Watch Stoppers

have you guys ever looked into this? This, uh, this idea that some people cannot wear watches because the watches always stop and uh, you know, they'll they'll they'll try out of risk watch. Within a few weeks, it stops, get another one, it stops. And they are essentially a person who cannot wear them for some natural or supernatural reason.

But you've been you've been experiencing this your entire lot. Yeah. Well, I mean, to be fair, I'm not really someone who wears watches, and and so when I did wear them, and it's been years now, um, I would go to put them on and then they wouldn't work. Fairly recently after I put them on. Now memory is fuzzy, and I will say that if you don't wear your watches regularly, then you're probably apt to put one on that's going

to die of the batteries about to conk out. So that could definitely be an explanation, but it could be that I have a crazy electro magnetic field rating radiating outward and just shutting everything down. It's what do you think? Well as well discuss I tend to air on the side of skepticism, but but it's a fascinating copy because it is because it's I mean, there's a little bit of science mixed in here, a little bit of pseudoscience, a little just a bit of just basic psychology going on.

Like one thing that instantly comes to mind when someone says, oh, I can't wear watches because when I wear them, they break, It kind of reminds me of someone saying, oh, I don't eat spinach because I don't like it. And then you want to ask, well, when it is the last time you had spinach? Did you have spinach like once when you were five and then you boughtened into this idea that you don't like it? Or is it like a re recurring thing where every time you try spinach

every day you don't like it. I mean, it's there's so many factors that come into play with our experience versus our expectation of the world. It's true. And even though I know better about the watches, I can't help but that to sit there and think. But I even got an oscillating watch, and that one also died. Um so, But it's true. That's why I think this is so interesting. And there's there's a really good observation by Slate writer Juliette Lapotitos in her article Really a man can't become

a magnet on why watch stopping? This myth of watch stopping is so pervasive. She says, quote it's both scientific seeming since magnetic fields can, after all, interfere with electrical devices, and vaguely magical, since magnetic forces operate invisibly. The best of both worlds for people who aren't entirely satisfied by

a materialistic worldview but aren't willing to reject materialism out right. Yeah, And it's kind of it's science e superstition, you know, and it gives you a you can sort of fool yourself into believing it because it sounds possible, right, I mean, they're on the surface of things until you start looking a little deeper. Well, yeah, I mean, especially when you consider that a magnetic field is produced whenever an electrical charge is in motion, right, and then we are electrical creatures.

I mean, the experience of the world that we're having right now are our thoughts. Everything. I mean, this is this is electronic in nature. I mean, essentially, we're a spark inside of a bunch of meat. It's true because all of those meat tissues and organs produce specific magnetic fulsations, and so this is creating this biomagnetic field. So of course, you know, all of this is really interesting material to

get into. But in order for us to get into it, the right way to probably just do a little one on one overview of magnetic field because that in and of itself is amazing and it's not totally clearly understood by scientists yet. Right, So what is what is the magnetic field? What is it admitted by Well, the Earth's metal core, because it's acting like a giant magnet, and

it's emanating a magnetic field with two poles. Right, You've got the north pole in your south pole, and then these two magnetic poles kind of ruffling match where the planet's geographic north in south poles lie which mark the access on which they were spins. So everything in between there is is creating these magnetic fields. And as we discussed in the Stuff to Blow Your Kid's Mind video series,

I mean this actually ends up protecting the planet. I means it's highly important just in MS in terms of a very basic life can exist on Earth level because because not every planet is going to have this though, the core situation has to be just right to make it happen. Yeah, it's really cool because it's kind of like an umbrellas shielding us from everything that you know, deep space and the sun is throwing at us right Without this, we would be fried meat bags exactly. Wouldn't

have even become off the ground. Yeah. Um, so that's kind of you know, quick insight and how it's working, you know, at least um on our planet. But I wanted to also talk a little bit more about the magnetic field and how humans and animals use them, because this again is something that is still trying to be figured out by scientists. It's still an amazing thing, the magnetic field being able to orient something like the monarch butterfly in its navigation. Yeah, butterflies are a great example.

