In her new book Opening Heaven’s Door, journalist Patricia Pearson focuses on paranormal experiences dying people have had. But there was this tidbit about how the kind of people you would expect to disbelieve in the paranormal may come to believe that there’s more to reality than positivism recognizes:

Private moments of conversion — from assuming the universe operates by one set of rules to suddenly suspecting there might be other forces at play — can happen to people “like a jolt,” as the University of California psychiatrist Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer said, after her own encounter with an act of perception that seemed to be drawing on an unknown sense. In Mayer’s case, the jolt came as the result of clairvoyance, which is the ability to somehow glean information across distance. Her daughter had a rare and valuable harp stolen near San Francisco in 1991; neither the police nor the family’s public appeals managed to recover it. After several months, a friend suggested to Mayer that she had nothing to lose by consulting a dowser. “Finding lost objects with forked sticks?” Mayer responded. But her friend gave her the phone number of the president of the American Society of Dowsers, at the time a man named Harold McCoy who lived in Arkansas.

Mayer spoke to McCoy, and told him the stolen harp was in Oakland. McCoy asked her to send him a street map of Oakland, and he would find it. Two days after it arrived in Arkansas, McCoy phoned and told her which house had her daughter’s harp in it. She thought she was crazy, but Mayer put up flyers about the lost harp within a two-block radius of the house, which was in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Pearson picks up the story:

She soon received a phone call from someone who had seen the harp in his neighbor’s house. He was able to get it back to Mayer. “As I turned into my driveway [with the harp],” she later wrote, “I had the thought: This changes everything.“

That 1991 experience inspired Mayer, a prominent clinician and psychiatric researcher who died in 2005, to come up with something called “coincidence theory,” which was noted in a short New York Times Magazine article praising it as one of the “most exciting ideas” of 2003. Excerpt:

Mayer’s research and writings eventually led her to Robert G. Jahn, a science and engineering professor at Princeton. Since 1979, Jahn had amassed a mountain of data demonstrating people’s ability to alter the outcome of a random event generator — essentially a machine designed to replicate a perfect coin toss over and over — in a minute but statistically significant way.

Comparing the latest research from the fields of neuroscience, psychoanalytic psychology and quantum physics, Mayer and Jahn found some intriguing overlaps. Just as psychologists have spent the last century exploring the unconscious mind, physicists have been exploring that netherworld of physics called intangible dynamics, where string theory and quantum mechanics lurk. Both of these shadow realms violate our everyday understanding of logic and physics, space and time.

Jahn and Mayer say they believe that anomalous phenomena may be a result of some type of information exchange between the unconscious and the intangible. ”Clairvoyance” may actually be snippets of information from the physical world slipping into the unconscious mind and percolating up into awareness. Moving in the opposite direction, the unconscious mind may have the ability to subtly alter the physical world, explaining Jahn’s data using random event generators.

For now, the model is more a way to think about the problem of anomalous phenomena than a solution. …

In her posthumously published book Extraordinary Knowing — the two forewords were written by Freeman Dyson and Carol Gilligan, just to let you know Mayer’s professional stature — she expanded on the effect of the harp incident on her orthodox scientific worldview:

If Harold McCoy did what he appeared to have done, I had to face the fact that my notions of space, time, reality, and the nature of the human mind were stunningly inadequate.

She says that she tossed and turned over it, until finally a UC Berkeley colleague, a professional statistician, told her that the odds that dowsing works are “far greater” than the possibility that this could have been a coincidence. In her book, Mayer concedes that the field of what she calls “intuitive knowing” and “anomalous knowing” is filled with quacks and frauds, and you have to be very discerning about the science. But there is, she says, some very solid science indicating that mind and matter interact in ways that our Western model says shouldn’t be able to happen. (In fact, Freeman Dyson famously said he believes ESP exists, as do other paranormal phenomenon, but they cannot be studied according to scientific protocols. I once sat at Freeman Dyson’s table at a dinner, and had no idea what to say to him, so was too intimidated to talk. If only I had known of this!)

You’re wondering, maybe, what this has to do with that six year old YouTube video on the top of this post. Well, it’s a short clip of Your Working Boy demonstrating his water dowsing technique. I say “technique,” but it’s not really that. I don’t work at it at all. My dad picked it up somewhere along the line, and has used it to find underground water lines when he had to dig to fix pipes. When he searches for underground water, the two rods held loosely in his hands cross at the point when the water is directly below him. But when I do it, they go in the opposite direction, as you can see from the video.

My father has been for many years one of the caretakers of the local cemetery. He has used his dowsing rods to find unmarked graves in an old, overgrown part of the cemetery. I was skeptical of this, but when he gave me the rods, the same thing happened — except again, in my case, the rods move apart over the grave. It even happened in a part of the cemetery in which I’d never been, and where there were no apparent graves (the markers had long since been removed, so the graves were hidden).

My dad told me today that he had once held the rods over a marked grave there, but gotten no reaction from them. He couldn’t figure it out, and finally telephoned one of the relatives of the man buried there. The relative told him the woman had many years ago had her husband’s body disinterred and reburied somewhere else. Indeed, there was no body in that grave.

How does this stuff work? I have no idea, but I do not believe the answer is anything spooky or spiritual. Rather I believe it is a phenomenon of the natural world that we do not understand yet. Still, there are forms of dowsing that seem to me to be forms of divination that are strongly forbidden in my religion. To be on the safe side, spiritually, I don’t fool with any of it anymore. But in the very limited ways I have used it and seen it used by my father and others, it works. Many people don’t want to believe it, because if it’s true, then the world is not quite what we were taught it is. Browsing through Mayer’s book on the Amazon.com “Look Inside” feature, I see that she writes extensively about the people who have confided in her over the years about paranormal things that have happened to them — episodes of “anomalous knowing” — that they are afraid to tell others about for fear of being thought crazy. This isn’t how it works in other cultures, but we are WEIRD, so… .