What Are You Broadcasting?
On plants, attention, living systems, and the signals we send without knowing it.
In the 1960s, a man named Cleve Backster attached a polygraph to the leaves of a houseplant.
Backster was a former CIA interrogation specialist who had become fascinated by the possibility that living systems might respond to more than we understood. His experiment became famous because he claimed the plant appeared to react when he formed an intention to harm it. Before he ever acted.
The findings were controversial. Later attempts to replicate them under controlled conditions did not provide reliable evidence that plants can read human thoughts. But what has always interested me about the story is not whether the plant was responding to a thought.
It is the question underneath it.
What are we transmitting that we are not aware of transmitting?
My mother has always had what people call a green thumb.
Growing up, I watched her talk to her plants. Not as a performance or a quirky habit, but as if she was in relationship with them. She would walk through the house, touching leaves, noticing changes, quietly mumbling to them as she cared for them.
People brought her plants they had already given up on. A struggling orchid. A neglected houseplant. Something that looked entirely beyond recovery. Somehow, she would bring them back.
Science would point to the practical things: light, water, nutrients, soil, timing. All of those things matter.
But I have always been curious about something else.
What happens when something living is consistently met with attention?
Attention is more than observation. It changes what we notice, how we respond, and the conditions we create.
I’ve come to believe every decision begins there. Not with choice, but with perception. Before we decide anything, we have already decided what deserves our attention.
Perhaps my mother was not proving that plants understand language. Perhaps she understood something more fundamental: living things respond to being cared for.
Science has since confirmed that plants are far more responsive than we once imagined. They sense light, gravity, touch, temperature, moisture, and chemical changes in their environment. Some release signals when threatened, warning nearby plants. They do not think like humans. But perhaps that was never the right question.
The more interesting question is why we assumed intelligence must look like us.
Plants also carry memory. Research on epigenetic memory shows that stress leaves traces at the cellular level, shaping how a plant responds to future threats. A plant that has survived drought or damage will often respond to similar stress faster and more efficiently than one that hasn’t. The past experience doesn’t disappear. It becomes part of how the system reads the present.
Human beings do this too. So do organizations.
Whether or not a plant can sense our intentions, human beings do this with each other constantly.
We enter rooms carrying information before we speak. We sense tension before anyone names it. We recognize when someone’s words and their underlying state do not match.
A leader can talk about trust while unconsciously communicating fear. A partner can say everything is fine while their body communicates distance. We can speak about empowerment while our smallest decisions reveal a need for control.
People notice these things long before they have language to explain what they are feeling.
Our attention communicates what matters. Our decisions communicate what is valued. Our nervous system communicates what feels safe.
We are always broadcasting. The question is whether we are aware of what we are sending.
An organization can carry the residue of a former leader’s fear, a culture of silence, a painful moment that was never fully addressed. A new leader arrives with good intentions and wonders why trust is slow to build. They are not working with a blank canvas. They are working with a system that remembers.
A relationship carries the same kind of memory.
Two people can love each other deeply and still find themselves responding to ghosts that are not actually in the room. A partner may withdraw not because they no longer care, but because some part of them learned that closeness was dangerous. Another may seek reassurance not because their partner has failed them, but because uncertainty once meant loss.
The present relationship may be safe. But the nervous system may still be responding to an older story.
This is why love alone is sometimes not enough. A relationship is not only built by what two people feel for each other. It is shaped by what they repeatedly experience together.
Safety is built through consistency.
Trust is built through repair.
Connection is built through thousands of small moments where someone learns, again and again, that they are considered, seen, and that they matter.
The past can keep speaking through the present. But a new pattern can also be created through enough experiences of something different.
A neglected garden changes.
A neglected relationship changes.
A neglected team changes.
You cannot force a plant to thrive. You create the conditions that allow it to thrive.
The same is true of people, of organizations, of intimate partnerships. The healthiest leaders and partners understand that their role is not to produce outcomes or demand closeness. It is to cultivate the conditions where trust, creativity, and connection can emerge.
Every decision begins before the decision is made. It begins with what we notice, what we believe those signals mean, and what experiences have shaped our interpretation of the moment. Before we can change the choices people make, we have to understand the architecture through which they are perceiving reality.
The quality of our decisions depends on the quality of our perception.
Maybe this is why we have become so disconnected from the quieter signals around us.
We live surrounded by constant input: notifications, opinions, urgency, noise. We have become so accustomed to broadcasting that we have forgotten how to receive.
The change in a colleague’s tone. The hesitation before someone speaks. The partner who says they are fine but feels far away. The part of ourselves that has been asking for attention for a long time.
Perhaps the lesson of the plant was never about plants.
It was about environments.
Every living system becomes, over time, an expression of what it repeatedly experiences.
We rarely control growth directly. We shape the conditions that make growth possible.
Which means every conversation, every decision, every act of attention is quietly teaching the people around us what to expect from the world.
The question is not whether life is listening.
It is what we are teaching it to hear.
