Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with dowsing?

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Dowsing, aka water-witching has been around a long time. And you might be surprised that's still a thing. We get into all the nitty gritty of this pseudo-science today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention, DC, Boston, Toronto, and any place that can fly to those cities, we're going to be live on stage doing our thing again on May 4th, 5th, and 6th this year. That's right. And I gotta say, we've done this topic a few times already. And it's a real banger. And we can't wait to

come to your city and have you see it with us. We're so excited. And we just can't hide it. So go to linktree slash sysk and get your tickets today. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too, in low data mode. And this is Stuff You Should Know. What does that mean? I just got a message flashed on my screen that Jerry's in low data mode. Oh, really? That's funny. It means she's low key. Livia helped us with this one. And you know what Livia has gotten great at lately, is titling these episodes in fun ways. Yeah, for sure. You want to say this one, too? Yeah.

And it's generally just for us, which I appreciate. But this is about dousing, a.k.a. water-witching the practice of using sticks or metal rods or something to walk around and have and tell you whether or not there's water underground or iron ore or body. Yeah, body being buried or whatever. So we'll get into all that. But Livia titled it the surprisingly long lasting art of dousing. And I think it's appropriate. She called it an art, because it's definitely not a science, although people have tried to apply science to it in interesting ways. Yeah. And a lot of people say it's pure bunk. I just think it's very interesting. And I've never known much about it. And that's how I'm kind of choosing topics these

days is, what do I want to learn about? Right. You know? Sure. Me first. That's right. And through me, we can be the conduit to others. To amazing new ideas like dousing. And actually, we shouldn't say this is a new idea for us, because this, we actually did a chapter in our book, remember on dousing? That's right. And in that chapter, I went back and reread it. And I was very satisfied that we basically took this stance that we're taking today that you just took that basically, you know, some people call it bunk. I don't know enough about it to say either way. And just to keep our minds open. And even though it is bunk in a lot of ways, we're not like going to poo or tear it down like we did crop circles. You know? Yeah, I agree. It's something that people

have been doing for over 500 years. And like we said, it's got a bunch of different names, but dousing, basically, as we think of it today, is something that started in 16th century, what would now be Germany. And the mining industry there, which was a new thing that was really growing fast. And they were looking for ore underground, veins of ore. And it looks like as early as 1530, there was somebody, a mining expert named Yorg Eirakola, who talked about dousing and divining rods in a way that he wasn't like, Hey, this is what this is like, as if people understood what it was. Right. In his book, Deray Metallica. Was that really what it was called? Yeah. That's a great name. So, yeah, the Germans are pretty

much unambiguously the people who created dousing, at least in the roughly modern era. And it got imported to England pretty quickly. And France also, so in England, they were using it for mining, just like they were in Germany to discover ore. But France also adopted it. And they said, Hey, we're going to use this for water instead. I didn't see where they got that idea from or why. But they, I don't know, there's like supposed references in the Bible, which may or may not reflect dousing. Who knows, it's possible that they thought that's what it was used for in France. I'm not sure. But by the 16th and early 17th century, you had people, a lot of people in Western Europe walking around with forked sticks looking for ore and water. And basically being

like this, this really works. This is how we're going to find water. And back then, it made a lot of sense because there wasn't any other way to find water. So why not walk around with a forked stick? Yeah. And the idea we'll get into to sort of how people do it later on, but is that you hold a forked stick. Back then, at least that was sort of what they were using exclusively. And it would dip down when there was something underneath you of note. There was a man named Robert Boyle, known as the father of chemistry in the 17th century, who described it as a forked hazel twig. I believe there are other woods used. Hazel is one that's kind of mentioned a lot. Yeah. What was one of the other ones? I've seen peach, Rowan, which I am not familiar with the Rowan

tree, but apparently there's plenty of them here and they bear fruit. But it's like a fruit wood that's supposedly really good for it. Witch hazel is another one. And then willow, which makes a lot of sense because willow trees tend to grow where there's water near the surface. So it would kind of make sense that you would use a willow branch and then you'd turn around and just point to the willow tree and say down there. That's right. And then if it's the 1950s through 70s, you could switch your child with it. That's right. My grandmother, oh my dear sweet, my dad's mom, Opal, she would make us go pick out our switch, which I think was a tradition this off, like go pick out the switch that I'm going to use. And that was the punishment. That was the

