The truth about ghost vibrations from your laptop
A day at work, your phone vibrates on your desk, you bend over to take it in your hands ... and then nothing. You have just experienced ghost vibrations. You are puzzled, but rest assured, the subject has been studied by researchers, reports The Atlantic.
The study was conducted by Michelle Drouin of IUPU of Fort Wayne in the United States and published in the scientific journal Computers in Human Behavior. The phenomenon, called "ghost vibration syndrome" or vibranxiety, occurs when you feel something vibrate, but it is not coming from your phone.
According to the researchers, 89% of the participants (high school students) confided that they were victims of ghost vibrations. According to another study reported by Discovery and conducted by researchers at the Baysate medical center in 2010, 68% of test participants had already experienced such a phenomenon. According to the two research teams, around 10% of the participants feel vibrations every day.
Little disturbing hallucinations
If the previous studies qualified the vibrations of hallucination, the researchers of Fort Wayne explain that "the classic hallucinations are associated with a pathology". The authors do not demonstrate anything, they wonder all the same if hearing his cell phone vibrate could be the sign of an illness.
It remains to be seen why we are victims of these hallucinations. The researchers are not yet able to explain it, but they have noticed that the vibrations were felt more by those who used their phone more frequently. Assumptions vary by study.
This could for example be related to the fact that the telephones produce electrical signals which would transmit the feeling directly to the nervous system, or then quite simply to be due to a mental anticipation of the alerts.
The phenomenon does not seem to bother the people studied more than that. In the 2012 study, 91% of high school students explained that the vibrations bothered them "a little" or "not at all". This figure rises to 93% for the medical team of the 2010 study. All the researchers agree that ghost vibrations are not dangerous anyway, but just disturbing.
Source: http://www.slate.fr/lien/59153/vibrations-fantomes
Damn I'm sick then? However I am a very moderate user ...