in Complementary Medicine from Medicina Alternativa in 1996 and was on the faculty of the California Institute for Human Science Graduate School and Research Center founded by Hiroshi Motoyama which is unaccredited.

His work was inspired by the research of physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who claimed to have discovered that playing certain kinds of music in the area where plants grew caused them to grow faster.

This made Backster try different scenarios, and the readings went off the chart when he pictured burning the leaf, because according to him, the plant registered a stress response to his thoughts of harming it.

[13] Soviet scientists invited Backster to the first Psychotronic Association conference in Prague in 1973 and his paper was entitled "Evidence of Primary Perception at a Cellular Level in Plant and Animal Life".

[14] After 1973, he further experimented on yoghurt bacteria, eggs and human sperm and he claimed his results showed "primary perception" could be measured in all living things.

His lack of control experiments were criticized and explanations, such as that the polygraphs were responding to static electricity build-up and humidity changes, were put forward.

He further said that plants can show altered electrical responses to light, chemical agents and disease but he "draws the line" to the claim of them "responding to human thoughts and events, including life elimination.

[18] In 2005 Kari Byron, Grant Imahara and Tory Belleci from the science based program MythBusters also tried to replicate the results of primary perception.

[citation needed] Marcel Vogel claimed to be able to duplicate this effect "using plants as transducers for bio-energetic fields from the human mind".

[21] After all human and environmental stimuli that could alter the results were removed, the Mythbusters team reproduced Backster's experiments with the dracaena plant, yoghurt, saliva and eggs.

[22] In an episode of Adam Ruins Everything that discussed the pitfalls of forensic science, there was a cutaway during the segment which criticized polygraphs and also referenced Backster's Primary Perception experiment.