M.J. Rose

You’ve probably heard of streetlamp interference (if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, that is) — but have you heard of watch interference?

From Princetonwatches.com,

The Mystery of the Stopping Watch… Why do Watches Stop When Some People Wear Them?

“A mysterious and yet common occurrence; why do some watches stop working when people wear them? Why do some people seem to stop every watch they put on their wrist?

It seems there has not been a serious study regarding this phenomenon and much like something you may see on a popular television series, or read in an internet chat room, appears to be widely debated and has a cloud of skepticism around it.

Although it is true that some watches will not function properly when around some electronic or highly magnetic equipment, there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer on why, when some people put a watch on their wrist, it will inexplicably stop working immediately or within a few minutes…”

For the rest, click here.

When reality is hard to swallow, remember, this scientist says that the world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality at all…

From The Atlantic,

The Case Against Reality
A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.
by Amanda Gefter

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

Getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. On one side you’ll find researchers scratching their chins raw trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to first-person conscious experience. This is the aptly named “hard problem.”…

For the rest, click here.

This is truly a strange mystery…and “unconscious ventriloquism” is something we’ve never heard of!

A young girl, possibly Pascuala Alcocer, poses with the chimney where the voice was said to emanate from. (Screencap by ANINBOXING on Youtube)

From Atlas Obscura,

Unconscious Ventriloquism: The Unsolved Mystery of the Zaragoza Goblin

by Eric Grundhauser

“The supernatural often seems to get a short shrift from government authorities, but that isn’t always the case. Or, at least, once, this wasn’t the case, because in 1930s Spain, the police, the military, and the international press were all summoned in response to the supposed voice of a goblin living in a residential stove.

The strange incident in Zaragoza, Spain in September of 1934 was finally blamed on “unconscious ventriloquism,” leaving one (probably) innocent woman slandered, and an entire city confused. (We scoured the almost daily reports from the 1934 London Times for the story.)

The madness began on September 27th, 1934 in the second floor home of the Palazón family, who lived in an apartment building on what was then known as Gascón Gotor street. It was on that date that the family first began hearing strange screams, laughter, and voices that seemed to come from the walls of their kitchen, specifically from their stove or its chimney. The chimney connected to many other units in the building before escaping to the roof, so the logic was that it must have been coming from someone in the building. The roof itself was taller than any around it and too isolated to access easily.

The voice, male, did not seem to just be in the heads of the Palazón family either…”

For the rest, click here.