fear. And you would go out there and you'd pick the flimsiest twig that you could find and come back and then she never touched us. She didn't. Oh, that's good. She didn't do that. Similarly, when you were really bad, Grandma Opal would make you dig your own grave in the backyard. Really get to you, but she never used it. No. Oh man, I miss her. She was great. Live to 101. I know. That's amazing. Not bad. So we mentioned other things that you could find underground, like dead bodies. This happened for a while in the late 17th centuries. They started getting into things like, hey, you'd find treasure using these Y-Rods. We could find the bodies that we were talking about. We could find a property boundary that no one can agree on.

Yeah, that one's really out there. Well, and that's very like, I mean, you better agree on who's doing that job between two neighborhoods who are at dispute with one another, you know? Yeah, for sure. I want to call the best dowser in your area. Let's use my guy. He'll show us where the property line is. Right, exactly. But there was a French peasant named Jacques Amar who in the latest 17th century, as the story goes, was water dousing and the rod pointed down very sharply and he said, hey, let's get some guys out here, dig down and get this water. And before you knew it, they struck body and it was a murdered woman. And he not only found the body, but then went to the

widower in the family basically and said, I'm going to point this thing at you guys. And the thing dipped at her former husband. He fled the scene and was found out to be the murderer. And so now all of a sudden, dousing rods are for a while at least. And for this guy, for sure, a way to root out murderers and dead bodies. So much so that in Lyon, there was a group of like, I think a husband and wife who owned a wine shop there who were murdered four years later after he discovered that first body. And they actually contacted Jacques Amar and said, can you come help us find who did this? And so he set about with this dousing stick looking, I think he actually got into a boat at one point and sailed around.

Wow. Looking for a murderer, rooted one out. He found one in another town. And that guy actually confessed and then fingered two other accomplices who had fled France by that time. So you're like, well, that guy was very special as far as dousing goes. There's a lot of ways to interpret it too if you're going to be a skeptic where you could say like, this is the 16th century or 17th century in France. And if people thought that you were a murderer, it didn't matter whether you were a murderer or not, you were in big trouble. And so you might flee France if you got word that people were coming to look for you, who knows. Or you could also believe that Jacques Amar had some special talent or gift that allowed him to douse murder suspects, among other things.

And that's actually a point that kind of underpins the entire dousing tradition. Most dousers believe that it's innate in them. Maybe innate in everybody and they're just a little more, their sense is a little more refined, but that it's not like you're picking up some magic stick. It's the stick is somehow an instrument that you, your special innate ability is using to kind of guide you. Yeah. And you also forgot the last possibility there, which is though Iraq and the 17th century France, and you're probably going to hit two people who've murdered wine shop owners. Yeah, that's a good point too. 18th century dousing was not so much a thing for mining anymore in Europe because science had improved such that they were like,

now we've got better, better ways to discover this or under our feet. And into the 20th century, we'll get to kind of where it stands today later. But of course, the Nazis got involved because they were into all sorts of weird esoteric methods of doing anything and the stupid Nazis. And Himmler of course said, hey, let's look for explosives. Let's look for water. Let's look for gold ore. Just get some Nazis out there with dousing rods and tell me what happens. Yeah, apparently they trained whole units because again, the Nazis were very stupid. And then in the 20th century, Chuck, if you were educated by or employed at Harvard in the 1950s, there was a good chance you were going to study dousing. Well, a lot of Harvard people did weirdly. Release these four.

