The Harp That Came Back: Part 2

Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind
by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

Of course, I also discovered that the world of anomalous mind-matter interactions is filled with shoddy research, flaky research, and research based on questions that are neither particularly interesting nor rooted in a solid grasp of science, scientific method, or scientific thinking. Yet as I delved more deeply, what most impressed me was the significant bank of well-conducted, scientifically impeccable research that imposes enormous questions on anyone interested in making sense of the world from a Western scientific point of view. I began to wonder, why had so much of this excellent research been overlooked, its conclusions dismissed?

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:

"My patient walked in and I knew her mother had died-no clues-I just knew, instantly."

"I woke up in the middle of the night like I heard a shot; the next day I found out it was exactly when my patient took a gun and tried to kill herself."

"I suddenly felt that my partner's son was in trouble. I called my partner; it worried him enough that he tracked down his son. His son had been in a bad car accident and my partner got there just in time to make a decision about surgery that probably saved his life."

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 was on a bus and all of a sudden found myself smelling the perfume my brother's ex-wife used to wear. When the bus stopped, she got on. I hadn't smelled that perfume or seen her in thirty years."

"My husband and I fell in love with a house in London on our honeymoon-very distinctive, across from a park. Fourteen years later, living in Boston, I woke up one day, and thought, maybe we could buy it. I tracked down a realtor in London, asked if she could figure out the address and find out if it was for sale. Crazy! But she did. The man who'd been living there had just died; the For Sale sign wasn't even up yet. We bought it the next week."

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.

I was somewhat stalled with one deeply troubled patient, a woman who was isolated and very frightened of the world. For years she'd insisted she couldn't remember any of her dreams, and indeed she'd reported almost none to me through our work together. Then, during one session, she told me that the night before she'd dreamed of my going to Arizona. I had indeed been planning a trip to Arizona that week, but I'd told none of my colleagues or patients about it. I asked her, why Arizona? She had no idea, no associations. I told her that I was in fact going to Arizona and wondered if she'd somehow picked that up. For a moment, she was quiet. Then she hesitantly told me that she often had dreams in which she knew where people were going, and it turned out she was right. She couldn't begin to explain it. She'd learned not to tell people; it was too weird. She had had dreams like that as a child and her parents had raged at her and called her crazy. They would sometimes beat her until she said she'd made it all up. So she'd learned to shut up and started pretending that she didn't have dreams, that a lot of things she experienced weren't real. Pretending to others, to herself, had made her feel safe, but it had also made her feel that she wasn't very real.

That exchange with my patient was a turning point in her psychotherapy. It was also a turning point for me. My evident curiosity about her dream had liberated a flood of experiences. As my patient started believing that I could believe her-and considered her neither crazy nor dangerous-a new world opened up between us. She began for the first time telling me about other bizarrely intuitive experiences, and about how they terrified her. Bit by bit, her comfort in the world took new root. Her life changed in profoundly positive ways. She told me that she started feeling she could be real.

Copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer.

About the Author

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.