Amazing Connection We Have With Plants

Have you ever felt a connection a connection with trees and plants as if they share some wavelength with you? We apparently share more of a connection with plants than we give ourselves credit for: Dr. Cleve Backster, former CIA operative, was one of the early developers of the polygraph machine (lie detector test that picks up electrical activity on the skin). While in his lab, Dr. Backster got the idea to hook up a plant leaf to the polygraph machine and try to get a reaction out of it. He tried tapping the leaf with a pen and dipping a leaf in his coffee, and there was no reaction on the polygraph chart. Then he had the thought "I'll go to my desk and burn the leaf with some matches", and as soon as this thought entered into his mind, the plant had an energetic response: the lines on the graph excelled to the top of the chart similar to electrical activity a person gives off during feelings of anxiety. The plant "screamed" from his thoughts alone, but only when it knew his thoughts were genuine making the plant feel threatened. This effect was repeated in his lab, in front of live audiences, and even on the television show "Myth Busters". Backster also got similar polygraph results from shrimp, eggs, and even human DNA. If you are interested in this, there is a book called “The Secret Life of Plants” which also has many other scientists accounts of the physical, emotional, and spiritual connections between plants and man. The creation is alive and conscious. It is energetically sensitive to its environment just as we are. We share the consciousness field with all of creation, and our thoughts produce energetic currents that propagate through space that all life is aware of on a scientifically measurable level. You and your thoughts are one with it in the most direct way. So to all the tree huggers out there who claim that the trees understand them and communicate with them, there may be more validity to that they we think;) Original study in the International Journey of Parapsychology: "The significance of the experiment results provides evidence of the existence of a yet undefined primary perception in plant life "http://www.rebprotocol.net/clevebaxter/Evidence%20of%20a%20Primary%20Perception%20In%20Plant%20Life%2023pp.pdf

Facebook and Self-Esteem

Your Facebook profile is an ideal version of yourself, full of photos and posts designed to put your best face forward to your friends, family and acquaintances. But there’s another benefit: A new study finds that looking at your own Facebook profile can boost self-esteem and influence your behavior. Catalina Toma, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used the Implicit Association Test — a psychological measure of automatic, largely non-conscious associations between concepts – to measure Facebook users’ self-esteem after they spent time looking at their profiles. The test showed that after people spent just five minutes examining their own profiles, they experienced a significant boost in self-esteem. The test measured how quickly people associate positive or negative adjectives with words such as me, my, I and myself, the researcher explained. “If you have high self-esteem, then you can very quickly associate words related to yourself with positive evaluations, but have a difficult time associating words related to yourself with negative evaluations,” Toma said. “But if you have low self-esteem, the opposite is true.” She noted she used the Implicit Association Test because it cannot be faked, unlike other traditional self-reporting tools. “Our culture places great value on having high self-esteem. For this reason, people typically inflate their level of self-esteem in self-report questionnaires,” she said. “The Implicit Association Test removes this bias.” She also looked into whether viewing one’s own Facebook profile affects behavior. “We wanted to know if there are any additional psychological effects that stem from viewing your own self-enhancing profile,” she said. “Does engaging with your own Facebook profile affect behavior?” To test this, the researcher had the participants complete a serial subtraction task, assessing how quickly and accurately they could count down from a large number by intervals of seven. She found that the self-esteem boost that came from looking at their profiles actually diminished the participants’ performance in that task by decreasing their motivation to perform well. She found that people who spent time viewing their own profile attempted fewer answers than people in a control group. The error rate of both groups was about the same. This finding is consistent with self-affirmation theory, which claims that people constantly try to manage their feelings of self-worth, she noted. “Performing well in a task can boost feelings of self-worth,” Toma said. “However, if you already feel good about yourself because you looked at your Facebook profile, there is no psychological need to increase your self-worth by doing well in a laboratory task.” Toma cautions against drawing broad conclusions about Facebook’s impact on motivation and performance based on this study, since it examines just one facet of Facebook use. “This study shows that exposure to your own Facebook profile reduces motivation to perform well in a simple, hypothetical task,” she said. “It does not show that Facebook use negatively affects college students’ grades, for example. “Future work is necessary to investigate the psychological effects of other Facebook activities, such as examining others’ profiles or reading the newsfeed.” The study was published in Media Psychology.

Don't Sneeze On Me

We avoid people who look sick—even if they are not. The common cold results in more than a sore throat and a runny nose; new research shows that illness can actually change our personal prejudices. When we are sick, we become more aware of and repelled by people who seem unhealthy, whether or not those people are actually contagious. Researchers at the University of Kentucky and Florida State University found that study participants who had just been ill paid more attention to pictures of disfigured faces than did healthy subjects. Those with recent illnesses were also quicker to push the images of disfigured faces away than they were to pull the images toward them. The results are consistent with other studies showing that prejudice toward people who are obese, elderly, or disabled is higher among those who have recently been sick. Scientists speculate that once the immune system has been kicked into gear, it triggers cognitive processes that set off mental warning bells when we see someone who looks ill. Our brains, however, may be unable to discern who is actually a threat. "Our minds evolved to solve problems associated with survival," says study author Saul Miller. But the system trips up "when we start assuming that anyone who has any health issues is contagious." —Sarah Korones