Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: The dowsing rod is a kind of indicator used by the process of the person. It > enables the person to externalize their intuition, and I understand > "intuition" as being the result of much process going on outside > consciousness, what goes on in the mind is far more complex and far deeper > than what we are consciously aware of, consciousness is only a small sliver > of the activity. >
Right! That's just what I have been saying. There are many similar examples of physical objects being used to express emotions, jog memory, or assist intuition or conscious thought. Also people often move the body in some sort of ritualistic manner, such as dancing, pacing, walking outdoors (Darwin's favorite method), gesturing, tapping, or stroking or tugging the beard (for a man; I sometimes wonder how women manage to think). As I said, many professors cannot gather their thoughts and start lecturing until you put a pointer in their hands. Ask an old fashioned physicist or programmer how to solve a problem and she may hem and haw until you give her a pencil and paper, or a piece of chalk, and she begins to jot down symbols. I do that for even the simplest programing tasks. Oddly enough, programming is something you do with your hands, like billiards or calligraphy, especially Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. The memory and skills are expressed by moving ones hands. Thinking, and observing nature for traces of water, and all other mental processes are active, physical processes, and they always call for organs other than the brain. Even the most esoteric thinking processes require sub-vocalization -- that is, talking to yourself; moving the tongue and other speech organs very slightly. I have a photo of Wilbur Wright standing next to an airplane in 1908 talking to European aviators (mostly wannabe aviators). He is describing how to maneuver an airplane. Like every pilot in history, he is doing this with his hands, holding them like wings, pretending to swoop and angle. He might have pointed to the actual machine next to him and showed them the control surfaces. He might have discussed it as a physics problem. He, more than anyone else alive at that time, might easily have described his point in advanced mathematical terms: center of mass, wing shape, lift, drag, stall and so on. He filled dozens of notebooks with engineering equations that would challenge any graduate student in aviation science today. But when he was teaching others and learning from Orville, he used his hands. - Jed
