 |
|
A GenePoool.com Essay
Dowsing
A lot of the things I write about here I write about because I cannot understand why people believe in them. Dowsing isn't one of those things.
Dowsing is probably the most respected undeniably pseudoscientific practice in the world. Some fields that one might consider unabashedly scientific even use dowsing from time to time. Archeology, for example. While it's not quite as common in the U.S., it's not at all unusual to find a "professional" dowser in Europe, where it's been in use for centuries.
I remember a story told to me by a co-worker who was born and raised in England. He was, like many people I've met, a confessed skeptic who nonetheless doubted the validity of his own skepticism in the face of what he considered good evidence to the contrary. He was at a dinner party with a respected friend who was a dowser, and who had just received a new dowsing rod by mail and wanted to try it out. He took out a set of keys from his pocket and requested that his guests hide it somewhere in the dining room, (while he was out of the room, of course) and he would use his dowsing skill to determine the hiding place. Feeling clever, the guests hid the keys in a planter, under the roots of a recently planted flower.
As my co-worker described it, when his dowsing friend returned, he first divided the room into four sections. He dowsed each quadrant, then chose the one that received the most reaction from his rod. Then he divided that quadrant into four and did the same test a second time. Shortly, he had the room reduced to a single planter. Looking puzzled, he tested the rod on the planter a few more times before he figured out to lift the flower and recover his keys.
Well, it was a very good story. It was one my British co-worker friend had been unable to resolve for ten years. Even subtracting a degree of embellishment (we all embellish a bit, especially when telling an old story) it was still an impressive anecdote. It is possible to explain the entire story away by considering that the dowser's wife was in the room and she could have worked out a signal system, or better, directed the keys to the planter, but it's not necessary to invoke the possibility of a confederate to explain how the dowser found the keys. It's not even necessary to assume the dowser realized there was a trick involved that had nothing to do with his "powers."
Finding hidden objects is one use for dowsing, but certainly not the most common one.
Dowsing is a centuries' old practice, and the primary purpose for it is to locate underground water. And in this regard, it certainly works. There is literally a ton of evidence that, when water needs to be found, a dowser can find it. The issue in regards to this particular point is not whether a dowser has a special skill, but whether underground water is very difficult to find.
There is a common misconception embraced by the dowsing community, and, I imagine, a great many others, that underground water runs along in sublevel rivers and streams. This is simply untrue; almost without exception, ground water does not exist work like this. Of course it doesn't; there's too much dirt in the way. Ground water seeps into the earth, and just about any probe of sufficient depth will discover some. (This makes even more sense when one considers that some dowsers claim to be able to find hidden water by dowsing over a MAP.)
Of course, as far as they are concerned, a genuine magical event is taking place. And why shouldn't they?
A basic explanation of the process is required. There are literally hundreds of different ways to do this, but all of them rely on the same basic setup. The way I learned it was with a Y-shaped stick. One is supposed to grip the forked end with one's fists turned so that the knuckles on both hands face one another and the thumbs extended outward and away from the center. Then both arms are fully straightened. This is an extremely awkward way to hold a stick, which is exactly the point. The goal is to hold the stick parallel to the ground, and then walk around with it. When the stick jerks downward (or upward, really,) then one has found what one is looking for. Most dowsers will use the violence of the jerking motion as proof that this is something they are not doing. This is only partly true.
Other techniques include holding two thin rods parallel with one another, or balancing a heavy object between two extended index fingers, a swinging pendulum, and many, many others. What they all have in common is what physicists call an unstable system. This means that the balance of the setup (holding the stick parallel with the ground, say, or holding two sticks even with one another) is very precarious; it would take only a little motion to upset that balance. In other words, the reason the Y-stick technique is so awkward is that it's hard to hold a stick that way and have any control whatsoever on the motion of the tip. Almost any movement of the hands will cause the tip to move.
This is a phenomenon known as the Ideomotor Effect. This effect can be felt in any situation when an individual causes something to happen without being aware that he or she is the one causing it. It's very common in a lot of psuedoscientific New Age tricks, and its practitioners can be forgiven for not realizing they're fooling themselves. Say, for instance, I told you a sure sign of contentment is the attraction your index fingers feel toward one another. Here's how my guruship will begin. First, clasp your hands together, so the fingers are threaded. Second, extend both of your index fingers so that they point straight up. Third, exert as much force as you can to keep these fingers from touching. Do this for as long as you can.
You will find, fairly shortly, that you are a very contented person, and further, you owe your guru fifty bucks.
What's going on here is the muscles in your index fingers have gotten tired. As a result, even though you have ostensible control over your own hands, your fingers still end up touching.
In a dowsing situation, the slightest movement, relaxing of tension, or muscular exhaustion will cause motion in the dowsing rod, because of the instability inherent in the system. But the key is, the dowser is unaware of having caused the motion.
There is another element to this that's a bit more mundane, but still significant. In any situation where dowsing might come in handy-- such as searching a landscape for water-- there are generally abundant visual clues that have nothing whatsoever to do with the dowsing rod. One might, for example, find more water in a low spot where plants are growing than at a high, barren peak.
On the few occasions when dowsing has been submitted to controlled tests, artificial environments had to be created in order to eliminate the good guessing possibility. The best one I've read of involved the excavation of a large, flat area. Three pipes were laid below the surface, none of them taking a direct route from one end of the land to the other. During the test, water could be flowing through any one of the three pipes. The dowsers who were tested had to pinpoint possible locations of water, and not one of them did any better than chance.
This brings us back to my co-worker's story. My first question to him was, did you blindfold the dowser? He was attempting to look for an object hidden in the room with five people who knew exactly where the object was. All it would take was one or two people unconsciously holding their breath when he got close to the object (a pretty standard response.) His technique of splitting up the room would have accorded him ample opportunities to gauge the physical responses of the people with him. If this seems weird, consider the concept of the "tell" in poker. A gambler does something unconsciously only when he has a good hand, or perhaps only when he has a bad hand. Now imagine reading the reactions of five people to the same hand.
The beauty of this is that the people in the room are entirely unaware that they're pointing the dowser to the object, and even better, the dowser is probably also unaware of the visual cues he's picking up.
You may be thinking at this point that I've
had to invoke a lot of different phenomena in order to explain
something that seems, on the surface, simple. But the ideomotor
effect, the ability to make a good guess, and the capacity to
identify unconscious cues are all a part of the ability of the
human mind to fool itself. That's really all there is to it.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
| |
|