Sure. But I mean, how many really were there out there at the time? So this is probably a significant portion. Yeah, probably like a dozen. So yeah, a full third of Harvard educated people were studying dousing in the 50s. One guy, Ray Hyman and another, Elizabeth G Cohen, they worked together. They were sociologists from Harvard. And they studied dousing by surveying agricultural extension agents, the people who were the conduit between education and the rural areas, right? So these people had a foot in each camp. So they were a really good group to study dousing or dousing beliefs. They found that every single state had dousers, mostly in the rural areas, and that in those rural areas where the dousers were most densely

concentrated, there was about an average in the United States in the 1950s, about 35 dousers per hundred thousand people. That's a huge number of dousers in the 20th century, middle 20th century still working in these rural areas. Yeah, I would agree. That's a lot. They also did a bunch of, like you said, interviews with these agricultural agents. And it was basically like a little more than half thought it was bunk, about 20% said they believed in it, about 24% said they were open-minded to it and kind of on the fence. And one thing that they discovered that Hyman and Elizabeth Cohen discovered was basically people, it's not that they so much believed in dousing as being like this foolproof thing, but more like, hey, we can't get a lot of guidance on where to find

water and like it doesn't cost a lot to hire a douser. So it's better than nothing if I can pay someone in the 1950s like five bucks to walk around my field for a good place to drill. It's better than zero. Right. And it's not like they just tapped Todd to go out there and use a stick to be like drill here. These dousers that they were employing had some sort of success in their track record. So it made it a little easier to be like, I'll just give this a try because what other alternatives do I have? Yeah. There was another Harvarder named Yvonne Z. Vacht who did some studying of this. And like you said, he found that there were certain people who just seemingly were more gifted than others at it. It was a part-time thing usually.

People did make some pretty good money doing it. And it was almost always something that men did and not women. And like you mentioned, they generally believed, it wasn't like a snake oil thing where they were like, let me see how many people I can rip off with this stick. They believed in what they were doing, it seems like, about across the board. Yeah. He said universally, basically. So he studied specifically Homestead, New Mexico. And he found that well, he basically lumped it in with folk magic, which I think is fair. And he said that dousing is the most commonly used type of folk magic in agriculture in these rural areas. Like another type would be using the Zodiac to predict when to do certain farming, like harvesting or planting

or something like that. But you're much more likely to find people who are willing to believe in dousing than that. And that even educated people believed in it in the area. And one reason you can kind of give for that is that these areas were hard up for water. So it kind of, I would guess that like the lack of availability of water or at least easy access to it would kind of help suspend your disbelief more than somebody who has a municipal water supply running to their house, you know? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Speaking of Vaught, he continued his work into the late 60s along with his colleague Linda Kay Barrett. And they started researching urban dousers, which is a pretty good band name. Yeah, it is. What are they? What kind of music? I know,

this is your specialty. I'm going to just go fall back on the standby of Math Rock. I would say pavement like maybe a pavement tribute band even. That's kind of what it sounds like to me. But yeah, I'm going to just go with Math Rock. Okay. They study the American Society of Dousers, the ASD. They were founded in Vermont in the early 1960s. I think they're about a thousand strong. And these are people that lived, you know, these are urban dousers. They live where they have city water systems and plenty of water. And they used dousing for other things. Sometimes to detect if you had a medical problem, sometimes to look for something that someone lost, they basically argued like, hey, you should be using us all over the world

where people don't have water. Like why is everyone against dousing when you should be enlisting us? Right. And the ASD still survives today. They have multiple chapters all over the world. As a matter of fact, even though it's the American Society of Dousers, they do have other chapters in other countries. And they still douse, they still meet. They share tips and tricks with one another. I believe they have newsletters. So they're still around, for sure. So should we take a break and then talk about how to do it? Definitely. Okay, we're going to take a break. We're going to get our coat hangers out and we're going to get going right after this. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called

Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University. And I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast, I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities. Like, does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident? Or can we create new senses for humans? Or what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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I've still stumped. There's about 10% of my brain is still working out what music urban dousers play. I'll come up with it. That's a tough one. So, I mean, if they were clever and they wanted to kind of engage in a bit of word play, then I would say they're like a neo-country pop. You know what I mean? Like Billboard chart pop, urban dousers. Their music can be enjoyed in the city or the country. You mean like the guys that sing about tailgating and stuff like that? Precisely. I mean, what? You got Luke Bryan or Urban Dousers. Which one are you gonna do? I predict Luke Bryan's gonna change his name to Urban Dousers in the next five years.

