Robert Park does not think things through. Assume for the sake of argument that dowsing does work, and furthermore it works for water or electric wires. Two obvious questions arise:
What is common to all of these things? What is the likely mechanism that would make the stick twitch to indicate something? The answers seem obvious to me. They are obvious, prosaic, and I can give you dozens of similar examples. The mechanism has nothing to do with quantum mechanics or anything novel. What is common to all of the things underground is that people, dogs, and other animals routinely find them by spotting signs of hidden water or disturbed earth. People and other animals have an astounding ability to find water in the desert with nearly invisible clues. A dachshund looks for disturbed earth to find the hole in the prey is hiding; and a person looking for a wire looks for similarly disturbed earth. (A telephone repair man told me "you look for where someone dug up the earth; you don't look for the wire itself.") The mechanism is obviously the person's mind. The stick is moved by the hand which is controlled by the nervous system; the brain. The person's vision, sense of smell, touch and other senses pick up tiny indications of water, which are too subtle for the person to consciously realize he is sensing. The hand has more nerves and muscles than any other human organ and it is exquisitely good at fine motion and manipulation. It is most sensitive organ for this purpose of any species on earth. Furthermore, people constantly use their hands to communicate with others and with themselves, waving the fingers, pointing, gesturing in various ways. Deaf people transpose entire human languages to the hands, and are able to communicate at the same speed as oral speech. No other organ is so closely tied to the brain as the hand, and no other organ is so amenable to training and practice. So, if you want to train yourself to amplify tiny, subconscious reactions, no organ is better suited. This is why, for example, people can play billiards or the piano with incredible control, without conscious effort or an ability to "know" or explain what they are doing. It is why they can type faster than present-day theories predict is possible based on the time it takes for synapses to fire. It seems clear to me that the dowsing rod is simply a handy tool, like a pencil, to record and amplify fine motions of hand which the person trains himself to correlate with clues for water or whatever else he is looking for. People and animals searching for water, or tracks in the dirt, or prey, or on the lookout for predators do not make conscious, considered decisions. They do not logically work out the fact that a slightly darker shade of green grass may indicate water nearby. They act on instinct to process sensations and subtle clues. The dowser is making use of our instinctive reaction to point at things with the hands, which comes to us as naturally and easily as a pointer dog's use of the tail to indicate to other pack members that the dog has sensed something of interest. Park and Randi (I believe it was) once conducted an experiment to test dowsing by running water through underground PVC pipes, recently buried. This is a preposterous experiment. It was done with no consideration for a plausible biological mechanism that might explain the phenomenon. Obviously, if there is an ability to find water, it must be grounded in our instinctive ability to find clues of underground water such as slight differences in color or the scent of wet earth. What else? So the only water you can expect to find using the human senses is that which has been flowing underground from a broken pipe or natural spring, which has been flowing long enough, and with enough volume, to affect the environment. There is no conceivable mechanism which would allow you to detect water which just started flowing through a PVC pipe a few minutes ago. - Jed
