Moments of extraordinary knowing

There are times during the year, Christmas being one, when thoughts turn to moments that change a life. Here's one:

In December 1991, a thief stole a rare and valuable hand-carved harp following a Christmas concert in Oakland, Calf. The harp belonged to a 14-year-old girl, Meg Mayer. Her mother, Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, was a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley and an internationally renowned psychoanalyst.

Meg Meyer was inconsolable. She couldn't play on any other harp. Elizabeth Mayer tried all possible channels to get this one back — instrument dealers, pawnshops, the police, even sob stories on TV news. Nothing worked.

After two months, a friend suggested she try a dowser. That's right, those odd people who use forked sticks to locate well water. Apparently, some of them can find lost objects.

You don't have to be a university professor to be skeptical of such an approach. When police get desperate, we're told, they sometimes use mediums to try to find people. Mediums populate our TV universe. Not so much with dowsers

Though skeptical, Dr. Mayer, being a thorough professional, went straight to the top: She phoned Harold McCoy, president of the American Society of Dowsers. He lived in Fayetteville, Ark., in a trailer park.

Immediately, she liked the sound of his voice. He also reassured Mayer that, yes, the harp was still in Oakland. Then he asked her to send him a street map.

Days later, he called Mayer back with the exact street and house where the harp was located. She called the police but they shrugged her off. So she decided to post flyers, within a two-block radius of the house, offering a reward, no questions asked.

A few weeks later, Mayer received a call from someone who said his next-door neighbour had shown the harp to him. After several shadowy calls, she arranged to meet a go-between at the rear parking lot of an all-night Safeway Supermarket.

There, she met a teenage boy who muttered "The harp?" Minutes later, Mayer sped away in her station wagon with the instrument safely inside the vehicle. "As I turned into my driveway," she said later, "I had the thought 'This changes everything.'"

When the phone doesn't ring

This story begins her book, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind.

At the core of this story, and Mayer's book, is the unexpected knock of "anomalous" — meaning unusual or abnormal — experience.

The world is a different place after you live through something like that.

The experience led Mayer to begin to explore this world of "extraordinary knowing." She knew it was a subject filled with outrageous claims and outright fraud. Still, extraordinary stories began pouring in.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer worked on her book for more than a decade, completing it just before she died of a rare intestinal illness on New Year's Day, 2005. It was published earlier this year.

Mayer's work isn't about explaining those times when you think of somebody and out of the blue, they call. Those are the stories the people at Skeptic magazine love to bash.

As James Randi, the stage magician who was a founder of Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, likes to say, ESP incidents like these are a simple case of faulty memory: You forget about all those thousands of times you were thinking of certain people and they didn't call.

In Mayer's case, she tells us stories of amazing coincidences, not so easily explained. Such as people who — sometimes as if they were in a trance — find long-lost friends or relatives or jewelry, or find out things they could not have possibly known.

Mayer, the psychoanalyst, believed that some kind of unconscious processing is going on in these cases, something science does not understand and has no name for.

Her view is echoed in the preface by the eminent physicist, Freeman Dyson. To the dismay of many of his colleagues, he says that anomalous experience is real. It's just that it often escapes the world of repeatable, experimental science.

Possibility

We all have heard stories that can't quite be explained. Let me end on one of mine.

Years ago I was lying in bed at night and I became besieged by wracking pain. It was as if I was on a torture bench. It kept me awake all night.

I flayed and moaned. Then, in the very early morning, the pain subsided. A little later, my mother called. She told me my father had died of a heart attack.

Now the Amazing Randi would ask me: How many other times have I been wracked by pain, woke up and forgot about it? I would say, not many. And this pain was special, out of the ordinary. But could I prove it? No.

So Randi would be skeptical. He may be right to be.

I just think that perhaps something else was going on. Something I don't understand and that cannot be explained in ways we all comprehend.

Perhaps I am guilty of wishful thinking, of wanting the world to be more mysterious and more spiritually connected than it is. Still, this story fits in nicely with the holiday season, where human possibility is celebrated, whether you believe in strange things or not.