Some people here will be familiar with my thread on a "Non-optical USB mouse".

I was looking for a Non-optical USB mouse as I was feeling sensations in my temples from the optical mice that I tried.

I thought the sensations were due to EMF's but others pointed out that it was impossible to feel them.
Later in the thread it was suggested that what I was feeling was HFN (high frequency noise).

I just activated my first ever cellphone this evening and simply by turning it on at home and going through the activation process I started to feel exactly the same sensations in my temples that I felt with the optical mice, only *10 times* as strong.

Would anyone here know exactly what it was that I was feeling in my temples?

TIA

I would start doing some blind tests (or double blind if possible). Perhaps by using different kinds of shields you could determine what it is you are reacting to.

What carrier? they use different freqs?

Also, get a wired hands free device.

Maybe it was stress (from trying to read tiny screen, dealing with menus, trying to understand the manual, or dealing with a cell phone company).

I would do as Victonik suggested - try some tests (with somebody else controlling if phone is on or off, and you just recording when you felt the symptoms.) How close do you need to be for it to be a problem? Is it a problem if in a muffling, non-conductive enclosure, is it a problem if in a
conductive mesh enclosure (not sure how fine a mesh need to block cell
phone signals - but something to block most of RF signals, but pass sound).

In addition to the issues you mentioned - have you considered odors? Do you have any problems with certain smells? A new cell phone might be giving off a bunch of plasticizers/etc. (Just another variable that might be worth investigating. E.g. is it problem if in plastic bag.)

NoiseFreeGuy: Every time you go to work or to the mall or to any gathering of people, there will be many cellphones all around you. Do you react to them?

I agree on the recommendation of double blind tests. You can do it like this: Have a paper bag and ask a trusted friend to put your phone in the bag in either on or off state in another room and then leave the room without you seeing. Then you go to the room and pick up the paper bag without opening it and write down if you have symptoms or not.

Repeat this for some times with the friend writing down if the phone was on or off at the time and you writing down whether you had symptoms. When you are done with some rounds of this, compare notes.

The main carrier is Rogers via Speakout.
My phone doesn't have a connector/plug for a wired device, is it still possible to get a wired hands free device?

Good one.



I might do tests in the future. Right now I simply would like to know what it is I'm feeling.
Is it EMF's, UHF's, light waves, radio waves, heat waves, etc. etc.?




Good questions.
Odors aren't the issue here though.
This phone is four years old, a used phone I have 'inherited' from a family member.

No I don't. The cellphone must be very close to me for me to feel it.
Over the years I have occasionally used a friend's or relative's cellphone.
Each time the sensation was exactly the same; a buzz in the temples.
With some phones the sensation was stronger than others, but it was always there.




Thanks this sounds like a very good test.
I should mention that the sensation is much stronger when the phone is turned on and engaged with the carrier; phone call, picking up messages etc..
Simply turning it on, I can still feel the sensation , but it isn't nearly as strong as during a call.

It's funny, though a few have replied to this thread, no one has answered my initial question.

Many have suggested doing tests, but that wasn't what I was asking about.


Here is a quote from another individual who knows what I am talking about:

"I can easily feel the effects of the radiation inside my head near my ear after about 1-2 minutes of talking without the speakerphone
(that is, with the phone right up next to my head). It hurts. So for me there is no doubt that the radiation is cooking my brain (and making it hurt). If something is pressing on my skin I can feel that, and if is pressing hard enough it will hurt – but that is because my body has millions of pain receptors that are designed to sense physical touch and to transmit that information to my brain. If I can actually physically feel the effects of radiation which is of a type (wavelength and intensity) that never existed on Planet Earth before 1928, I cannot see how that can be a good thing."

http://www.mobilemediabits.com/mobile-p ... your-life/

and another individual:

YogiSugama says...
Fact is if you spend more than one hour in a phone call with your mobile phone next/close to your ear/head, then you'll get dizzy or headache or even nauseate.

Apr 13, 2010 08:57

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephon ... 483,00.htm

You need to do the double blind tests to answer those very questions.

Are you just trolling, or what?

I'm not trolling so I guess my answer must be "or what".

The reason for my post was simple.
I just started to use a cellphone for the first time yesterday.

When I turned it on after registering I started to immediately feel the same sensations in my temples that I feel when using numerous other electronic devices (computers, peripherals, power adapters, etc etc.).

I immediately thought of a thread that I posted here not long ago, discussing the same sensations that I was feeling using a mouse.

I simply thought I'd report about my cellphone experience here, hoping for some insights. I was not hoping for detractors or other unhelpful responses.