Hey, I'm not gonna knock Luke Bryan. I don't know his music, but he seems like a good guy. From what I understand, he is. All right. So, how to douse? You take the... Well, there's a couple of ways. You can have that Y-shaped rod and you hold it by the Y and have the single stem pointing out with your palms upward. The Y pointed upward. In fact, at about a 45 degree angle, then you walk around and you wait for that thing to, I guess, to move in your hands. You wait for it to make a boy on your own stout. And it dips down. Like we said, we mentioned the different kind of sticks that were used. The kind of dousing I see a lot on YouTube, because I did a lot of watching of this stuff,

is the coat hanger one where they take, and it's not always coat hangers, but just two metal L-shaped rods, and you hold it by the small side of the L in each hand, and walk around, and then these rods come together and cross one another at a place where you're standing. Right. Apparently, the American Society of Dousers has far and away the most frequent tool these days to use for dousing is the pendulum. Yeah. Which can be anything from a crystal on a piece of hemp string to a paper clip on some leftover thread or dental floss, even. Who knows? It doesn't matter. Because again, remember, this is a tool that the human is a conduit for. It's not like the tool itself is super important.

Yeah. It just kind of points out what the human can sense innately. And with the pendulum, they basically say if it's swinging forward to backward, that's yes, meaning, okay, there's some water here, or it swings from side to side for no. And because you can get a yes or a no out of this pendulum, you can use it for plenty of other stuff. In fact, there's something called information dousing, which is essentially like fortune telling. You ask the dousing rod or dousing pendulum, certain questions, and the way it responds will give you the answer you're looking for. Yeah. It's interesting to think it just kind of hit me today that they said that this is usually men. And this is sort of the one area there where that's true. Like, have you ever

heard of a man that's a fortune teller or palm reader? It seems like that's usually women, right? Yeah, there are plenty of women dousers these days. I think it was just in that 50s survey that they're mostly men. Yeah, because I've seen interviews with multiple women who are dousers. All right. All right. So that clears that up. We talked about walking across the field and stuff. That's sort of what everyone usually thinks of when they think of dousing, or water-witching is something they call it here in the States. But there's also map dousing, which that pendulum comes in handy, or you might just use like a pencil or something, where you go to like a map and do the same thing to narrow down what field you should walk in to find whatever you're looking

for. The pencil one, I think, there's a writer named Robert Ader who wrote a pamphlet that's on the American Society of Douser website, where he talks about using that pencil to find whatever, and you'll hold that pencil over a map, try and tune in whatever that means to what you're trying to find and feel for the location. And he's like, listen, I've looked for water on the moon with my moon maps. I've looked for the grave site of Bigfoot. And I didn't dig Bigfoot up, but I found a spot on the map where there are definitely some large humps of earth. Right. Full stop. So exactly. So also in that pamphlet, Robert, he basically says like how you ask the question and how you word it is really important. And he gave an anecdote about when he was looking for

water on the moon with the map of the moon, he asked the pencil like show me where water on the moon is. And he said the pencil started to float over in his hand over, don't be ridiculous here, over his shoulder and point toward the moon behind him out the window. And he realized, oh no, I had to ask it where on the map, show me on the map where there's water on the moon. And then the pencil pointed it out. So I feel like here we kind of reached like the point between finding water on the moon and finding Bigfoot graves where most people are going to take their leave of dowsing and be like, this doesn't work. But if you step back and kind of strip away all the add-ons and stuff that's been put onto it over the years and just go back to searching for oars or water

using this stuff, you can kind of not regain credibility. That's not the word I'm looking for the phrase. It's more. A little more rooted. Yes, sure. It's less loony. How about that? Yeah, did that guy also in the pamphlet say I found the Ticonderoga number two to be quite cheeky? Man, that's a arcane pencil reference right there. Shout out to David Rees. Yeah, he got that one. But he's slapping his knee right now. So how does this supposedly work? It's not like they're just like, like, hey, this is magic or whatever. There have been people that have tried to explain like how this might work. And some of the explanations, you know, early on were obviously

