In her book Extraordinary Knowing psychologist Elizabeth Mayer asks: “Is it possible to investigate apparently anomalous experiences while remaining firmly grounded in rational thought?” And answers: “I dearly value the rational world and all it enables, while facing the awareness that it’s a world with no room for experiences like the harp’s return. We need, however, to address what it may take to acknowledge and appreciate both worlds, and manage to live in both at the same time. I don’t insist that any reader swallow the stories in these pages as true; I consider myself a skeptical, highly trained scientific professional, and feel that perspective is essential if we are to make any creditable analysis of anomalous events. Yet, after fourteen years of studying such phenomena with my skepticism firmly in place, I believe that these vast arrays of experiences deserve our serious attention.
“The stories in this book, along with the questions they raise, have led me to consider an inescapable possibility. As human beings, might we be capable of a connectedness with other people and every other aspect of our material world so profound that it breaks all the rules of nature we know? If so, it’s a connectedness so radical as to be practically inconceivable. In this book, I’ll suggest how we can start to render such a radical connectedness more conceivable by making a kind of sense out of it.
“We can begin by looking to certain transactions that we haven’t conceptualized before, transactions that take place between the realms we call mental and material. They’re transactions that occur between the realm of unconscious mental processing—as understood by contemporary psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science—and the realm of intangible physical dynamics, which fields such as quantum physics are beginning to explore.
“I’ll suggest that these transactions are characterized by a paradox that helps explain why we haven’t acknowledged them, much less found ways to understand them. They reflect human capacities to which we can’t gain access in the customary ways. Their peculiar capacity is that they’re least likely to become available when we deliberately try to access them. We cannot reach these new sources of information simply by ‘tuning in’ to something new; paradoxically, we must also ‘tune out’ much of the ordinary information that continually bombards our senses. While some people appear born with an innate gift for doing that, it may be possible for the rest of us to learn to develop precisely that same quality of awareness, an awareness that might result in a subjectively felt state of profound connectedness to other human beings and to every aspect of the material world around us.
“If that state exists and we can achieve it, we may also develop distinct perceptual capacities, including an intuitive intelligence whose development and training our culture has largely overlooked. Refining and educating such an intelligence has huge implications for how we see the world because it changes what we are able to see, changing what we’re able to know as a result.
“As I’ve come to believe, extraordinary knowing may not be so extraordinary after all, but part of ordinary knowing that we simply haven’t known how to account for. If that’s true, we might start inhabiting our world with a different, radically more hopeful outlook for our future.”
“A neurosurgeon of world-class reputation calls me. He’s been suffering from intractable headaches. Despite exhaustive medical workups, no physiological cause for them can be found. In desperation, he’s called for a psychological consultation—a last resort, in his view.
“During our first appointment, he begins to describe his work. He’s passionate about it. He is also supremely successful. When heads of state need brain surgery, he’s flown in to operate. His reputation rests not just on the brilliance of his technique but even more on his astonishing track record. He undertakes one dangerously life-threatening surgery after another, yet he tells me, humbly and with quiet gratitude, I never seem to lose a patient. He has a loving marriage and wonderful children. He can’t think of anything troubling him, no obvious subconscious source for the crippling headaches that are destroying his life.
“I probe a little, looking for some hint of possible conflict, anxiety, or pain. He, on the other hand, keeps going back to his work, lighting up as he talks about it.
“And then it occurs to me that he hasn’t mentioned doing any teaching, even though he’s on the staff of a big university hospital. So I ask: Does he teach residents? He looks away, suddenly silent; finally, he answers:
No, I don’t teach at all anymore.
But you did? What happened?
I had to stop.
You had to?
Yes . . . I couldn’t keep it up . . . but I miss it. I loved teaching. As much as surgery itself, I loved it . . . but I had to stop.
“He falls silent again. Gently I probe further. Why did he have to stop? And then slowly, reluctantly, the surgeon tells me what he’s never told anyone. He can’t teach anymore because he doesn’t believe he can teach what he’s really doing. He tells me why his patients don’t die on him. As soon as he learns that someone needs surgery, he goes to the patient’s bedside. He sits at the patient’s head, sometimes for thirty seconds, sometimes for hours at a stretch. He waits—for something he couldn’t possibly admit to surgery residents, much less teach. He waits for a distinctive white light to appear around his patient’s head. Until it appears, he knows it’s not safe to operate. Once it appears, he knows he can go ahead and the patient will survive.
How, he asks me, could he possibly reveal that? What would the residents think? They’d think he was crazy; and he thinks, maybe he is crazy. But crazy or not, he knows that seeing the white light is what saves his surgeries from disaster. So how can he teach and not talk about it? It’s a horrible dilemma. He’s adopted the only solution: he’s quit teaching.
And when did your headaches begin? I ask him. Startled, he looks up at me. It hits him and hits him hard.
“That’s interesting, he says. The headaches started two years ago. And I remember when I noticed the first one. It was the day I resigned from teaching, right after I told the dean.”
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007).
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