When someone disagrees with another person, it takes a degree of self-control and restraint to be polite and state your opinion/give your input, rather than get out the slings and arrows.

Edit: This post was composed/sent before NoiseFreeGuy's post of 1:31 pm showed up here.



How would people know the answers to questions without adequate information? (There may be more than one possible answer.)

Why would you believe an answer given without evidence?

If you want an answer that fits your particular situation, and that you can trust, then explore and try to find out more about the phenomenon. (i.e., experiment)




One certainly shouldn't trust something just because one reads it on the internet. For instance the first poster you cite
"Mobile Phone Radiation Health Hazards – How the Speakerphone Could Save Your Life" makes some dubious leaps.
* They ignoring the fact that your brain is encased in a skin/etc. which has a high water content - rather than being exposed unshielded 2cm away from the cell phone antenna.
* They go to great lengths calculating equivalent exposure distance for emitter in a microwave oven, and then just relying on people's fear and uncertainty to say that therefore it is unsafe. (i.e. no evidence is presented that the emissions from a microwave at that distance would be unsafe - relies purely on people's fears))
* If they are that uptight about cell phones, then small wonder they feel things when they are near one. (Worrying about radiation, tensing muscles, paying attention to sensations in that area that don't normally attend to, there are all sorts of ways to make yourself feel things.)

For another view on effects of cell phone radiation and heat - consider

Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?
by Bernard Leikind
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/10-06-09/

Forget cell phones for cooking brains - how about the real cookers, like exercise.


There are many claims of sensitivity to electrical fields, etc. But so far little to no reliable experimental validation of them (i.e., usually turns out to be psychosomatic, etc.). If one just wants an answer that fits the symptoms, without bothering with experimentation, then psychosomatic is probably your best bet.

Consider also: "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc"
(After which, therefore because of which.)
People assume that because something happens at the same time as something else (or after something else) there must be a causal relation.
People are big on pattern matching - sometimes it is a real pattern, but it is so easy to fool ourselves or to see patterns that don't exist. (Hence the need to experiment, try things out, and do multiple repetitions of experiment.)

I keep trying to give you folks some idea of just how sensitive an individual I am but you just don't get it.

Let me try one more time. (No more tests please!)
The year was fall 1995 and I had just purchased my 1996 Toyota Camry V6.

Took it home and while driving back from the dealer something just wasn't right. Sure I test drove the model, but you're concentrating on many different things while you test the car out.

Now I'm on the road, driving smoothly and quietly and I feel something. Yes you guessed it. I feel it in my temples. And yes, it's the same sensation that I have been describing in all my other examples.

But I don't have an optical mouse with me and I don't have a cellphone with me.

I go to sleep on it.

Next day I'm driving and right away I feel it again.
Soon after I start the car.

I decide I need to get to the bottom of this.
I park the car and let it idle and listen everywhere very closely.
When I bring my head close to the center of the car near the armrest it is the strongest.

So I pop off the armrest and look to see what's inside.
There is a friggin' hard drive sitting right there on the floor!

You could put 100, no 1000 people in the car and not a single one of them would even notice it, let alone be bothered by it.

I couldn't live with it. So I disconnected it.
Yes I know what it was for.

I drove the car more than 10 years like that.
When it was time to bring it to the new dealer for a trade-in, I plugged the hard drive back in. And that's the end of my story.

NoiseFreeGuy --

From all of your various posts, I have little doubt that you do have extremely high sensitivity to something that emanates from various electrical/electronic devices. It would be really worthwhile, therefore, to do double-blind experiments with different kinds of electronic devices -- to try to ascertain what type of devices cause your reaction.

If it is simple EMF -- which is caused by even a wire that carries electricity -- then the intensity required for your reaction should be checked. If it is RF, again, almost every type of device makes it, but obviously, wireless devices using RF will create much higher intensity. Again, you'd need some type of RF measurement device. If it is very high frequency noise, then you need some type of ultrawide bandwidth mic to check.

I, for one, am really fascinated by your apparent ultra-sensitivity to... whatever it is. I'd love to devise experiments to determine just what it is you're reacting to. It would be like... stepping into an episode of the twilight zone.

A hard drive in a 1996 Camry V6? I don't recall that in my Camry V6 of the same generation. Did you unplug the ECU (engine control unit)?

What ever it is, I suspect you are sensitive to the high or low frequency noises outside of the range that most humans can hear, and not anything having to do with RF or EMF. Maybe you are really a dog and not human.

NoiseFreeGuy wanna milkbone?

