Do you feel the cell vibrates even though nobody calls you?

Many mobile phone users focus entirely on signaling messages and incoming calls for focusing purposes. However, it is precisely at that time that the so-called " "phantom vibration" - a feeling that a message or a call has arrived on the device, although this is not the case.

According to an earlier survey from Taiwan, 95 percent of mobile phone owners felt phantom cell vibrations, and as many as 84 percent of them had heard that their cell phone was ringing, although this was not the case. A similar thing is true for mobile phones equipped with signaling LEDs - how many times does it happen that peripheral vision seems to have arrived a message or something like that?

A similar result came from the 2012 survey in Indiana. Of the three hundred students, 89 percent of them felt a kind of phantom cell vibration, on average once every couple of weeks.

It's not just the preoccupation of young mobile devices - because the same thing applies to, for example, hospital staff, where almost three quarters of the employees experienced a similar feeling.

It's a very old thing

Psychologist David Laramie described in the 2007 dissertation a feeling as 'ringxiety' (a combination of English words ring and anxiety, ringing and anxiety), although the thing is not completely new. Much before mobile phones dominated the world, pagers owned similar phantom feelings, which in a small number of cases were also mocked in comics.

Feeling and everything connected with him is therefore not new - and has been studied practically for decades.

In Larami's research, it was discovered that many adults also experienced sound hallucinations - two-thirds of them heard that their cell phone was ringing, although this was not the case.

Either way, the culprit is just a brain - although the exact mechanisms behind feelings and hallucinations are not completely clear today. In a 2010 study on hospital staff, a hypothesis was explored that phantom signals can actually arise due to a wrong interpretation of the signal in the brain.

So the blame is - only the brain

The human brain is brilliant (or brilliantly bizarre, as anyone asks) when it comes to filtering excess information. Thanks to this, numerous optical tricks, illusions, and the like are possible. The brain simply filters all the content that comes from all the senses, which it considers unnecessary.

The assumptions that all together work is a lot, but a few are the most memorable. The fact that the brain filters things and misses 'what matters' is probably a role in the whole story. If the brain expects a call, it may misinterpret the information from a certain sensation to convince a person that the cell phone is ringing, vibrating, or something else.

However, there is another idea. A 2016 research by the University of Michigan revealed that ringxiety is related to people's uncertainty. The paper found that people who have a certain degree of uncertainty about other people have a much higher chance of experiencing frequent phantom vibrations of the cell phone.

It's not a real disturbance

What is common in all studies is that such things are irritated by a very small percentage of people - about two percent of all respondents. Most people do not even try to do anything about it, although they usually know how to do everything.

As MentalFloss writes, it seems that the best way to avoid phantom vibrations is to move the cell phone to another pocket, or to become a person without social anxiety with a high level of self-confidence, writes the Scientist.

• 18 Nov, 2017
• 1495 views