Nuts and Bolts: the ideomotor effect,

Does dowsing, the process by which buried treasure (most often water) communicates its presence to a person walking across the soil above it, work?

The answer seems to be yes, sometimes. In particular dowsers are effective at finding water in places which are situated on large areas of underground water.

The next question is: does dowsing work more often than mere chance?

Well, no one has yet managed to prove this using any rigorous scientific method, though some large companies who need to look for water or oil do employ dowsers. 

Well, you've got to look somewhere, so why not go with every clue you have?

So the next question is: are all dowsers fakes?

The answer to that seems to be no. A sincere dowser seems to rely on the ideomotor effect, which is when a thought causes an involuntary contraction of the muscles. To make things even more obscure, this thought may not be one of which the thinker is aware.

It's the same mechanism that's reckoned to account for the various forms of "ghost-communication" such as table-turning and ouija boards.

So it may be that an effective dowser is just very good at the unconscious analysis of geological or geographical clues (and people do lots unconscious analysis: when judging the flight of a ball, for example).

Or perhaps, just perhaps, there's some mysterious communication with the Earth going on, after all...

I still can't help hoping, you know.

Word To Use Today: ideomotor. This word was coined by William Benjamin Carpenter in 1852. The ideo- bit is from the Greek idea which means, well, idea; and the motor bit comes from the Latin movēre, to move.