some kind of magnetism or magnetic field or something that people can pick up on on planet Earth. There was a German alchemist named Johann Tolde who wrote under the pen name Basilius Valentius, great name, and put out this theory that the metals in the Earth basically breathe a breath that rises out from the Earth that attracts the rod and that, you know, the trembling rod would shake when it hits that breath. And this is back in the day. Right. And the German miners of his day were like, we think it's just magnetism. That's a kind of a convoluted theory you got there, Valentius. But yeah, so I feel like there have been people over the years who've kind of added unnecessarily to the mystique. Because if you think about it,

you're like, okay, this is just magnetism. Somehow we're picking up magnetism. That makes sense. That it's logical. We don't have any way to explain it, but it's a lot better than breath coming up. But if you stop and think about it, you know, maybe this guy was just basically using a different word or a different term or embellishing on the idea of magnetism or something like that. And if you kind of read into the explanations over the years by dowsers for what dowsing is or how it works, you kind of get the same premise that somehow the person is picking up on something that's invisible to us, but that person can still sense. Yeah, I watched this cool YouTube. There was this guy. It had 185,000 views. I don't know if he even

said his name, but he's a YouTube dowser guy who came on to kind of talk about it. And he just, he had a very nice demeanor. He had this big beard and he was just sort of like, listen, this coat hanger isn't magic. I'm not magic. He said, I just believe that there are certain people who can sense voids in the earth under their feet. And some people are better at this than others. Other people have pointed to like certain animals that could do this. I know that, of course, these are all anecdotal, but like, Mr. Ed, like, Hey, put peanut butter in that guy's teeth and he'll say anything you want. But like, you know, animals like mules plowing fields with their anecdotal stories and then like stopping at places and like refusing to sort of walk over an

area that later turns out there was something buried underground that would have like harmed the plow or something like that this way. But this YouTuber was, he was a good guy and he was just like, listen, you believe it or not. I'm not saying you should go do this stuff or you should believe it. But this is just what I feel like people, there are certain people who can sense a void in the earth. I was waiting for you initially to say where he was saying like, the rod's not magic. I'm not magic. My beard, that's magic. But no, he turned out to be fairly sensible. And this is something I remember from childhood, though, from church is that Christians have

long sort of had this, you know, it's kind of the dark arts in a way. And so anytime it's something in that realm, Christians are going to be very much like, no, no, no. I don't remember specifically what it was, but I have some vague recollection from my childhood of hearing about water-witching and someone saying, I don't know who it was, but someone in my life could have been someone at church or in my family even saying like, no, no, no, that's like, that's like, you know, black magic basically. Right, exactly. Call it folk magic, call it whatever. It's still not, it's still not God performing a miracle. It's you. Exactly. Yeah. And therefore, it's blasphemous and demonic and the devil's somehow involved. We just know it. I'm sure

it's Judas Priest's fault to some degree. It's that same impulse. We don't understand it, so it must be demonic. The irony here is that what they're afraid of and don't understand probably doesn't even exist. It's not even necessarily real. So they're afraid of chance happenings of people just randomly getting something right once in a while. Martin Luther, apparently, was not a big fan of dowsing. That doesn't surprise me. And there was a guy named Johann Gottfried Ziedler. He wrote a book that was basically like, hey, these people are tapping into something called the world spirit. And if you tap into that, man, you can find out anything you want, like whether somebody who died went to heaven or hell, you're not supposed to know that.

