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Did my phone just buzz in my pocket?
Deconstructing the phantom vibration syndrome.
Ever thought you heard your phone ring and rushed out of the shower to a blank screen with no missed calls? Or felt your phone vibrate in your pocket, and took it out to find no new notifications?
Often in these situations, you can swear that you heard or felt something, but reality doesn’t align with your experience.
What is happening? Is it your skin, your ears, or is it all in your head?
Well, the answer is a rather diplomatic, “it depends”.
“What does it depend on?”, would be the natural follow-up question. Let’s find out.
The key to understanding why this happens and what it depends on lies in understanding the fact that your perception of reality is created in your mind. First, our senses receive an input, then our nerves react to this input and encode it, and finally, the neural impulse reaches our brain to be comprehended. So, if you think about it, our brain never directly interacts with the outside world, it must trust the word of the nerves.