Please consider that maybe we do "get it," but that there may not be standard answers that apply here. (Or at least the people in this forum may not have the standard answers.)

I followed this thread and posted because I know some people who have various chemical sensitivities (whatever that is). I have also followed the cell phone/radiation research a little. Possibility of sensitivity to ultra/infrasound is intriguing. Just because people suggest tests or don't have pat answers does not mean they don't understand, or aren't trying to be helpful.

SPCR has a lot of people who try things out, so not surprising that responses are on the lines of experiment and discover.

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson


What have your doctors said about it?
What does searching medline or the research literature turn up?

I wouldn't mind doing these tests if they were easy to set up and administer.
But you say the tests would ascertain "what type of devices cause your reaction"

I already know what type of devices cause my reaction.
I will list them in a second. It seems the tests you would administer (and those that others have suggested) are not to determine what type of devices cause my reaction, but rather to convince yourself/themselves that I am able to detect/react to any signal being emitted, period.

A subtle but profound difference. Many people here aren't being upfront with their input and the reason they are suggesting tests. If they are skeptical, then they should simply say, "I don't believe you can feel anything. Do these tests and they will prove that you can't."

The devices that cause my reaction are:
computers, notebook computers, hard drives, power supplies, Iomega Zip drive (for sale if anyone wants to buy it), some wireless routers,
cellphones, certain CPU's, most DVD recorders, etc.



Could you recommend any specific meter for testing?
Would any of these be recommended? Preferably not too expensive.

http://www.trifield.com/content/micro-alert-2/
radio/microwave detector

http://www.lessemf.com/gauss.html
(a whole bunch of EMF meters)

I unplugged the drive located under the armrest. It still allowed me to drive the car, but I believe the airbags were de-activated and possibly more.



Possible. Do cellphones emit UHF or RF/EMF's or both/all?

scdr, I appreciate what you are saying.
By "get it" I meant that people were doing two things:
not trying to answer my initial question (suggesting tests to PROVE I could feel these effects) and dismissing me as a kook outright but not coming out and saying it directly.



I understand. Most however are suggesting the tests because they simply don't believe.

Here is an interesting article directly related to what is being discussed here.
I'd be interested to hear from you and all the others here as to what they think of it. (They'd probably be interested in getting the teachers names/addresses so they could have them do some 'tests'.)

School Solves Staff Health Problems With Electrical Filters
http://www.lessemf.com/es.html
(Scroll down the page for article)

I am pretty sure that the 96 Camry does not have a hard drive (unless someone had an after-market audio video system put in). It may be a computer of some sort to control the engine or other other functions of the car. Typically, if the computers are not functioning, then default values are used to control the engine.


What I suggested is that it is just noise, not RF or EMF. Some people and animals can hear sound frequencies that others cannot hear, or you may have some sort of hearing problem where certain frequencies (from regular noise) causes you ear to vibrate (so to speak). I would go to a audiologist and have a hearing test done.

You seem to deliberately misunderstand me -- I wrote explicitly that "I have little doubt that you do have extremely high sensitivity to something that emanates from various electrical/electronic devices." My mistake to write "what types of devices" when I should have written "what types of energy"... but surely the rest of my post makes it clear that the experiments I suggest are to determine just what you're sensitive to -- EMF, RF, and/or high frequency audio noise.

As for the school/teacher story, I've read/heard about them before. (There is a school in Vancouver where the parents voted successfully not to have wifi LAN installed to reduce RF exposure to their kids.) But the radiation levels described in that story seems substantially higher than the amounts you've described sensitivity to -- ie, an Atom processor. [This one is particularly odd. Why not other processors? (Is it the Atom itself? The chipset? what aspect...?) ]


OK, so it would make sense to get instruments to measure what emanates from these various things -- and find the commonality(ies).

I suspect you'd be best off with the radio wave detector, but probably should not limit yourself to that alone, and you'd want something that has a scale rather than crude high/med/low LEDs. This should be able to detect EMF as well. But I am no expert in such instrumentation. Seems to me it would be well worthwhile for you to investigate instruments available to measure different kinds of radiated energy... and buy or borrow them to experiment for yourself. (After all, this whole discussion is mostly for your benefit.)

Does it matter? To discover if you are reacting to something "real" and in that case what, then you need to do some tests. How else do you expect to find the cause? There's no other way.

It's like if I say "I ate this cake yesterday and I seem to have some kind of allergic reaction to it. Help me guys, what is it I'm allergic to?" And then dismiss all replies along the line of "Was there any lemon in it? If so, try to eat a little bit of lemon and see if you have some kind of reaction."

