ALL SUSHI ALL THE TIME 'be careful when you eat'

[Taro Toporific]

Via the always charming Mari-chan.

Rice is hearing you
Mari - diary: Saturday, November 19, 2005:
...experiment in English! The title is "Can rice understand English?"
She talks to the rice: "I love you!" to one, "F**k You" to another one, and says nothing to a third one every morning and every evening....
....rice understands words. We should not talk badly during eating. Please be careful when you eat sushi, they hear you.

[gomichild]

I thought this topic might have been in relation to Mulboyne's sushi posting mania today....

[Greji]

I thought this topic might have been in relation to Mulboyne's sushi posting mania today....

That was something, wasn't it? I think he browsed into the pictures of the girls in the Fantasy Sushi bit, and they turned him wild! Suddenly, a tekkamaki maniac!

[Charles]

This pseudoscience of "talking to plants/bacteria/etc." really bugged me, and one day I happen to run across the origin of this utter nutjobbery. And I was pretty astonished at how this fringe idiot managed to worm his way into mainstream thinking. You'd never guess who it was.

So I thought I'd put this out as a quiz. Here's the question:

WHO originated the idea of a "scientific experiment" of talking to plants? You know, this same classic setup, you talk nicely to one plant, and say nasty things to the other one, then compare how they grow.

[Taro Toporific]

WHO originated the idea of a "scientific experiment" of talking to plants? You know, this same classic setup, you talk nicely to one plant, and say nasty things to the other one, then compare how they grow.

I would have assumed it was in the 1960s when galavonic detectors become mainstream science class toys. But it seems to be a distant relative....

Ask Yahoo!
January 29, 2003
Does talking to plants actually help them grow?
.... The idea of talking to plants was introduced in 1848, when Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German professor, suggested the idea in his book Nanna (Soul-life of Plants). He believed that plants were capable of emotions, just like humans, and you could promote healthy growth by showering your plants with attention and talk.
In his book Training of the Human Plant, Luther Burbank, a renowned botanist and inventor of the Burbank potato (better known as the Idaho potato), wrote that plants may not understand the spoken word, but they were capable of telepathically understanding the meaning of speech.

See also Answers.com: Gustav Theodor Fechner

[Charles]

WHO originated the idea of a "scientific experiment" of talking to plants? You know, this same classic setup, you talk nicely to one plant, and say nasty things to the other one, then compare how they grow.

I would have assumed it was in the 1960s when galavonic detectors become mainstream science class toys. But it seems to be a distant relative....

Ask Yahoo!
January 29, 2003
Does talking to plants actually help them grow?
.... The idea of talking to plants was introduced in 1848, when Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German professor, suggested the idea in his book Nanna (Soul-life of Plants). He believed that plants were capable of emotions, just like humans, and you could promote healthy growth by showering your plants with attention and talk.
In his book Training of the Human Plant, Luther Burbank, a renowned botanist and inventor of the Burbank potato (better known as the Idaho potato), wrote that plants may not understand the spoken word, but they were capable of telepathically understanding the meaning of speech.

See also Answers.com: Gustav Theodor Fechner

Hmm.. I never heard of Fechner before, and there's nothing in those links or anything else I found in a quick net scan to indicate he did the classic good vs. bad talk/vibes experiments. The idea probably did originate that long ago, but AFAIK neither Fechner or Burbank got this idea into the mainstream.

But you were on the right track, at least for the guy I'm thinking of, who got this concept to go mainstream back in the 1960s. Yep, think galvanic response meters. Think MONUMENTAL idiocy on a GLOBAL scale that persists long after his death.

Here's a dead giveaway, although few people would recognize this man from his photo:

[Taro Toporific]

[...neither Fechner or Burbank got this idea into the mainstream....
Here's a dead giveaway, although few people would recognize this man from his photo:

Let's see now... Before WWII there's was Chandra Bose's work in India and the Kirlian research in the old Soviet Union.

However, I guess you want me to say L. Ron "Butt-boy" Hubbard and Scientology's "E-meter" which is just a galvanic-response-detector machine.