Right. You're not God. Keep away from dowsing, essentially, what Ziedler's message was. Yeah, I'm sure there was a lot of Christian pushback on that guy. So as science kind of progressed, there's a really long tradition of people trying to apply science to explaining dowsing. And I say we take our second break and come back and get into some of those, because this is where it gets super fascinating to me. Let's do it. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University. And I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast, I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences

by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities. Like, does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident? Or can we create new senses for humans? Or what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. I'm 60 years old now, believe that? Yes, it's the truth. So I figure two-thirds of my life are done, zero to 30, 30 to 60, and now I'm in the 60 to 90 if I'm lucky. Mostly this part of

my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it. With the podcast that I can sit down here in my home, with people I love and admire, people I've worked with, people I've gotten to be friends with, and some family friends that feel like the real deal. Like who, you might ask? Natasha Leon, Jennifer Lewis, Ricky Lake, Fran Drescher, Sharon Glass, Kathy Griffin, Cameron Mannheim, the list goes on and on. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, occult murder. Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Kithegge from Twilight. Tune in to uncover what happened

when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned. The Manta Wal Caves, MANTAWAUK, a production of iHeart radio, Blumhouse television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Manta Wal County, the thick of the fog gets. Listen to the Manta Wal Caves now on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we were going to talk a little bit about the beginnings of sort of the modern take on things. And I guess this is less modern because this is the seven late 1700s. But in 1693, there was a French priest and a doctor of divinity named Lé Lorraine de Valmont. Great book. Great name, but not a good hotel name at all. He really attracted

attention to you. I think he said great book. Great name. I wrote a book about Amar. Remember Amar who found the, I think, the murderer? Jacques Amar, the probably the most famous dowser of all time. Well, did he have 185,000 views on YouTube? I'll bet he would have. He would have. He was quite a showman. So he wrote a book when he basically wrote about Amar's success where he claimed that certain particles arose from water underground, from treasure, from a dead body, let's say, and they would enter the body through the pores and that some people like this YouTube dowser said were just particularly sensitive. And that seems to be the sort of the refrain that, like you said earlier, some people just claim to be more sensitive to this either

magnetic field or this energy coming out from the ground or these voids in the earth. Right. And this is about where science starts to kind of try to be applied to explaining dowsing in that Dave Vollmont termed these particles, lasatomes, because Robert Boyle, the father of chemistry had already identified that they're probably something called atoms in the world and that they are just out and about. And so what Lola Rain de Vollmont was saying was that some people are sensitive to those lasatomes. And that kind of kicked off that tradition of like, oh, there's this new science. Let's figure out how it applies to dowsing. Right. Or, hey, let's believe in the 1900s, there were French priests that practiced what

they called radiesthesia, which was let's use dowsing to detect radiation of various kind. Let's find it to diagnose disease. And this, you know, this again is when it veers away from like water and iron ore or something to a little more of the hokey pokey. But again, radiation had just been discovered and in no time three French priests are applying it saying like, that's what we're detecting. That explains it. Some other people have said, oh, it's electricity. Some people say, yeah, it actually is radiation or it is magnetism or something like that. And then you've got the other camp that's like, no, it's ESP, or these people are conduits for God or something like that. What was that thing you found that I, in reply, sent you a picture of

Professor Frank? I don't remember where I saw that, but it was a really neat explanation of it. So it was basically saying that we have, like our cells are capable of accepting electricity or some sort of charge or whatever, and that the that ores and water emanate things that can charge those cells and that that's kind of how we pick it up. Okay. It's, I mean, it's just another way of putting it. It's just again, we know about cells, we know that cells currency is electricity or that they can transmit electricity. So therefore maybe those that we're on a cellular level, some people are picking it up and that's what dowsing is. It's that same tradition. Now we understand something a little more about the universe. Let's figure out how it applies to

dowsing. Right. Perhaps it is the, when in terms of human bodies, it is the soul. Perhaps, you know, maybe that's dowsing is the, is the window to the soul. I thought the eyes were. Nope. That's wrong. It's dowsing. As far as modern science goes, and this is something that you reminded me that we talked about in our Ouija boards episode, is that people were doing this with their hands with something that's called idiomotor movements, which is your muscles are twitching because of some kind of subconscious mental activity that's going on. Yes. And that ties into that last explanation I was mentioning about the cells and the electricity. They were basically saying like, yeah, that's

totally correct. The idiomotor movements are triggered by the emanations from the ground that enter your cells and trigger your muscle movement unconscious to you. Yeah. So like someone may be good at finding water because they've spent a lot of time in a particular area finding water and they're, they have this sub subconscious thing to where they're picking up on the vegetation or the way the ground is and they don't realize it. So then they'll stop at a place that their body is saying here is water and it's translating to that idiomotor movement, making the rod dip. Right. That's one explanation, right? That, that we, they have some sort of what's called non-conscious intelligence. Okay. The other explanation I was saying is like,

they were saying no, the water or the or itself is putting something up from the ground that's triggering your muscles to, to engage in that idiomotor movement. So they're both saying, yes, there's idiomotor movement. The dowser, the people, the person holding the dowsing rod is, is causing these movements without being aware of it. But the different explanations of why is that either the person is noticing some vegetation that they're not aware, they have linked to water unconsciously. Right. Or the other one is that the water itself is, is emanating something that's triggering that idiomotor movement in the person. It's a little more than potato-potato. The, there's a pretty big difference between those two, even though they share the majority of the explanation

in common. No, I agree. They're quite different. I mean, if you're out there screaming at your phone, guys, there's water under the ground all over the place. So anyone can take a couple of coat hangers and dig down 12 feet and find water probably. The YouTuber acknowledges this and says, yeah, there's water all over the place. He said, but some places are better to get water than others, because you don't just go dig a well anywhere on your property. You try and home in on a place that has got, you know, better water more readily available to pool and where you can get it easier. That's why people bring in geologists. That's why people bring in dowsers. They have done experiments where I think BBC Science Focus reported on them, where they did

like randomized experiments with water pipes underground. They found that dowsers had no success at finding a water. There have been other experiments under control conditions where they find that dowsers don't do any better at finding water than chance would. Our old buddy James Randy offered a million dollars to anyone that could prove it that has not gone claimed, to my knowledge. No. Not just prove that, but prove like any real paranormal ability. Proving dowsing would have probably won that prize for sure. The thing is, if you're a dowser, if you're a geologist, you poo poo dowsing. If you're a dowser, you probably poo poo geology. If you're involved in excavating wells, you probably poo poo both. There was a guy interviewed in an Aeon article that Olivia

turned up written by Lois Parsley to where this guy whose job it was was to excavate wells in California. As part of his job, it was to hire either a geologist or a dowser or both. He was saying neither one's particularly good at reliably finding a good water source. They're both used different techniques, but neither one's dead on. It's not like in this guy's mind, geology is just supplanted dowsing in rural water thirsty areas because the geologist, you pay a lot more for a geologist. They may or may not turn up water, whereas the dowser you pay, I think I saw about a tenth of what you pay a geologist for a day, and they may or may not turn up water. It just kind of makes sense in that rural area, like, hey, if neither one's going to reliably turn up

water, but there's a chance either one will, I'm going to go with the person who charges way less. There was also the case of this science blogger from the UK, Sally LePage, who was having a water pipe installed. I believe the UK company, the water company, sent out a dowser. Sally was like, wait a minute, what is going on here? What century are we living in? The UK water company kind of shrugged. LePage did a little investigating and found that 10 out of 12 water companies in the UK use water dowsing, and one of them, I believe the one that did her parents' house said in a tweet, hey, we found that some of the older methods are just as effective as the new ones. We also use drones and satellites, but a little bit of money spent toward dowsing

is no big deal, whereas a lot of other people were like, you shouldn't be spending any of our money on this. Yeah, because again, it's pseudoscience, right? So yeah, you can understand how people would be upset about that. And then at the same time, it really kind of undermines a lot of geologists work if water companies are using dowsers still too. I have a question. I'm naive. I don't know a lot about machinery. Isn't there some kind of machine that can look into the earth and find good water pretty easily? I would guess that there is as well, but I don't necessarily think so because if I wouldn't geologists just be employing that. And if so, why would they have a reputation for not being able to find water very reliably? I mean, the answer is there can't be.

Otherwise, of course, they'd be using that. But like, I don't know, it seems like some kind of seismic grab. And someone a lot smarter than me is going to explain why, which that's what I love doing about the show. Someone's going to explain to me and we'll read it on the air. I would guess, though, Chuck, at this point. So that really cool tool where you put a shotgun shell in and it stamps the earth and then it like gets an image back on radar or something. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Right. Those things are awesome. But I think they only go so deep. And you're probably looking for water much deeper than that. That would be my guess. Like if I was watching a movie and it was about one part of it had a family trying to dig a well. And they called up some guy

Well, Wells R Us came out and like just planted some funky machine down on the earth and went and he said this thing's gonna it's on wheels and it's going to drive around this acre of property and tell you exactly where the water is. I would totally believe that's a thing. Sure, I would too. And in the exact same way, people who hire dousers and watch somebody walk around the property with a stick believe what they see too. Probably wouldn't be a very good movie. But that is a huge, huge area for improvement from what I can tell researching this unless somehow the dowsing community has managed to completely silence the geological community as far as like water finding goes. It just seems like the geologists aren't like,

of course we can find water and here's how. I just haven't really seen it that where there's like this reliable way to find water. Yeah. I just don't understand it. So if you're a geologist who finds water, we would love to hear how you do what you do and how reliable it is. Yeah. One more thing, Chuck, before we go, in that Aeon article, there was mention of a study that was done at the University of British Columbia by a psychologist named Helene Gaucho. Mm-hmm. And she is the one who seems to have turned up that idea of non-conscious intelligence where people using a Ouija board were actually better at answering questions. They got more questions right when they were using a Ouija board than when they weren't using a Ouija board,

which is really, really weird. Yeah. And so Gaucho explained it by saying like, we might have some type of intelligence or intellect or memory that we can't access consciously, but if we kind of put the power of answering off onto something else like a Ouija board, we're able to access it because I guess we get our conscious mind out of the way a little bit. And that kind of was applied to this idea of dousers that these people, like you said, could recognize vegetation in the wild or certain kinds of rocks that suggested there's water somewhere. And they didn't realize that they've done this, that they've made that connection, but it's still there. It's non-conscious intelligence. And when they're holding those dowsing rods,

they're able to kind of put the power of explaining into the dowsing rod and access that non-conscious intelligence and that that's how they turn up water when they manage to turn up water. Interesting. I thought that was pretty interesting, too. Well, I certainly don't have everything figured out, so who knows? Who knows? Well, if you're a member of the geological community, let us know how you find water and how reliable it is. We'd love to hear that. And since I spoke to the geological community directly, that means, of course, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this overdue read. This came in at the end of last year. And this is from Emily Kenyon in the UK. Okay. Specifically in England.

Specifically. And I know I always get these shires mispronounced, but Lester Sher. This is, apparently, we have gotten Emily going on a lot of fun things because of our show. I want to say thanks for all the excellent work. Let you know that your podcast has, I'm sure, will continue to make subtle and positive impacts on my life. And Emily listed some highlights. I now have an active compost after your composting episode. Very nice. We now regularly have breakfast for tea, as I wanted every breakfast you discuss in the episode, but as we don't breakfast together as a family to solve the problem. Okay. Okay. I asked for the book, Radium Girls, by Kate Moore for Christmas,

from the Dial Painters episode. And I've just finished it. It was stunning, rage-inducing, and inspiring all at once. And I just ordered a copy for a friend. Very nice. I'm planning on making the watershed fried chicken recipe this week, off the back of the fried chicken episode. Very nice. That's going to knock your socks off. And my house has never been cleaner and my garden more well kept since I found you guys during lockdown. You made pottering around a joy, learning and chuckling at the same time, although I'm with Chuck on the economic stuff, which is to say, I guess, no, thank you. Thanks again for all these positive impacts on my life and happy new year to you guys and the

team from Emily here. Emily Kinney. Thanks a lot, Emily. That's fantastic. I'm glad we could have some positive effects on your life. That was very nice, Chuck. Good selection. It was good. If you want to be like Emily and let us know how we've impacted your life, hopefully for the better, you can send us an email. It's a stuff podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions,

like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward, and I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with good friends across a tiny table and just have a heartfelt conversation. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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