From: RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Dowsing Info Wanted
Date: 10 Oct 92 17:13:34 GMT

i blatantly steal this from "the straight dope", by cecil adams, which
is an awesome book which everyone should run out and buy five copies of:

     cecil, my world view has been severely altered, and i need your help.
while on a recent trip to the wilds of arizona, i had the opportunity to
witness - and indeed, participate in - a demonstration of "wishing," which
is the location of underground water through a divining rod, or "wish
stick."  i had always thought this practice was an old wives' tale, but
the natives use it routinely to determine where to dig their wells.  if a
stick of wood is used, it bends toward the ground; if a coat-hanger wire
or thin brass rods are used, one is held in each hand, and they cross over
each other when water is found.  the only explanation the local experts
could provide is that moving water creates a magnetic field, but this
doesn't account for its effect on wood.  i swear on a stack of straight
dopes that i speak not with a forked tongue.  illuminate me, cecil.

                                         -cooper b., chicago

     listen, slick, if you let a bunch of rustics from arizona fool you
with an old dodge like dowsing for water, you need more help than i can
give you.  you don't describe what your "participation" consisted of, but
let me guess: you watched some old geek with a divining rod (typically a
forked stick held in a peculiar grip with both hands, but sometimes just
an ordinary single stick) wander around the desert for a while with a look
of concentration on his face.  by and by the stick began to quiver, and
suddenly plunged sharply downward, whereupon he exclaimed something to
the effect of, "dig here, you'll find water."  then he said, "you try it,
sonny, it'll work for you, too."  and gosharoonie, he gave you the stick
and showed you how to hold it and lo and behold, when you got to the spot
where the stick had plunged down for the old coot, it did the same thing
for you - just like some mysto force had grabbed onto it.  naturally,
since water in arizona is typically found 175 to 200 feet below the
surface, you didn't actually dig a well to test the accuracy of the rod,
but assumed that *since it worked for you*, it must be legit.

     congratulations, sucker.  you've fallen victim to the classic
skeptical young guppy becomes a true believer syndrome, described in
great detail in a study of dowsing (as wishing is sometimes called)
published by two university of chicago researchers in 1959.  "wishing,"
incidentally, is a corruption of "witching," as in "water witching,"
the most common american expression for dowsing, aka rhabdomancy and
divination.  although divining has been around in various forms for
millenia, the well-known forked stick method appears to have been
devised in the mining districts of germany (you could supposedly find
minerals with a dowsing rod, too) in the late 15th or 16th century.
it was first formally described in an essay in 1556, and since then has
been spread around the world by european colonists.  in the past 400
years, more than a thousand essays, books, and pamphlets have been
published on the subject.

     needless to say, dowsing is entirely a fraud, although often an
unconcious one.  innumerable experiments, beginning in 1641 - that's
right, 1641 - have demonstrated that (a) the presence of water has no
discernable effect on a rod held above it, whether the rod is made of
wood, metal, or anything else; (b) the success rat for diviners is about
the same as that for people who use the hit-and-miss method when looking
for water, and (c) geologists trained to recognize telltale surface clues
(certain kinds of rocks and plants, various topographical features) will
invariably far outdo dowsers in predicting where water will be found, and
at what depth.

     nevertheless, belief in dowsing has persisted, partly because most
people secretly want to believe in magic, partly because water is fairly
easy to find in most parts of the inhabitable world, and partly because
the plunging-stick phenomenon seems so convincing to untutored observers.
it is worth noting that in many parts of the eastern u.s., it is virtually
impossible to dig a hold and *not* find water.  you don't mention where you
went witching in arizona, but i lived in tucson for a spell and they had
gotten well-digging down to such a science that the success rate approached
100 percent.  even over complex hydrological formations, the success rate
by the hit-and-miss method is often as high as 75 percent.

     the plunging-stick phenomenon is caused by a well-documented
psychological effect known as "ideomotor action," first described in the
1800s and clinically demonstrated in the 1930s.  what happens is that
concious thought gives rise to involuntary, usually imperceptible muscle
movements.  if i strapped you to a table in a lab and loaded you up with
sensors and told you to just think about raising your arm - but not actually
do so - the sensors would probably detect some slight upward motion in that
arm, which you'd be completely unconcious of.  ouija boards and several other
seance-type tricks make use of this principle.

     in forked-stick dowsing, the two ends of the stick are held in a rather
uncomfortable grip in such a way that the stick is under considerable
tension - coiled up like a spring, as it were.  any of four minor muscle
movements will result in the stick taking a sudden lurch downward (you
can try this in the backyard sometime).  an experienced dowser, who has
often picked up a fair bit of practical geological knowledge, particularly
if he has worked in the same geographical area for many years, often
develops a good instinct for judging where water might be just by looking
at the terrain.  when he walks around doing his number with the stick his
mind unconciously transmits this knowledge to his arm muscles, with
predictable results.  you, the young sap, don't know anything about
geology, but you do know where the stick pointed at the first time, and
unconciously you want to duplicate that feat.  if either you or the dowser
is blindfolded, though, you won't even get close to the same spot twice.
besides forked sticks you can use barbed wire, a fork and spoon, coat hangars,
welding rods, even a bunch of keys hanging by a chain from a bible.  if you
want more information on this ridiculous art, most libraries have lots of
books on the subject - right next to the section on tarot cards.
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic