For all fans of pokémon, of which there are a surprising number considering how much growing up the original fan base has been doing since 1997, there is an application to the games that is always looked over and seen as but a convenience, from its beginnings as the itemfinder, to its current incarnation as the dowsing machine, this efficient and simple way of finding the game’s hidden items is not just based on simplicity and convenience, but on a real pseudoscience that some people genuinely believe in.
Now dowsing itself is the process in which people hold two ‘dowsing rods’ in their hands that respond to tiny unconscious movements called the idio-motor effect, something which can easily convince people that they are indeed finding what they need through magical means due to the nature of the effect.
Much of the time the rods will follow what you think they should due to their movement’s origin in your brain, in fact, if you hold them loosely, they are sometimes hard to even keep still.
The point of the rods is that they will point in a direction, or sometimes cross in conjunction with whichever objective the user is told they can be used for, perhaps the most outrageous of which was the mass production of dowsing rods for western armed forces to detect bombs, truly a horrific exploitation of human life and gullibility for profit.
When requested the rods were taken apart and the only things inside were those tags you get on the sides of CDs in shops to stop people from stealing them. That’s not going to save people’s lives, if anything it’s going to delay the response and put more people in danger. If you’re sceptical of this, I have the news story at the bottom of the page.
Thankfully however, dowsing machines in pokémon exist and therefore aren’t the nonsensical money-grabber they are in the real world.
