Dowsing, Mushrooms, Religion and Tacit Knowledge

Preface- I’m an atheist with zero belief in the supernatural. So, please read to the end, because, before we get there, I’m going to write that I believe in dowsing. This essay will take a minute to get back to the subject of religion.

I once read a report in a skeptical publication that claimed to have disproved the practice of dowsing- the practice of humans, with no technical gear, locating underground water. The report detailed a scientific experiment where dowsers walked over a floor with pipes underneath, some of which contained water and some didn’t. The dowsers who tried to locate the water under foot failed utterly. They couldn’t detect which pipes had water and which didn’t . This experiment was bound to fail, as it ignored the entire outdoor context of dowsing, as practiced in the real world- predicting underground water locations in familiar terrain. I’ve met dowsers and totally believe in their ability to tell people where to dig wells that will produce water. They can do it. There is absolutely NO supernatural component to this skill.

I love to collect morel mushrooms in the springtime (trust me, this is relevant). I move every three or four years, often to a new country, so it’s been hard to maintain my morel hobby. I learned to collect morels in southeast Ohio, in Appalachia, close to where I met my first dowser. Most families there have proven morel spots, where they return each spring to find mushrooms. Morel hunting is easy for them, as they just walk to a specific place in the woods and pick. I’ve always had to find my own place, and a new one every few years. Still, I’ve managed to find them in many countries- Afghanistan, Bermuda, France, the US. These mushrooms are hard to find, difficult to see, even when you stand next to them. It’s challenging to enter a forest you’ve never seen, in a new country, and still find them. I’m not an expert at finding these mushrooms. The weight of my annual haul correlates more with my obsessiveness than my skill. I have entered only one morel hunting contest, in Appalachia, and finished in last place.

So, as a mediocre morel hunter in the areas I am most familiar with, I have a lot of strange experiences I need to account for. I was in Bermuda, first time ever, looking for mushrooms. For reasons totally unknown to me (wait for the description of tacit knowledge later), I suggested hunting in some limestone (actually, coral) cliffs. In Appalachia, this would not have been the type of place I would have searched- in Appalachia, we searched near certain types of trees. I did not have any known reasons for the suggestion. Bermuda has acidic soil that isn’t conducive to morels, so I didn’t expect to find any, but I still thought this would be worth checking out. We found morels, growing, literally, out of the rocks. Mushrooms sprouting out of rocks with no soil touching them. We found no other morels anywhere else on the island. I have no idea why I suggested looking there, but it worked.

On my first trip to central Texas, for a morel hunt, I found myself in a region with vegetation I had never seen- scrubby, live oak/cedar forests. I had low expectations, as I had searched west Louisiana/east Texas woods thoroughly and never found a morel. We arrived an hour before the official hunt, so we decided to look around to kill time. I had never been within 150 miles of this place and had never seen this type of woods. We pulled into a parking lot and our group asked me where we should go hunt. I looked to a distant tree, one of a long row of trees, on the edge of a firebreak above us, 400 meters away. “We should go to that tree,” I said. It was far from other trees and areas that might have been promising. As in Bermuda, I had no clue why I said it. We trudged up a hill to the tree and found more morels than I had ever seen before- filling two large, paper grocery bags. When we finally finished picking all the mushrooms under that tree, we searched under all the surrounding trees. We found nothing else. I had, some how, picked the only tree in the area harboring morels.

I have a lot of similar stories about finding morels- odd places I searched on a hunch. I have had many failures when I tried to systematically look on forestry maps for the best spots for morels (In Appalachia, they are associated with poplar trees. I have searched so many Poplar Ridge, Poplar Road, Avenue, Lane, etc.).

I am so happy that, on that day in Texas, no one I was hunting with was religious. If we had prayed “God, show us where the mushrooms are” and hiked up to that live oak, it would have been tempting to see the hand of god.

So, how did I, ‘magically’, find the one tree out of hundreds that actually had the morels? I tacitly know, but I don’t know. The philosopher Michael Polanyi first used the term ‘tacit knowledge’. In a less relevant way, this can mean knowledge that is difficult to articulate- such as grammatical rules that a person can’t describe, but perfectly knows. When dealing with a natural environment and an activity guided by ‘hunches’ (mushroom hunting), tacit knowledge is knowledge that one can’t articulate and of which one isn’t consciously aware. Why was I not consciously aware of the reasons that I should have hunted at that particular tree? Mushrooms are a complicated organism. Their roots (mycelia) live all year underground. At certain times of year, in certain conditions, mushrooms sprout from the mycleia. Mushrooms are the fruit, mycelia are the trees. Many mushrooms can’t be grown commercially, because no one has cracked the code on which conditions are required for certain mushrooms to sprout from their mycelia.

