Though any mechanism still eludes him, he has divined about 650 water wells. So far, he claims, only 18 have come up dry. Reddish says lengthy pieces of wood, pipe, or other materials on the surface can cancel out the response of his rods to buried or overhead lines in some spots but not in others. As an illustration of how the mind can play games, members of his society have learned how to trigger this ideomotor effect in people holding pendulums, he says. It explains why fans watching a soccer game may make reflexive kicking motions with their own feet as they watch a player do the same.
Dowsers tense their arms so that the rod exaggerates even a small movement.
When a dowser walks across the ground and the rod moves by chance, Sarma says, the mind replays that action every time the dowser recrosses the spot. This may kick in a subconsciously driven repetition of that first movement. Dissatisfied with anecdotal claims and theories, physicist HansDieter Betz of the University of Munich decided to launch a multisdisciplinary probe of dowsing. That report has stirred the curiosity of many scientists who have regarded divining as parlor trickery or subconsciously prompted muscle movements. For this reason alone, concedes physicist Leonard Finegold of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Betz' report on dowsing has to be taken seriously.