Phantom ringing syndrome decoded

PTI | Sep 13, 2012, 08.30 AM IST
LONDON: Do you always feel your phone ringing or buzzing away in your pocket? You might be suffering from 'phantom ringing syndrome'. Scientists have now come up with an explanation to describe the cause of the phenomenon experienced by millions of people every day.

Alex Blaszczynski, chairman of the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney, believes the sensation is actually triggered 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," the 'Daily Mail' quoted him as telling the 'Sydney Morning Herald'.

He explains the vibrations as being similar to the buzzing noise produced when a phone is placed near a speaker. Although Blaszczynski hasn't conducted any formal studies on the vibrations yet, if he is right then the feeling isn't a figment of our imaginations, but a real sensation. However Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University disagrees. He believes that because people are often anticipating a call they often interpret unrelated stimuli, such as a chair leg dragging against the floor or trousers rubbing their leg as a phone call.

Michael Rothberg, a clinician investigator at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, who conducted a survey on the vibrations, agrees that they may be caused by the misinterpretation of sensory signals in our brain.

Rothberg's study found the phantom phone vibrations were experienced by 68% of people surveyed, with 87% feeling them weekly, and 13 per cent daily. "In order to deal with an overwhelming amount of sensory input the brain applies filters or schema based on what it expects to find, a process known as hypothesis guided search," he said.

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