In previous morel hunts, I used my conscious knowledge of the species to guide me. Think of all the data that my brain absorbed as I walked-

• the humidity in the air
• the smell of countless fungi, bacteria and viruses in the soil
• the moisture level of the soil, as felt as I stepped on it
• the slope
• the sunlight/shade ratio
• types of plants growing in the area
• the state of growth of the springtime plants
• evidence of animals in area (trails through the grass, etc.)

There are countless other parameters that my brain absorbed, but, of which, I had no conscious awareness. When I say ‘countless’, there is also the combination of all these factors- perhaps you won’t find the morels in this sunlight/shade ratio when the soil moisture level is like it is now. We evolved as hunter/gatherers. No doubt, the more factors our ancestors absorbed and incorporated into decisions, the more successfully they hunted/gathered. So, when I picked that one tree for hunting, my brain, unconsciously was probably assessing dozens of parameters based on my previous experience. I couldn’t describe most of them, but I tacitly (unconsciously) knew what to consider.

I used to belong to a mushroom club with a 70 year-old French woman member. She was an awesome person (70 year-old French woman who worked as an armed guard at a Louisiana library) She passes my God test (If I were God, would I want to watch this person all day.), but she was also utterly depressing, because, upon her first step into the woods, she would often pronounce her verdict on the hunt. “It doesn’t smell right. We won’t find anything.” She was always right. Sometimes, we would drive five hours for these hunts and pay for hotels, meals and all, but she would kill the whole day right at the start. The only thing worse than an unsuccessful mushroom hunt in mosquito and snake-infested Louisiana woods is being told beforehand that there was no point in even looking for mushrooms. But she had decades of experience and could just smell the air and predict the hunt. She was never wrong, but she was often a downer.

Dowsing is based on the same principles as mushroom hunting. The dowsers I met learned the trade from their fathers. I say ‘trade’, but half of them refused payment for their services. They claim that they can tell people where to dig wells. Some of them even predict the output of the underground springs. The stereotypical dowser carries a y-shaped stick that guides him to the well site. The guys I met would carry a random stick or a coin between their teeth or some other totem. They enjoyed great success at finding water. Some of them considered this a god-given talent. Others didn’t like discussing the subject at all, as if they had no right to discuss it. They almost acted like they would lose the ability if they discussed it- I suspect their fathers dodged the topic, too. I totally believe in their abilities, but there is nothing supernatural here.

These guys, since they were old enough to walk, followed their fathers around the same 25-mile radius area of Appalachia, while their fathers predicted where to dig wells. These guys had decades of tacit knowledge. Even inadvertently, they observed the shape of the hills, hallows, valleys, streams. They saw the type, height, greenness, health of the vegetation. They saw the quality of the soil, the ratio of rock/sand/dirt. They smelled. They saw the effects of temporary drought (wilted leaves) compared to long-term presence of water. They felt the ground under their toes. They heard the birds, insects and animals living around a good well site. They took all this in and remembered it, unconsciously. No doubt, they also passed over a lot of unfavorable locations and remembered all this data for those sites, too. They remember which sites had water and which didn’t once the wells were dug.

How could these guys not be able to predict a good place to dig a well after all that? When hunting mushrooms, sometimes I, too, feel that I need to grab a stick and hold it. Holding a totem focuses my thought on the stick and lets my tacit knowledge guide me, unfettered by all the good ideas I would come up with if I thought about it. Conscious ideas don’t help in this. I need to stop thinking to be successful. I think this is why the dowsers carry something, too. The totem gives them permission to stop thinking and fall back on all their tacit knowledge accumulated just below their level of consciousness. It’s a distraction, rather than a magic wand. It just helps us to stop thinking. We don’t have all of our accumulated data in our conscious minds, so thinking is a distraction.