Various birds, foxes, animals that use the magnetic field for navigation purposes. Um, and it continues to be, like you said, a fascinating research topic because it's for the most part, something we don't get on a biological level. I mean, is there is the research shows. I mean there's it's not like that these creatures are completely alien and completely dissimilar to us, but they are able to tap into it and and and and use it in a way

that we cannot. Well, there's no one mechanism that can point to me and say, oh, this is the reason why, say a bird or a butterfly can use the magnetic field. But there is something called cryptochron homes, and these are a bit of a clue for us. These are a class of light sensitive proteins found in plants and animals, flavor proteins even flavor. Yeah, in humans. It's found uh in the retina, the cryptochrome and uh it's been of course studied in birds and monarch butterflies. It's very much

a part of circadian rhythms as well. I mean, so it's it's not something where we can again we can point to it and say, there you go, this is this is here exclusively for electromagnetic field sensibility. Yeah, and if you look at it, we're not gonna go into it too much because we can do the entire podcast

on it. Really, but if you look at it in birds, the cryptochromes are really helping to um sort of kick off this at the quantum level, this whole process and the light sensitivity and the magnetic field in birds eyes, and it's these sort of changes that are going on that helped to detect whether or not the sun is in this position and the magnetic field is being sensed in this direction. It's really fascinating. But the thing I

wanted to get to is, uh, Stephen M. Repert. He is a neurobiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and his colleagues Lauren Folly and Robert Gieger have been studying these cryptochromes and they fust around with the genes of a fly and they found that they fly could detect magnetic fields, but only when it's cryptochrome gene within

good working order. So that given the clue to say, this is really important in the detection of magnetic fields, and flies, by the way, always a good test subject for various genetic tankering. Yeah. So then the researchers subbed the fruit flies genes for the monarchs genes and they found the same thing. Okay, then they said, what about humans? Of course, uh so one of the monarchs to cryptochrome genes is similar in its DNA sequence to the human

cryptochrome gene, because we have it as well. So that prompted the idea of seeing whether the human gene too. Could we store magnetic sensing to fruit flies whose own gene had been knocked out? Yea. So they're using the monarch butterfly genes to fix this disabled fruit fly, and then they're saying, can we do the same thing, Can we fix the fruit fly with human cryptochromes? And they did.

So that kind of said, all right, if this exists in um in a marked butterfly, and this exists in fruit flies and this helps them to sense the magnetic field, then certainly there's something going on in the human eye with these cryptochromes and the magnetic field. So this opened up this this whole sort of Pandora's box of questions.

Um Repard says, of the cryptochrome and the human eye, it's beautifully poised to sense light, but we don't know if it has the downstream pathways that communicate magnetic information to the brain. The possibility exists. So the question becomes, you know, are we overstating the cryptochrome and its ability to sense the magnetic field or did humans once have a more refined ability to sense the magnetic field with cryptochrome? Yeah?

And to what extent is it possible that we could in some cases see the magnetic field or at least in some way since it um, Yeah, I mean it's in the union of the whole other quandaries about the possibility of super sers, people who you know, can see the world a little differently, see extra colors. What if they can what have a particularly gifted artists is actually seeing to some degree, uh, this electromagnetism in the world

around them. Well, so I immediately start to think about trans humanism because it's spent out on our minds a lot lately, and I thought, well, this is one of these things that you would want to tinker with. Yeah, why, I see with our limited vision, when you could you know, completely turbo charge everything to where you can see in the electromagnetic spectrum as well. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back more on

this topic. Alright, we're back. We're talking about our electronic brains and our meat bodies. We're talking about people who wear watches and claim that they're not your coal. Electronic properties make the watches stop, maybe even fall off their hands. I tend to imagine it that way, like somebody like Julie trying to wear a wristwatch and it just stops and just falls completely off your hand. It just bursts

into planes. H Well, I mean, okay, so let's get back to this idea that your brain, your body um is pulsing with electricity sort of. I mean it is. I mean, like we said that your thoughts in your head, this is essentially an electronic um situation, your your nerves. I mean, these are electronic signals. I really liked this description from a writer named Ferriss Chopra from Scientific American.

He said, your brain is electric. Tiny impulses constantly raced among billions of interconnected neurons, generating an electric field that surrounds the brain like an invisible cloud. That's quite poetic, but it does talk to this idea that the brain is enveloped in these countless overlapping electrical fields and is generated by the neural circuits of scores of these communicating neurons.

