Buzz
Imagine a typical moment of my day: I’m going about my business with my iPhone stashed in my back pocket. Out of nowhere, I feel a slight buzz on my left side, as the phone vibrates in its usual 'bzzt, bzzt, bzzt' rhythm. I pull out my phone, only to find nothing on the screen—no calls, no texts, no emails, and no updates on my social media or games. There’s nothing that should have caused the phone to vibrate, yet I swear I felt it.
I’m not alone in experiencing these perplexing vibrations. According to one study on the phenomenon, which is often referred to as 'phantom ringing,' 'phantom vibration syndrome,' or 'vibranxiety,' 68% of participants reported feeling these sensations. Of those, 87% experienced them on a weekly basis, and 13% felt them daily.
What is the mystery behind these phantom vibrations that seem to haunt our pockets?
The phenomenon of phantom vibrations has only recently started to attract scientific interest. While experts have offered various opinions and theories, there is a lack of peer-reviewed studies on these elusive buzzes.
Alex Blaszczynski, the chairman of the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney, believes that the sensation of vibration may be caused by electrical activity. 'I expect it's related to some of the electrical signals coming through in a transmission, touching on the surrounding nerves, giving a feeling of a vibration,' he explained to the Sydney Morning Herald, though he noted that he has not conducted any studies on the phenomenon. If his theory is correct, it would suggest that the vibrations are not imaginary, but rather a real sensation—similar to the buzzing sound you hear when your phone is near a speaker and experiences interference from a cell tower’s electromagnetic signal.
Anticipation
Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University, presents a different theory in his book, iDisorder. He suggests that because we are constantly expecting some form of technological interaction, especially with our smartphones, we tend to misinterpret other sensations, such as the feel of our pants brushing against our leg or the sound of a chair scraping the floor, as a phone call.
The only published study on phantom vibrations that we found primarily focused on measuring the prevalence of 'vibranxiety,' without exploring its cause. However, the researchers shared a theory that aligns with Rosen’s. Michael Rothberg, a clinician investigator at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, who conducted the earlier survey, posits that vibranxiety might arise from the brain’s misinterpretation of sensory signals.
"To cope with an overload of sensory information," Rothberg and his team explain in their study, "the brain applies filters or schemas based on what it expects to encounter, a process known as hypothesis-guided search." When it comes to phantom vibrations, the brain sometimes misreads sensory signals, influenced by the expectation that the phone will vibrate. In other words, it appears that smartphone users are so attuned to, and focused on, the feeling of their phone buzzing that they occasionally experience false alarms.
Make It Stop!
While phantom vibrations are not harmful, they can be irritating. If the nuisance becomes unbearable, there are ways to stop them. In Rothberg’s survey, 39% of the medical staff who were constantly carrying a phone or pager managed to stop the vibrations by either switching the device from vibrate mode to audible ringer, relocating the device on their body, or using a different device. The success rates for these methods were 75%, 63%, and 50%, respectively.