So, I was certain, upon reading the skeptic test of dowsing, that the dowsers would fail. They don’t know how to find water. Rather, they know how to turn off their conscious thought long enough to allow all their accumulated knowledge guide them to a likely well site, in a location similar to the hundreds of others they have visited before. But this only works in situ, outdoors, in the area where they learned their trade. Probably, some of these guys think they have a gift, though the dowsers I met were extremely humble about their ability- again, not even wanting to discuss it. They don’t have any gift or skill; they really just have a huge store of local knowledge.

In mushroom hunting, we all rely on instinct (accumulated tacit knowledge) to locate mushrooms. Any forest is impossible to completely visually examine, so a hunter must decide (consciously or otherwise), where to stand and where to look. But we loudly preach that no one should ever rely on instinct to decide what mushrooms are safe to eat. Thousands of people before us have died eating the wrong mushrooms and we need to honor them by not making their mistakes again. But I had two friends, Pat and Dave, who were mushroom specialists with decades of experience in finding, identifying and eating mushrooms. They came to our house in Louisiana once and, after dinner, asked to go looking around our property for mushrooms. Fifty feet from our back door, we found a new species of mushroom. (Louisiana, being semi-tropical, has an extremely large variety of fungi. I met many mushroom hunters there who had discovered new species. I went on walks when new species were discovered. My wife found one species that had only been seen once before. This was, oddly, normal for Louisiana). I no longer remember what the genus was (perhaps Tricholoma) but it was a genus with both edible and deadly species. Dave, who has a long history of discovering new mushroom species and has numerous mushrooms named after him (search lewisii for the species name), said that this was a previously undescribed species. When a guy who has discovered numerous new species says that, you can safely take him at his word. I was pretty happy at this point, until I noticed that Dave and Pat were collecting way more specimens than they would need to establish a new species and send samples to the University of Chicago. “What are you doing, Dave?” “Oh, we’re collecting some to eat tomorrow.” So, this guy was collecting a mushroom that, literally, no mushroom expert had ever seen before, that was part of a genus with some deadly mushrooms, TO EAT. I told him he was insane, but he insisted that he could ‘just tell’ that this one would be safe to eat. It was. They ate it with no ill effects. He had hunted and eaten so many mushrooms over the decades that his tacit knowledge told him he could eat this new one and live. Incidentally, Dave and Pat only once got sick from eating wild mushrooms, when they ate a safe mushroom species growing on an unknown tree in Mexico (outside of their realm of familiarity), that absorbed toxins from the tree. After so long hunting, studying mushrooms, Dave’s tacit knowledge led him to conclude whether a previous unknown mushroom would be safe to eat. Although a PhD, with decades of scientific work under his belt, he made it clear that he just had a reliable hunch about this. I still think this was an insanely stupid act, but he was right- they were good to eat.

In college, I collected wild plants for money, which required me to get in touch with my pre-human, unintellectual, unconsciousness. I hunted ginseng, which is an 8-inch tall plant, easily lost in a forest, with an unbelievably large There are plants that mimic every aspect of this plant. I quickly gave up attempts to predict where to find it using maps. This is not a plant that you can out-think. To find it in any quantity, you have to enter a primordial hunter-gatherer consciousness where you just let your hunches guide you. Eventually, I learned to temper this with an appreciation for places where it might grow that were too difficult for the competing hunters (I never met a hunter who wasn’t collecting disability benefits) to reach. After years of this, I can accurately find a lone population of ginseng in a forest, as long as I listen to my instinct (accumulated tacit knowledge) and don’t listen to the good ideas from my intellect. I would be an idiot to try and weigh all the natural variables that might hint at the presence of the plant. I would screw that calculation up. But, if I turn off my conscious thought, and listen to the knowledge under the surface (gained from years of experience hunting ginseng), I’ll always find it. None of this is supernatural. It’s just unconscious. Nothing magical is happening here, although it would be extremely easy to see this as magical. Let’s consider the significance of all this to religious belief.

We’re cavemen at heart. We evolved by listening to our conscious and unconscious thoughts. It’s tempting to think that our ancient, successful, forebears, consciously planned out their berry picking and gazelle hunting routes for the day, using the same reasoning that most modern humans today would use to plan a shopping trip. But, they probably didn’t. They probably walked through the world guided by a vast trove of tacit knowledge that they couldn’t spell out, if asked, if they could even speak. They just (tacitly) knew that they shouldn’t hunt the berries on that side of the hill today. Or knew that the herds would still be in this valley versus the other. Or that this tree would have the morels. It wasn’t instinct at all, but tacit knowledge. We can all tap into this knowledge that each of us has built up through our own experience. Sorry- but I don’t believe this is some kind of species-wide library we can tap into.

