Countless times I will feel my iPhone vibrate with an alert or a message and I will get it out of my pocket – only to find nothing. No message. No notification. Nothing.
Up to now I have suspected that I am psychotic or that someone at Apple is gaslighting me. Granted, these are extreme possibilities.
But they’re better than the idea of my very soul so aching for human contact that I am creating my own vibrations by telekenesis. Which I’ve also wondered.
I sound like I’ve got the answer to why it happens but really I’ve only got reassurance that it happens to you too.
In 2010, a team of researchers from Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts asked 232 of their colleagues to answer a questionnaire about phantom vibrations from their cell phone (or, more correctly, from the area where their cell phones usually are). Of the 176 who responded, 115 — 69% — stated that yes, they experienced the disconcerting fake alerts like the type described above. The researcher’s plain-as-day conclusion: “Phantom vibration syndrome is common among those who use electronic devices.”
Phew.
The article does go on to suggest reasons and answers and possibilities but I’m just happy to not be alone in this profound manifestation of a longing and a yearning that rests within my soul, like.
What causes it? There are a lot of theories. Discovery News suggested that “[i]t could be because cell phones produce electrical signals that transmit the feeling of vibration directly to a person’s nerves or simply because of the mental anticipation of alerts.” Mental Floss explains how the first of the two theories would work, likening it to “a physical stimulation similar to what happens when your phone is near a speaker and you hear that weird buzzing sound as it does a ‘hand shake’ with a cell tower and gives off some electromagnetic interference.” And the anticipation aspect is not dissimilar from any other sort of psychological conditioning — we are so used to our phones vibrating that our brains make it feel like it is happening when we “want,” not when it actually does.