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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
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