The best books about interspecies communication – between humans, animals, and plants

After decades of experience as a lie-detecting expert for the CIA, Cleve Backster one evening put the electrodes of his polygraph on his house plant. To his great surprise, the emotional pattern of the plant corresponded with his own emotions. This book describes Backster’s subsequent experiments measuring changes in action potential of plants in response to human thought, for instance by the experimenter thinking about cutting the leaves of the plant. This is a book decades ahead of its time, as Backster’s results never were accepted by mainstream scientists. The book makes an inspirational read by outlining a research agenda in plant-human interaction for many years to come.

It took millennia for the wolf to become “man’s best friend.” At least that was accepted scientific wisdom until a brave Russian scientist and World War II hero decided to replicate the domestication process with foxes. Under the disguise of making fox breeding in fur farms easier, he recruited a team of biologists at a location in Siberia, where foxes were selected for breeding based on their tameness in interaction with humans. To the experimenters’ great surprise, it only took a few decades until the foxes became as tame and human-centered as dogs. A great story of scientific curiosity and courage, and a must-read for anybody interested in evolutionary zoology.

While we think of humans as the pinnacle of evolution, plants are far more successful than humans and other animals, both in terms of biomass, and in their capabilities of interacting with the environment. Mancuso heads the institute of plant neurobiology at the University of Florence, where he studies the neural patterns of plants, continuing where Cleve Backster stopped fifteen years ago in his research on “primary perception” of plants. After having read this fascinating book, you will never interact the same way with your houseplants as before, starting to see them not as a piece of furniture, but as a sentient creature sharing your dwelling, capable of solving complex tasks impossible to humans.

Habitually overlooked, fungi are essential for the long-term survival of plants and animals. Highly valued by the hippie culture for their psychedelic properties, fungi can do far more than that. There would be no wine, beer, or whiskey without the fungi fermenting alcohol, nor would there be wheat bread. Brilliantly written by an author who did his PhD on underground fungal networks, this book is both scientifically grounded and highly entertaining, describing how to leverage the medical properties of fungi, ferment alcohol, and grow furniture and even your entire house as a big fungus.

Thinking, Fast and Slow describes how our brain operates when making decisions, either by carefully weighing all the facts based on knowledge – “thinking slow”, or by making split-second, intuitive decisions – “thinking fast.” For this insight the author got the Nobel memorial prize in Economics. Kahnemann’s results certainly changed the way how I think about intelligent decision-making. A certain skill, for example playing the piano, can move through constant multi-year exercise and practice from a tedious “thinking slow” process to an intuitive and instinctive “thinking fast skill.”