And then, uh, the the idea behind this is that this week electromagnetic field, because remember it is weak, this is not a strong EMF here, that this electromagnetic field actually helps the brain's neurons to fire together. So it does serve a purpose here. It's not just sort of generating electricity because it's working so hard. And then, of course we live in a world where they're just constantly fields all around us. Are all the devices in our

house pretty much increasingly so? And to your point, if if when we're capable of stopping a watch with one's personal electromagnetic field, where would it end where? I mean, because how many other devices do we have on our bodies at any given point these days? Yeah, you and I were talking about it. I mean, the effect of the matter is is that we're admitting pretty low levels of E MF. So if you're gonna destroy a watch with your crazy strong e m F, then you're going

to destroy everything else in your path. I mean, right now, I would even be able to record right because I would be knocking out everything in the space. Would be like an electronic muggle. I like that. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, I mean our smartphones are normal phones, um, you know, little running devices that people have to keep track of their exercise, various others cybernetic enhancements that create the more

and more into our daily lives. But we can't help to think that, you know, maybe just maybe there's something going on, uh with this E m F and our own little field that we're creating around us. And I can't help but think of something called the iPod shuffle effect. Actually I don't know if it's called the effect, but I'm gonna go ahead and call it now. And that's this idea that we we begin to see again the

patterns that don't necessarily exist. But if if I keep putting that watch on, you know, intermittently over a seven year period and a different watch and they're not working, than I began to think, right begin suspect that perhaps something fishy is going on with my own E m F, Just like if I put my iPod on and it's still it seems to me to play the same five songs over and over again from the sound of music. Yeah,

I mean it's similar to the I'm not kidding. And then some people attach the added level like it's oh, it's always playing that song When I do this, you get into that area like oh, if you if you watch you know, the Wizard of Oz with with the Pink Floyd playing that it that it matches up that we end up finding the connections and things. I mean, we've we've talked to this about about this before. As humans, we are just always looking for the patterns and things.

We're looking for pattern recognition so that we can figure out who we are and what we're doing in this world. And uh, sometimes we crank it up a little too

far well, and we attach meaning to things. Right, So in the in terms of the shuffle for for your iPod, for instance, you're attaching meaning to songs that means something to you emotionally, so that sort of amped up, so your brain is going to pick out that song the sound of music the album for instance, a little bit more because it's tuned in because it says, oh, I remember that that movie of my youth and this is the song about I don't know, yodeling over hills, and

I get all warm and fuzzy when I hear it. Um, you know the same thing with an object with a watch if I go to put it on that you know, we talked about this with our podcast about objects last week. Is that you began to really ascribe a lot of meaning to things. Uh, So you can see why it would be pretty easy to say, ah, I have this,

I have this going on. In fact, you may have even if you've ever been suspected that you are a watch stopper, you might even think that you're someone who can turn off and on street lights just by walking by them. Yeah, and this is I feel like we've all had this happen where you're walking along and you know, so that's light went out weird. But and I've never thought, oh, I must have I must have done that. Like it seems like that would be awfully self centered to me

to think, oh, wow, a light just went out. That must have been me. It's the same sort of thing that thinks, oh that stranger looked over in my direction, she must think I'm handsome. You know. It's like it's it's it seems to have there seems to be a self centeredness to it, that the world revolves around me, and then I'm somehow affecting things in ways they don't

really well, you know. And if it's late at night and you know, you're just your heels are clacking against the concrete and you happen to be approaching a street light, it's a very dramatic moment right when it goes out, and so you began to think, oh, what's going on, and not thinking, oh, that this sodium bulb is near it's the end of its life cycle and it's gonna you know, turn on and off. Well, you know, you we put ourselves in the you know, the mindset of

our primordical ancestor. I mean when when we're trying to figure out if something is is a risk or not if something is a threat. I mean, it's on one hand, it could be a could be just coincidence, or it could be a sign that something bad is going to happen, and our brains tend to decide with the possibility that there is a reason behind it. It's true, but your brain normally doesn't go like, hey, that's that sodium bowl that high sodium intensity and you know, the city has

been using those lately. UM. But that being said, I don't want to you know, wholesale poop to the idea of E MF in general, because, as you have pointed out, they are surrounding us at all times in various ways. UM. We get this invisible electromagnetic radiation in the form of AM and FM radio waves, visible light, microwaves, UM, cell phone towers, electronics appliances are all radiating and em possibly as well our cool spring mattress. Yeah. That was an

amazing study that we ran across. And this was this is from two thousand ten Hawburg Independent Research in Sweden, UM and also the UH Carol Linska Institute in Sweden, and they were looking specifically at at what role are box springs are Western box springs may play in UH

in these electric and electromagnetic fields. Well, this is amplifying them serving as basically in antenna for all the electro mantictic fields around us and then transferring them directly into our bodies while we're sleeping, when then we spend a lot of time sleeping. Yeah, I mean this is a real detective story. That's what I love about this study is that because they came across with this data and they said, why is the cancer rate uh ten percent

