Book Review:
Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind
By Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer

In 1991, when her daughter’s rare, hand-carved harp was stolen, Elizabeth Mayer’s familiar world of science and rational thinking turned upside down. After the police failed to turn up any leads, a friend suggested she call a dowser–a man who specialized in finding lost objects. With nothing to lose-and almost as a joke-Dr. Mayer (a prominent clinical psychologist at Berkeley) agreed. Within two days, and without leaving his Arkansas home, with only a photograph of the harp and a map of San Francisco, dowser Harold McCoy located the exact California street coordinates where the harp was found.

Deeply shaken, yet driven to understand what had happened, Mayer began the fourteen-year journey of discovery that she recounts in this mind-opening book. Her first surprise: the dozens of colleagues who’d been keeping similar experiences secret for years, fearful of being labeled credulous or crazy.

Extraordinary Knowing is an attempt to break through the silence imposed by fear and to explore what science has to say about these and countless other “inexplicable” phenomena. From Sigmund Freud’s writings on telepathy to secret CIA experiments on remote viewing, from leading-edge neuroscience to the strange world of quantum physics, Dr. Mayer reveals a wealth of credible and fascinating research into the realm where the mind seems to trump the laws of nature.

She does not ask us to believe. Rather, In an attempt to understand her experience with remote perception and to explore what science has to say about such inexplicable phenomena, Mayer has written a book of intrigue and optimism, with far-reaching implications for scientific inquiry.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Ph.D., was an internationally known psychoanalyst, researcher, and clinician, the author of groundbreaking papers on female development, the nature of science, and intuition. In addition to her private practice, she was associate clinical professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and also taught at UC Medical Center, San Francisco. She died just after completing this book.

Excerpt: Chapter 1

Weeks after I’d published my first tentative foray into exploring mind-matter anomalies, a physician I barely knew came up to me at a professional meeting. He’d read my article and wanted to tell me something. The story poured out. He’d been diagnosed twenty years earlier with fatal bone cancer and had become deeply depressed. As a marathon runner, he’d found relief from despair only while he ran. Early one morning, two hours into his run, he’d been suddenly overcome by what he described as “a sensation of light-clear, soft light, as though light was filling my bones, as though light and air were infusing each bone. I saw it-light penetrating those bones, right through to the marrow.”

The next week his X-rays were clean. “I’ve never told another colleague,” he said. “I told my wife when it happened-no one else. And this part I didn’t tell anyone: I know that’s what cured me. The light crowded out the cancer cells. I don’t know how, but I know it did.”

As word of my new interest spread, my medical and psychoanalytic colleagues began to inundate me with accounts of their own anomalous experiences, personal as well as clinical. As with the physician, the stories they shared with me were often ones they’d never revealed to another professional associate. Their accounts-by e-mail, snail mail, at conferences, in seminars, in hall corridors or at dinner-made as little sense to me as they did to the colleagues telling me about them. The stories were all about knowing things in bizarrely inexplicable ways.

I was particularly fascinated by how eagerly my colleagues shared even the most weirdly personal stories with me. Their eagerness puzzled me, until I realized how badly people wanted to reintegrate corners of experience they’d walled off from their public lives for fear of being disbelieved.

I began taking notes, word for word and with every detail I could catch. I couldn’t figure out what else to do. I couldn’t ignore the things people were telling me, but I couldn’t find ways to make sense of them either. The stories were from credible people, backed up by enough hard facts that I couldn’t reject them out of hand.

As my files of all these notes grew, I found myself pursuing the odd, unexpected conversation with a new kind of curiosity, not just with colleagues but also with friends, students, and even first-time acquaintances. I began asking different questions.

Someone would mention an unusual outcome of a friend’s illness; instead of letting it pass, I’d ask what was so unusual. In return, I’d often hear accounts of apparently anomalous healing or treatment or even diagnoses: perhaps a stranger delivering an accurate, complex diagnosis of a medical condition over the phone, without any background information. Or someone would describe knowing something but having no idea how they knew it, and I’d probe gently. Peculiar stories would follow: a woman wakened by a sudden ache in her chest just as her father suffered a heart attack three thousand miles away; a man assaulted by shooting leg pain at the moment an identical twin fractured his leg; a student instantly guessing to four decimal places the exact strength of a chemical solution that should have taken hours to work out; a mother seized by panic at the exact moment her baby across town took a bad fall.

My new focus also encouraged me to tune in to my patients in a new way. I gradually had to face the realization that there were things my patients had been only half telling me for years, things they viewed as too weird or risky to reveal for fear I wouldn’t believe them or-worse-would think they really were crazy. Now when my patients began to hint at strange incidents, odd images, or funny coincidences, I worked harder to encourage them to explore their meaning. And I began hearing some remarkable things.

Read more about Harold McCoy and Ozark Research Institute