10 Explanations For Those Strange Things You Do All The Time

Has this ever happened to you? You feel your phone vibrate in your pocket and rush to check which of your many friends and admirers is contacting you, only to find your notifications screen disappointingly blank. Just ride out the embarrassment by pretending you were checking the time.

This is one of those phenomena that just wasn't a thing until a few years ago, so the research into it is still pretty limited (plus, you know, a lot of scientists have bigger fish to fry).

There are two schools of thought on the subject of those phantom vibrations.

Alex Blaszczynski, chairman of the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney, thinks that the sensation is triggered by electrical activity. He reckons that the signals sent out by your phone as it connects with a network could cause some kind of interference with the electrical signals whizzing around any nearby nerves in your body. This would mean that the sensation is actually, physically real but, so far, Blaszczynski hasn't conducted any studies to prove his theory.

Another idea comes from Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, who believes that the sensation is all in the mind.

Nowadays, we are so highly tuned to our phones that we are just primed and ready to almost immediately react to any stimuli they give us. You can test this by manually playing your ringtone or alarm sound - a lot of people will feel the urge to react to the sound of their phone ringing, even when they know that it is them who is doing it.

Rosen thinks that the phantom vibrations are just our brains misinterpreting things like our clothes rubbing against us - a sensation we would have blanked out before the advent of mobile phones because it didn't require us to react - because there is always a part of it that is waiting expectantly for your phone to vibrate.