I mean, what do you expect us to say? "Yeah, all this technology have a dark, hidden side they don't want us to know about. We should all wear tin foil hats and throw our cellphones away." What kind of answer are you looking for?

You have to be open to the possibility that it's psychological. There's no shame in that. Placebo is powerful shit. This is a real possibility (but not the only one) and dismissing it outright is not wise.

I'm not trying to sound rude, but if you are unwilling to go about this in a scientific way there's little we can do to help.

To know what you are feeling, you need to know how you are feeling.

Pyschosomatically, or physically. I'd say its 50/50 chance either way.

The only way to do that is double blind tests. If you really want to tackle your problem, stop beating around the bush and do them. Otherwise, you're asking for help from us without even putting in effort to isolate exactly what your problem is, a.k.a. wasting people's time.

Thanks a million buddy.

Some of the tests that people have recommended are extremely simple to administer. Yet, your previous reply was something like "I'll do them eventually."

Look through the first few replies... They were not out of spite or were designed to convince you that you have no reactions to cell phones.

Get a friend / family member / neighborhood hobo to put the cell phone, or other devices to which you are sensitive, in a plastic or paper bag, switching it on or off without you knowing. Tell him/her "I'm feeling it now" or "I'm not feeling anything now" or "Strong reaction" or "Slight reaction" or "On a scale of 0-5, that was a 3," etc. Whatever you want. Do it a few times. Move the bag closer or farther away. Then, put it in a potentially-shielding container of some sort. Repeat. And so forth. Some variations could include having the person call her/himself, without your knowledge; or better yet, have your eyes closed, lie on a couch, and have the person place the cell phone closer or farther away from you, and measure your subjective response. Write down the results for each trial. It takes a whole of 15 seconds to set up such a test ("Hey ___! Come over here, and bring a bag, a sheet of paper, and pencil"), plus the time to switch the cell phone on and off.

You would then know a few facts, such as when the reaction seems the strongest. From there, we can try to make some new hypotheses and test those out with better tests.

Trying to find out specifically what's causing the problem might not be that useful or necessary for you.

The more one thinks about it the more complex the procedure for the testing is revealed to be; and if the culprit is ultrasound, how do you shield it?

I think you should just accept the problem and minimize exposure. Using a headset with a cellphone is one way to do just that.

Here's a man who thinks like me!!!

Many people here assumed I made this post to:
a) first, determine the exact cause of the discomfort I was feeling.
b) once found, I wanted to try as best as possible to minimize the cause;
cook up all kinds of shields, devices etc. to minimize it...
c) continue to use said device, happy that I had minimized the offending
forces that were causing my discomfort
d) etc. etc.


That was NOT THE INTENT of my post at all.

This cellphone will be stored in a drawer somewhere away from me (where I can't feel it)

I will be using it extremely rarely for emergency purposes on a long drive.



Thanks, that is precisely what I intend to do with it.

I'm very sorry for not stating the intent of my post.
This is a technical forum, and I will try to remember to do so in the future

I used to teach in high schools also. When I was in the computer labs (thankfully not very often) I could feel the pressure in my temples as I moved from computer to computer. It was likely the hard drives (component-wise) that were the first source of my discomfort.

I mentioned the Atom because of my experience with several netbooks that I have tried out. Each one had no moving parts. No hard drive and the fans had been disabled. Could it have been the Atom chipsets, of course. I just know they were Atom-based netbooks and it was getting down to the component/monitor level.

My Asus eeePC is OK and it uses the Intel Celeron CPU. I simply was trying to put two and two together, that's all. Was it a scientific, double blind study that made me come to this conclusion? No. sorry I can't state that.



Thanks Mike, if I can find a device to make these measurements that won't break my pocketbook and has good reviews I'll buy one.

I wonder if anyone here can recommend one from personal experience?

Well, you did end your original post with this:



I thought that was the main question. As you had already identified the cellphone as the source of the problem, advise of the type "store the phone in a drawer somewhere" seemed superfluous.

There are people that are EMF sensitiveand it seems that you are one of them. The selectivity (eg Atom/Celeron) probably comes from different quality of the components or different working frequencies.

I guess there is no treatment for that except minimizing exposure. Not going to suggest to wear tinfoil hat

Edit: it makes a cool superpower, ability to hear electronic stuff

I don't see why not, it seems perfectly reasonable to me. I did a search and instantly found this array of caps, hat, hoods, headbands and other gear (even boxer shorts!) designed to block emf: http://www.lessemf.com/personal.html