However, Hubbard ideas were predated by Cleve Backster's decades of "research" which later were covered in the "Secret Life of Plants" by Chris Bird and Peter Tompkins in 1973.

http://www.primaryperception.com/

Primary Perception?
Cleve Backster coined the term in a letter written to J. B. Rhine, of parapsychology fame, over three and a half decades ago. Rhine had jumped on Cleve's demonstrations of plant reactions with a Galvanic Skin Response, but when Cleve refused to be taken under his wing,

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

<snip>
DJ: I'm sure you've told this story a million times, but can you say again how you first noticed the reaction in a plant?
CB: The initial observation that happened on February 2nd, 1966, involved a dracena cane plant I had back in the lab in Manhattan. I wasn't particularly into plant culture, it's just that there was a going-out-of-business sale at a plant store on the ground floor of the building I was in, and the secretary bought a couple of inexpensive plants for the office. One was a rubber plant, and the other was this dracena cane. I had done a saturation watering of these plants--putting them under the faucet and watering them until water ran through completely--and I was curious as to how long it would take the moisture to get to the top. I was especially interested in the dracena because the water had to climb a long trunk, and then to the end of these long leaves. I thought if I put something that measures resistance at the end of a leaf--the galvanic skin response section of the polygraph, and I had those sitting all over the place because we were running a school--a drop in resistance should be recorded on the paper as the contaminating moisture arrived between the electrodes.
That, at least, is the cover story. I'm not sure if there was another, more profound, reason. It could be that somebody at another level of consciousness was nudging me into doing this. I don't know. But curiosity about watering seems to have worked out as a reasonable explanation of why I did it.
Next, I noticed something on the chart that resembled a human response on a polygraph. In other words, the contour of the pen tracing was not what I would expect from water entering a leaf, but instead what I would expect from a person taking a lie-detector test. Lie detectors work on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they physiologically respond in predictable ways. If you were conducting a polygraph as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a suspect, "Was it you who fired the shot that was fatal to so and so?" If the true answer is yes, the suspect will fear getting caught lying, and electrodes on their skin will pick up the response to that fear. So I began to think about how I could threaten the well-being of the plant. First I tried putting a neighboring leaf in a cup of warm coffee. The plant, if anything, showed what I now recognize as boredom--it just kept trending downward.
Then at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds chart time, the imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf I was testing. I didn't verbalize, I didn't touch the plant, I didn't touch the equipment. The only new thing that could have been a stimulus for the plant was the mental image. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart.
I went into the next office to get matches from my secretary's desk, and lighting one, made a few feeble passes at a neighboring leaf. I realized, though, that I was already seeing such a saturation of reaction that more change wouldn't be noticeable anyway. So I tried a different approach: I removed the threat by taking the matches back to the secretary's desk. The plant calmed right back down.
Immediately I understood something important was going on. There were no alternate explanations. There was no one else in the building, nobody else in the lab suite, and I simply wasn't doing anything that would provide a mechanistic explanation. From that split-second my consciousness hasn't been the same. My whole thought process, my whole priority system, has been devoted to looking into this.
After that first observation, I talked to scientists from different fields, trying to get them to explain to me within their disciplines what was happening. It was totally foreign to them. So I started to design an experiment in greater depth to explore what I soon began to call primary perception.
<snip>

[Charles]

[...neither Fechner or Burbank got this idea into the mainstream....
Here's a dead giveaway, although few people would recognize this man from his photo:

Let's see now... Before WWII there's was Chandra Bose's work in India and the Kirlian research in the old Soviet Union.

However, I guess you want me to say L. Ron "Butt-boy" Hubbard and Scientology's "E-meter" which is just a galvanic-response-detector machine.

However, Hubbard ideas were predated by Cleve Backster's decades of "research" which later were covered in the "Secret Life of Plants" by Chris Bird and Peter Tompkins in 1973.

http://www.primaryperception.com/

Primary Perception?
Cleve Backster coined the term in a letter written to J. B. Rhine, of parapsychology fame, over three and a half decades ago. Rhine had jumped on Cleve's demonstrations of plant reactions with a Galvanic Skin Response, but when Cleve refused to be taken under his wing,

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

<snip>
DJ: I'm sure you've told this story a million times, but can you say again how you first noticed the reaction in a plant?
CB: The initial observation that happened on February 2nd, 1966...

well... That pic of LRon appeared in Newsweek in 1958 along with a big story, this seems to be the point where this idea became implanted into the modern public's consciousness.