higher in the left breast than in the right. And this left side bias, by the way, is true for both men and women, and it applies also to skin cancer um to melanoma. Okay. But then they found that in Japan there's no correlation between the rates of melanoma and breast cancer. Okay, So that said, why, why, what

could be going on here? So that's when they figured out that, yeah, the coils we're actually and this is I'm gonna go ahead and quote our Douglass fealties from Scientific American because I think this He lays it out really well. He says, as we sleep on our coil spring mattresses in the West, we are in effect sleeping on an antenna that amplifies the intensity of the broadcast FM TV radiation. Asleep on these antennas, our bodies are

exposed to the amplified electromagnetic creation. For a third of our lifespans. As we slumber on a metal coil spring mattress, a wave of electromagnetic radiation envelops our bodies so that the maximum strength of the field develops seventy five above the mattress in the middle of our bodies. So what's going on here? When you're sleeping on the right side, the body's left side will thereby be exposed to field

strength about twice as strong as what the right side absorbs. Yeah, and previous research has shown that men and women both tend to prefer to sleep on their right side, uh, and their various possible reasons for it. For this, one being that the that if you sleep on your right side, you're reducing the weight stress on the heart. The heart is not a heartbeat is not that's allowed? Do I sleep on it? Let me see, I tend to sleep on my chest at first, and then I then I

go into a hanging recline position from the ceiling. No. Um, yeah, I guess I do. You know, I never really think about it. I tend to wake up one way or the other. Well, I understand the less pressure on your your heart right sleeping on your right side, But the whole thing about not being able to hear your heartbeat. Yeah, I mean, I've lived next to a train track, so I mean I'm used to that. I'm pretty sure I'm used to my heartbeat and it's for I mean, I've

never been sleck. Sometimes I'll be sleeping my leg feels a little weird, all the cats laying, I mean a strange position. But I'm never like, Oh, my heart feels like it's a bit weird. Maybe I should sift over so there's less weight on it. I don't know. Well maybe I just always go to bed with a heavy heart. Oh yeah, sorry about that. Um, all right, so you're probably saying, like, what's up with Japan? How did they

figure into all this? Well, yes, in Japan, and most beds do not have any sort of metal in them, so that's one thing. Um. And then their TV broadcasts and does not use the seven to mega hurts frequency that's used in western countries. Well, there you go. It's a fascinating notion, it is. It is. So that's that's a little tidbit about E m F. Again, we could go on and on about it because it's fascinating. And that's just one sort of example of how you can

inadvertently create a situation with e mfs. Uh that that could be dangerous, But for the most part, we'd like to think that we have ms under control. Right, Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Now I would like to launch in a little more into debunking watch stopping, just talking about some of the other possible reasons do squash it, just to just to squash it a little bit. Uh. First of all, moisture comes into play, especially with you know, your cheaper watches.

That's something to keep in mind. It's like, am I a am I? Am I a watch stopper or watches completely dying on me all the time, and then be am I swimming with them? On? Am I going out in the rain? A lot? I mean, there are so many environmental factors. I'm like it, like it or not. Technology can break over time, especially if you're putting in it in an environment that is detrimental to the technology. Also clumsiness, right, just straight up clumsiness. This thing is

going on your your your wrist, you know. And if you're like me, you talk with your hands. If you're like me, you sometimes like just are waving your hands a little bit as you walk down the hallway and you just completely smash your hand into it like a desk or something, just out of sheer clumsiness. So of course it's going to break a watch every now and then again, especially if you're tend to go towards some

cheaper models. Yeah, now see that this is building the case against me again because I'm a wild gesticulator, right sorry watch Uh. And then of course we've we've mentioned coincidence, the fact that we just end up ascribing some sort of importance to something that is basically just a freak occurrence. But then also there's confirmation bias, and this is the psychological cognitive science idea that basically we have a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that

confirms preconceptions. So you get in your mind, hey, I'm a watch stopper, then of course you're gonna think about that every time a watch stops on you. It's just you know, or it gets into the whole magical thinking

and and uh and weaving superstition in your life. If you go into it with this in mind, then yes, you're gonna see those patterns, just like if Doe ade Er, a female deer comes on your iPod shuffle yet again, it seems like and then there's also a sense that it might be a self fulfilling prophecy or something that

is essentially subconscious sabotage or psychological reversal. This is basically a situation where your subconscious objective thwarts your conscious objective um and generally it's it's more based in stuff like on the conscious level, you really want your marriage to work, but on your subconscious you're working against it. Or on your conscious level, you really want to be successful at work,

but subconsciously you want to destroy it. Most of the studies you look at with this, it tends not to revolve around something as petty as your risk watch, but you know it could. It could possibly explain what's happening subconsciously you hate your watch, or subconsciously you want to break stuff, and hey, your watches right there just begging for it. Maybe so, maybe so. But here's the thing.