In fact, anthropologists have described pre-hunt rituals, where people ceremoniously shoot/stab a drawing of their hunted prey. The hunters believe that this ritual confirms their success ahead of time. I don’t believe that the ritual has any supernatural connection to the hunt, but I could see how it might make them so assured that they don’t think too much during the hunt, and just follow the data hovering beneath their consciousness.

I would invite my fellow atheists and skeptics to consider how this heritage might influence religious belief. First, consider that humans have survived because they followed hunches without (consciously available) evidence. We love to demand the reasons why someone believes something or acts a certain way. But, in nature, we survived by following hunches based on dozens of streams of information that never reach the level of conscious knowledge. The idea that we should all have describable reasons for our beliefs is pretty new, on an evolutionary time frame. Following hunches got us to the next generation. The very idea that every belief needs justification is a modern concept. I’m not knocking demands for proof. In a world where we are surrounded by the products of science, we should default to a mentality that demands proof. But, in the past, a human who had a hunch that they would find berries over the hill to the left vs the hill to the right, might have missed the crop if they delayed action til they could prove that they had a reason for that choice. So, Dave had a PhD and a ton of learned knowledge, but he was still a descendant of cave men and used intuition (tacit knowledge), as well.

One huge potential complication of tacit knowledge involves prayer and interceding for divine intervention. Had I been a believer and prayed before that Texas morel hunt, I would have been thrilled to see that god guided me to the right tree. Believers also accumulate tacit knowledge. How many times do believers pray for guidance, then make decisions based on some tacit knowledge and later blame god for some unforeseen success? In some cases, they might not even be able to see that they actually had (under the surface) the knowledge to guide their decisions. While I always see tacit knowledge impact more in natural settings, surely we all have unconscious knowledge of contemporary, urban situations that we never consciously think about- everything from which cars we should park next to, who we should stand behind a grocery line or whose sales pitch we should trust. Perhaps there are unconscious cues about such subtle things as the way people smell that guide our behavior. We have a lot of experiential, tacit knowledge, which guides us, when we are carrying out the actions that might make a prayer come true. Our decisions, based on this knowledge, cause of the positive end result, not divine intervention.

On another level, this reliance on tacit knowledge presents an obstacle to skeptical thinking. We’ve all relied on (tacit knowledge guided) hunches and succeeded. We’ve all made the right decision without enough (conscious) evidence to back up our choice. We’ve followed hunches that seemed to pop into our heads with no more evident cause than divine intervention- with good results. All of this is consistent with the idea of divine guidance. That’s not real and not what’s happening, but it is a possibly consistent explanation here. Especially in natural settings, where other humans can’t mess things up, relying on these hunches and intuition can bring good results (because we know the right answer without being aware of it). But it is so easy to confuse trusting our unconscious tacit knowledge with relying on the divine. I listen to a lot of atheist podcasts and the host always try to nail down the reasons that theists believe in their gods. And the theist usually points to anecdotal evidence of god. How many of these anecdotes are explained by the hidden hand of tacit knowledge guiding their decisions or answering their prayers?

When we, atheists, reach out to theists, we should bear in mind that many of them may well have examples of supposed divine intervention in their lives, which was really just tacit knowledge guiding their actions. This is an explanatory force that negates many supernatural claims, sheds light on happy coincidences, and, if properly harnessed, puts us more in touch with the world.

I neglected to mention it above, and this may be an epiphenomenal artifact of our evolution- it feels awesome to rely on tacit knowledge and succeed. Any time you are out in nature and make a prediction that comes true, you feel a small euphoria. This stuff is powerful, enjoyable and helpful. It’s not supernatural, but it is the closest feeling I get to anything supernatural.

(PS, I currently live in an area that was populated by white folks for centuries after the high value of wild ginseng had been established. I have never found any within 80 miles of my house, although I sometimes find myself in woods where I know it should be growing. I understand (consciously) that it was probably all over-harvested 170 years ago, but my instinct (tacit knowledge) keeps telling me it should be here. Conscious reasoning still has a place here- tempering the tacit instinct with the know reality.)