Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Dowsing And The Woo Factor
"Uncle" Leonard has lived on my mother in law's street for more than 40 years. My mother and father-in-law have known him for 30 of those years, and my wife, Mrs. Inscrutable, has known him since she was a little girl. She always called him "Uncle Leonard" or "Uncle Len". I met Len when I married into the family and immediately liked the old coot.
Len is 80 years old and strong as an ox. His eyes are clear, his brain works great, and he's deeply intelligent with a childlike sense of humor that infuses all that he says and does. He knows everything that is to know about big and small game hunting here in Arizona. He's our "hunting buddy", and we go hunting with him 3 or 4 times a year at least - more if we can get the time off. Working for 40 years of his early life as an electrical engineer erecting power poles and stringing high-power electrical lines through some of the most desolate desert and high-country wilderness in the state of Arizona means that he also knows every trail, track, and road. In many cases he created the trail or road when he and his crew were wiring-up the state in the 40's and 50's.
He is a crack shot. I have seen him take down two javelina from more than 400 yards, one right after the other, with perfect behind-the-ear shots. This is in the desert, and a javelina is about the size of a medium-sized dog - and they are sand-colored. It wasn't luck - he shoots like this *every time*.
My point is that Uncle Leonard isn't a wild-eyed, deluded fruit-loop new agey weirdo. He's one of the most down-to-earth, hard-nosed materialists I've ever met.
However, he dowses for water. Successfully.
More after the fold...
It was perplexing to me. In my experience, of all the woo practioners out there, the dowsers - especially the water dowsers - are the most sincere. Richard Dawkins notes this in his new television program called The Enemies Of Reason:
[link] However, the water diviners were “genuinely sincere”. In a rather touching sequence a group of dowsers agree to submit to a double-blind trial. Their success rate in finding water was about what you would expect by chance. “In some cases they were devastated that they couldn’t do it under those conditions."
I think that this is because in many cases, water-dowsing appears to really work. Heck, it does work in Len's case. I've seen him do it.
One night at hunting camp we were sitting around the fire and I asked Len how he could possibly believe that a supernatural force was directing him to underground water. I gently tried explaining the ideomotor effect to him.
He looked amused at my question, then noted that he never said anything about a "supernatural force".
I reviewed the conversation and agreed that, yes, he never had mentioned anything about the supernatural. So, what exactly did he think he was doing when he was waving his diving rods around? And how exactly did he find water with them?
He said that he's an old man with lots of experience, and he is an exceptionally good observer. He picks up cues about the land and the environment simply by walking through it. He also knows a lot about where water should be in this part of the country due to years of experience in the area. He doesn't always have that knowledge consciously accessible to him though. So, he uses the rods to allow the knowledge that is sure to be there about where the water is to "come out".
I was floored. This is the first explanation of dowsing that actually makes sense to me. No supernatural agencies involved, just a deep knowledge of the land and the climate and years of life experience controlling the ideomotor effect and allowing him to find where the water should be - because he already knows where it is unconsciously.
It also explains why dowsers placed into unfamiliar or artificial lab conditions under a double-blind testing environments fail to find the hidden water, or perform about the same as can be explained by mere chance. It's because even unconsciously, they don't have the hidden knowledge necessary to be successful. To dowse for water successfully, like Len, you need to already know where the water is, or be able to formulate a real good guess based on your past experience and knowledge. The rods are simply a tool to get the hidden knowledge out. The "woo" factor is when a dowser attributes that hidden, experiential knowledge to an outside, invisible, supernatural force.
Len doesn't claim to do that sort of dowsing. He's a materialist water dowser. He does not attempt to dowse for gold, or jewels, or mining deposits, or any of that crap, and in fact seems to holds a certain amount of contempt for dowsers who claim to be able to do this sort of thing. "If they can do it, then they already knew where it was." He told me around that camp fire.
Makes sense to me.
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Dowsing success
There is a different possible explanation of why dowsers appear to be successful in the field, but not in the lab. That is why James Randi commonly challenges dowsers to find a "dry spot."
Dowsing or Don'tsing
So we chip the crust off that old bit of hoo-doo crapola to expose it to the light once again. Unlike Schrodinger's cat, dowsing seems only to work so long as skeptics are not watching. I think a proof of dowsing would qualify for Randi's million dollar proof of supernatural challenge.
I have personally seen dowsing not work several times done by different water witches using both willow twigs and iron wires. Aren't my anecdotes just as valid as anyone's?
Look, why some folk are better at guessing where water can be found than others is only speculation, but there are obvious signs around near surface water sources. perhaps there are similar, more subtile signs for deeper water.
Extraordinary claims.....
Sounds to me like he just
Sounds to me like he just came up with his own explanation of the ideomotor effect. He just didn't call it that.
Dowsing
My family has a log cabin in Arkansas, and we have a well -- the kind that you lower a long thin bucket on a rope down to get at the water.
Before we had the well dug, a local, a real nice old guy, offered to "witch us up some water", which meant locate a spot to drill via the method of dowsing. My mom told him, "okay, but just make sure it's close to the cabin."
