know about two articles from scientific journals, but they are in Russian (if you need, I may send you these works):
Oshmarin A.P. & Veryovkina M.V. (2012) “Influence of music of different genres on germinating ability and growth of some Cereals” in ВЕСТНИК АПК ВЕРХНЕВОЛЖЬЯ. 3 (34-37):
“Mozart's music exerts stimulating impact on germinating ability and the further within 14 days growth of a mix of cereals of sorts Festuca (fescue), Lolium (rye-grass) and Poa (bluegrass) in comparison with the control not insonified samples. "Hard rock" music by "Black Sabbath" and "Guns n roses", on the contrary, influences on the germinating ability and the further growth of the specified mix of grasses depressingly. It is possible to assume that both stimulation and oppression of germination of seeds and the further growth of samples of the studied plants can be caused by acceleration or deceleration of physiological processes in plant cells. This is testified with acceleration or deceleration of movement of cytoplasm in cells of Canada water weed under the influence of music of various genres. The mechanism of stimulating or inhibitory action of different music on plants remains indistinct”.
Lygin & Zhigalova (2014). “INFLUENCE OF VARIOUS FACTORS ON THE GERMINATION AND GROWTH OF WHEAT” in ЕСТЕСТВЕННЫЕ И МАТЕМАТИЧЕСКИЕ НАУКИ В СОВРЕМЕННОМ МИРЕ, 3 (98-105):
“The article presents the external influence on the growth and development of plants of the cereals family, namely wheat. It is found that water, which was affected by verbal influence and different music, in different ways influenced the germination of grain, and then the growth of the plant”.
Dear Olga, thanks a lot for your contribution of which i really would like to get the original paper and i will try to find somebody to translate it tome. I´m greatly impressed that somebody from the linguistic field has this answer for me and i ´m afraid may be it is typical, that i didn´t get this answer from the agricultural side. It is a pity to neglect this Kind of easy and helpfull Research of which the positive consequences could help us in Addition to other means to feed mankind.
Dear colleagues, и особенно дорогой Наполеон,
I’m glad to share this information. I read such sort of literature, because sometimes it is connected with the manifestation of a so-called “parascientific folklore” (and different pseudo-scientific ideas that may be of interest for a folklorist, too).
One of these articles does not cause any doubt, but I must admit that when I was reading it, I thought no more about plants, but how music affects us (this is also important).
In another article the works by Masaru Emoto and Chumak are mentioned, and I know that the different scholars have not solidarity discussing their research results. Both Masaru Emoto and Chumak have the fans of their ideas and opponents (I'm not an expert to make decisions in this area, although the abundance of metaphors and some other things in their texts confuses me too).
However, in the second article there are the data of experiment with plants, so, I hope, they may be useful for you, too.
The second article.
These articles are avaiable here: http://elibrary.ru/defaultx.asp
Dear colleagues, as i said in the introduction and has been mentioned by Napoleon: this question includes two and more aspects.
One is the direct influence of Music, to living beings like plants in this case, which can be investigated actually easily.
Second the influence of thoughts / especially when combined with emotions on other beings in General. Love is the greatest example for this.
May be, long time ago people knew about such abilities of plants. One can find the mentions on the plants-helpers or suffering antаgonists in folkloric texts, full of symbolic wisdom, and their text functions (helping or antagonistic) depend on the behavior of human heroes.
It has been demonstrated positive impact of music in many situations. There are reports of an increase in milk yield in cows who listened to music. Dungeons while dorodniejsze piglets were born. Therefore, it can also as we already have examples here have favored the growth and quality of Orza the yield of plants. One might be tempted to define what kind of music has a beneficial effect depending on geographical location and how they react to certain species of plants on the sounds? It may be interesting experience.
Regards
Dear Roland, i think this is what Napoleon also was thinking of and my personal opinion is: Yes. The plants disliked certain styles and tunes and so do I. But the variations are of course more difficult than like or dislike.
One Thing is the mood you are in and so some kinds of therapeutic Music pieces are (for e.g. in China) used to listen to them under certain psychopathological conditions to improve these.
At the contrary to this in Germany musictherapy is more the active part and not just to listen.
So both, the active and the passive part can be used according to the different Situation in different benefitting ways.
What is positive for one Person or in one Situation can be negative in a very different one.
dear all, the sensory mechanisms for acoustic perception in plants haven't been discovered yet, but appel & cocroft (2014) and gagliano et al (2012) present strong evidence that acoustic perception is actually happening in them.
Dear Filipe, thanks for your information to the acoustic perception. How about the ESP-Connection to them. Do you know about this as well?
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Medicine