If people really do have electronic electromagnetic fields that are breaking watches all the time, what they need to do is they need to get themselves an anti magnetic magnetic watch. And we fancy, yeah, well, we've we've had these things around for oh about sixty years. I believe generally the way they've worked in the past is that you have shielding involved. One of the more popular watches out there that that does this is the Rolex milligoths, which actually

was developed for scientists working at CERN. Because they're powerful magnetic fields all around them. They want to know what time it is, so it makes sense let's develop a watch that can withstand those pressures. So the Milagos is resistant to a thousand gaus, which is a unit of magnetic um induction uh. And to put that in the frame of reference, a small iron magnet has about a hundred gals and a refrigeration magnet has about fifty. So again,

the existing Rolex millergus takes care of a thousand. And there's a new model from Omega called the Omega Sea Master Aquacara, and this one um is that is really cool as well, cancels out to the field and is resistant to a fifteen thousand goals. So in other words, you're probably good because you'd have to to to break one of these things. You'd have to be wearing it through an m r I machine or traveling to a neutron star. So I'm guessing that the cost of this

is going to require Richard Branson dollars. Well, you know it's a pricier option, but if you think that you're breaking watches all over the place, then maybe it's what you need to try out there you go, yeah, or go for the Rolex model. I mean shop around. Like I said, We've had this technology for years, so uh, an answer is out there if you really think that you're some sort of electromagnetic freak. Al right, So on that note, let's call the robot over and see. Here's

another example. If you really were um putting out some sort of electromagnetic energy that breaks technology, you would have broken the robot ages ago. Uh well, he's in a fair day cage. Oh well, okay, safe alright. Lena writes in and says, Hi, Robert and Julie, I just listened to your podcast and wanted to write in with a somewhat embarrassing confession. Um oh in the podcast you listened to was our Objects of Love podcast about objects attachment,

et cetera. She says, I'm seventeen years old and I still sleep with a Teddy bear. His name is Teddy. I've had him since my first Christmas and I don't think I've ever spent more than two nights without him in my entire life. Sometimes I worry if I will have to take him to college with me and my roommate will think I'm weird or immature, but I have a really strong attachment to him, and he gives me a lot of comfort. I even gave him a personality and everything. My sister and I used to play with

stuffed animals a lot. I doubt that you would find many eleventh graders like me around still sleeping with a teddy bear. But I also have attachments to other objects, and I tend to keep things for the memories, even if I never look at them again. I'm probably not unique in that sense. Though I love the podcast, keep up the great work, and thanks Lena cool Well. I don't think it's I don't think it's weird at all.

I don't either. Actually, I was thinking that, you know, back to our Imaginary Friends episode and about how we postulated that you know, you haven't managing your friends when you're little, and then that just gets converted into something else when you get older. Maybe you get an attachment to a certain character on a television show or a movie or a book. Um, but that we tend to have these relationships, these fictionalized relationships, so it's in the

form of a teddy bear. Then I say, you know, great I think that that's not not a bad thing. I think that's actually a healthy thing. Yeah. Well, I'm setting here podcasting without Rubert triceratops in my hand, and UH and my sister's and I we had still to a certain extent, have a stuffed animal world that we refer to the various characters, and we would refer to these characters and have them to some extent interact with

each other, like all through high school and college. Um. In fact, up until recently, one of the stuffed ones UH named drunk Monkey UH still lived in the trunk of my car. See that makes me pine for Cronja, which was a stuffed ape that my brother and I have. We're a little that lived on Marijuana Island? How did how did? Where? Where did? How did Marijuana Island? Inners a full babysitter babysitters? Where is Cronja? Now? I don't know.

That's always been the mystery, like what happened to cronja? Every once exactly never to come back. But yeah, that comes up every couple of years. My brother and I'll be like where did it go? All right, Well, if you have something you would like to share with us, A be a prize. Teddy bears or apes that live in your trunk or on marijuana island, let us know we'd love to hear from you, and particularly if you have thoughts about Watch Stop. Do you think you're a

watch stopper? If so, explain yourself, what's your rationale and what do you think about it? Now that we've explained some of the properties going on here, both electromagnetic and psychological, uh, let us know. You can find us on Facebook and you can find us on tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on both of those and we also have a Twitter account where our handle is blow the Mind and you can always drop us a line. A blow the mind at discovery dot com for more on

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