Our cabin is kind of on a hill, and slopes steeply down to a creek on the south, and down to a river
on the west -- easily more than 100 feet down the the creek, probably 200 to the river.
The water level in our well is just 15 feet below the surface. When you look around at the lay of the land, it seems a little surprising... what, is this hill just a shell, with a big pile of water at the center?
Now, even we had noticed that during the hot, dry summer during which we built the cabin, the trees right around the site had seemed healthy, while those further away had seemed a little parched. So there were definitely some clues.
Meanwhile, our neighbors, maybe 1/2 mile away, who drilled their well within 50 feet of a little creek had to lower their bucket 80 feet to hit water. I don't know if they had a dowser witch up their well or not.
In any case, I think dowsing is pretty bogus, but it wouldn't surprise me if dowsers either consciously or unconsciously took cues from the environment.
Have you read Blink, by
Have you read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell? He talks about the same (or a similar) sort of phenonmenon in other areas - where people who have a lot of experience doing something can make an incredibly accurate decision in a few seconds, but they can't usually explain why in any logical way. Anyway, I'm glad to see a reasonable explanation for dowsing.
Woo addiction.
Len sounds like a hell of a guy, Brent, and I'm sure you've learned more from him than even you realize. Thanks for the story - it is refreshing to hear some sanity applied to such Woo.
I just posted a comment in reply to something someone said on my blog that has some application here:
That last bit also relates to a new post I put up about Alzheimer's, in reation to this news story. Basically, I think that there is a fundamental unwillingness to confront unpleasant truths in our society, so we do our best to ignore them or find some facile, feel-good solution such as Woo, religion, drugs...
More on this tomorrow.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Unpleasant truths
You know, when I was a kid (somewhere in the 10-15 age group) I asked my mom why it was that despite the fact that a majority of people are unhappy in the (human created) environment they are forced to live in why they don't do anything about it. I mean we know that High School is a sack of crap for several reasons (among them that the average teenage brain can't actually record information reliably before 10 or 11 am, yet school starts at 7 or 8, leaving anywhere from 2-4 hours of the school day which will be innately unproductive, and that in order to function most efficiently the human brain needs downtime, something that pouring on the school work decreases). My mom said basically the same thing, that it was because they'd either ignore or endure the hardships of society rather than trying to correct an inherent error in the basic structure. The world's not fucked up, it's the people who suffer who are the problem.
We also discussed this in class. Apparently a theory about how memory is stored in the human brain stated that only the connections between neurons were necessary for creating lasting memories. However in species that tend to memorize a vast amount of knowledge then forget it as the seasons change (notably caching animals like squirrels and some songbirds) require an entire neuron for each memory. Since humans really aren't wired any differently than other animals (aww, did I hurt someone's narcissism?) there is no reason to expect that humans are any different. Of course, this would imply that people learn best when they are young (when the most neural development takes place) which is true and that learning slows down as they get older (also true), of course it didn't explain why people could continue to learn stuff if the brain stopped making new neurons after a certain point in life (which it's recently been found that it continues to make new neurons even into old age). Of course, this would also imply that we couldn't be like little godlings and learn everything in the universe. It would also pose the question of "is the problem that causes Alzheimer's actually a failure of the brain to continue making and retaining neurons?" and I'm not sure if anyone's answered that.
Then there's the statistics that mild Epilepsy and Autism are on the rise. Of course there's debate about whether they are on the rise because detection has become better (which is certainly true) but I also worry that it could be a canary and a coal mine thing if some children are born with these conditions as a result of something in the environment (of course, there's not proof that this is the case, but I'm in the habit of looking for indicator species and children and the elderly make good canaries). I'm concerned about this partly because I was born with epilepsy, although it was a type that you either grow out of with puberty or grow into with puberty. So I was lucky, sort of, I've had enough of blood drawing for a lifetime though, twice a year from when I was 4 or 5 to when I was in my teens and my veins have become so difficult to work with that recent blood tests (this time to measure thyroid hormone) have had to be taken from my hands and that is not fun (scars have also developed on my arms over where the blood was drawn). At the time the doctors couldn't figure out what caused the seizures, so I have experience with a phenomena that could not be explained by science (hence why I laugh at the "be patient, even phenomena that can't be explained by science now will be explained in the future" statement of some atheists, knowing stuff in the future is nice but it doesn't do anything in the now). Personally I believe there will always be some phenomena that can't be explained by science, or at least I hope so, what would be the fun of a world where we knew everything?
My Grandmother once told me that her mother had suffered from Alzheimer's and that the most heartbreaking thing were the times her mother couldn't even remember her (didn't know who she was, didn't remember having a daughter). Ah, if it were me I'd rather just be shot than live like that, so I don't really understand the whole "caring for the demented relative" thing.
I can do it
My grandfather, who was a chemist, taught me how to water witch. As a test, I would find a spot, not tell him about it and then he would find the same spot. His explanation was completely scientific. He didn't believe in any woo. A flow of charged molecules creates an electric field which can interact, albeit very slightly, with our muscles. You hold the branch (we used a coat hanger) so it is right on the balance point and you walk until the electric current causes your muscles to contract slightly.
