Clear quartz is crystalline silicon dioxide, the second most abundant mineral in the earth's crust, and its genuinely remarkable property is one that the metaphysical literature gestures at without understanding.
Quartz is piezoelectric. Because its crystal structure lacks a centre of symmetry, mechanical stress displaces charge and generates a voltage across the crystal, and conversely an applied voltage deforms it. The effect was demonstrated by Jacques and Pierre Curie in 1880. Its practical consequence is that a quartz plate cut to a precise orientation and thickness will resonate at an extremely stable frequency when driven electrically, and that stability is what makes quartz clocks and watches accurate and what provided the frequency control for radio, radar and computing throughout the twentieth century.
Two corrections follow. First, the crystals in watches and electronics are almost entirely synthetic, grown hydrothermally in autoclaves, because natural quartz is too variable and too full of twinning for the purpose; the industry that made quartz technologically central does not use natural crystals. Second, piezoelectricity does not amplify, store or transmit anything resembling intention. It converts mechanical stress to charge, in specific orientations, in measurable quantities. Statements that quartz is used in computers and therefore stores information conflate a resonator with a memory device; quartz keeps time in a computer and holds no data.
Quartz occurs in an enormous range of varieties, and several others in this collection (amethyst, carnelian, bloodstone, agate, citrine), are the same mineral in coloured or microcrystalline form.