Phantom mobiles and ghostly vibrations

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Back in Mae West’s days, her infamous question was whether or not suitors had a gun in their pocket or where they just happy to see her.

These days – unless you’re an American of course – that gun is more likely to be a mobile phone.

Mae would have to become accustomed to the notion of it going off in people’s pockets at the most inappropriate of times; which is embarrassing but obviously a lot less life-threatening that a pistol without a safety catch.

We’ve all endured the shuffle of shame when the mobile goes off at a funeral or a movie or in the middle of a speech – and that’s the very time that it gets stuck in the lining of your pocket just to ensure that everyone in the venue knows who the idiot it.

Sometimes we bring it on ourselves of course – remember our Taoiseach in the Vatican, playing with his Blackberry when the Pope should have had his undivided attention?

We also add to our own embarrassment by insisting on having personalised ring tones. The concept is a good one – your phone has a noise like no one else’s – but some people just take it to extremes.

Fine if you’re sixteen and want to pin your colours to Rihanna’s mast – but it just seems a little strange if you’re a fifty year old man.

And now comes the phenomenon of the phantom phone – the one ringing in your pocket when it isn’t there at all.

A phone goes off in your vicinity; you automatically assume it’s you – and it isn’t even your ring tone.

Like all new phenomena, there’s a guy who turns this trend into an investigation – step forward Robert Rosenberger, an assistant professor at the Georgia Tech Institute of Technology, who has recently released his findings on these good vibrations.

“It was one of those things that people knew about but weren’t talking about,” Dr Rosenberger said – and he should know.

He admits that he suffers from the delusions so acutely that “I have even felt vibrations when I wasn’t carrying my phone”.

His work follows an earlier study by a group of US doctors, who were expected to be particularly vulnerable to the delusion because their work required them to carry pagers.

Michael Rothberg and his colleagues, who surveyed staff at a hospital in Massachusetts in 2010, found that nearly 70 per cent experienced phantom vibrations.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.