I don't know what I think about it today.
Spiff Technology
Brent-
That's an interesting post about water dowsers and divining rods. I probably would have made the same mistake you did and got caught up on the ritual part of dowsing and the divining rod instead of focusing on Uncle Leonard's intuition. This article also made me think of myself a little. I have the ability to tell when people are lying. I am almost 100% accurate. I am not sure exactly how to explain it, I just know. There is nothing supernatural I assure you. It's just a gut feeling or intuition, if you will. Is it in the vocal inflections or watching pupils dilate or unconscious heart rate detection? I am not sure. I gained this ability through my career in sales. Salesmen are expert bullshitters.
To give you an example, when I was younger and a little less scrupulous, I sold a lady a computer that had "spiff technology" in it. There is no such thing as spiff technology. I made it up. A spiff is a special cash bribe a manufacturer puts on a computer or other item to incentivize a salesman to sell their brand over another brand. It works very well, I must say. Some weeks I made more than the head manager. That lady would have been happy with a computer we had right there in stock, but I talked her into the computer that had to be ordered, so I could get the extra spiff. Don't worry, the computer was not a rip-off. It's just that the one she wanted had no extra money for me in it so I made up a story. Sounds like religion, eh?
Now, when a theist or politician or salesman or really anyone for that matter tries to BS me, I know almost instantly. When Bush lied us into the Iraq catastrofuck we are in now, I knew right away it was a load of crap. When I heard his speech and he said the famous "16 words" I laughed out loud at the audacity and obviousness of his lie. Especially the word Africa. When he said Iraq was trying to buy uranium from 'Africa', it was a dead giveaway. Over the past few years, I have had time to analyze his deceit. I understand why most people bought into the sale. Most people are not skeptics. Most people will buy "spiff technology" from a good salesman. Why say Africa? Why not say the specific country, Nigeria? He was selling us. He was playing on our fears and prejudices. Ooh...Africa...the dark continent. Scary.
I think as a skeptic, I have always had this ability to some degree. My sales experience just made my BS detection more highly tuned. All of the Sunday school, bible camps and confirmation classes I went to only made me more certain that the whole god thing was made up bullshit. If you think about it, priests get a pretty heavy duty spiff for each new sale/convert.
Dirk
You know what the sad thing is?
In recent poles most Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was working with the Taliban for 9/11. Despite the fact that this has been proven false time and time again. Fortunately most people don't think Saddam had WMDs (and that they were cleverly smuggled across the border to Iran by his faithful followers, which is a summary of a message board argument from some young Rep about why we didn't find WMDs in Iraq... and I have no words to poke fun at this statement, it humiliates itself), and only a minority of Americans still believe the sun revolves around the earth. A much higher minority of Americans point to Canada or some other country when asked to find the US on an unlabeled political map (about 10% of Americans can't find America on an unlabeled political map). When it comes to evolution a majority accept the theory of evolution but deny human evolution (Because humans are "different, special somehow", why is it the people who say something like that are psychotic madmen bent on world domination?).
You know what? When Bush said "they're buying enriched uranium from Africa" my first thought wasn't "wait, how do the Africans enrich uranium?" or "OK, what country are we talking about?" it was "How does this stack up against geological resource maps of Africa?". Oh I knew he was bullshitting, so the question of whether he was lying was moot, but I was curious about how good the lie was. Did he at least pick a region that has natural uranium deposits or was this another "All the CO2 comes from volcanoes" argument. Well there are Uranium mines in Africa but only in three areas. Personally I think Bush said "Africa" rather than a specific country because someone in his speech writing devision realized that if they said a country that produces no Uranium someone would cry bullshit and have evidence to back it up.
You know, I really love mazes. When I've gone through real world hedge mazes I've had an almost supernatural ability to sense the way through the maze. Then I tried a maize maze and found that didn't work so well. I'm thinking that maybe I was feeling a slight change in air currents when I examined the route that would lead to an exit, whereas there would be less current down a route that ends in a dead end, and just following that. But I really don't know, the information that would back that up is that I'm not fond of wearing covering clothes and that I can feel a definite change in the air when going from a large room to a small room, and when approaching places in a room where more air is leaking through.
"If they can do it, then
Wow! What a remarkable man. He uses his brain and everything. Bet Uncle Leonard can tell some stories around that campfire too.
bragging about dowsing
A hydrologist buddy of mine was visiting the water manager of a nearby town. The manager was showing him the town's new well, which had a rather good yield, and was bragging about how good the dowser was.
My buddy looked around and noticed half a dozen piles of cuttings in the field. He asked the manager if they had been drilling test holes or observation wells. The manager said no, the first dozen spots the dowser picked came up dry, but by golly, when he finally picked the good spot, it was a good spot!
I've run into numerous dowser stories in my years as a hydrogeologist; some time I'll have to tell the one about how the dowser's job was being interfered with by her little bottle of holy water.
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