Sitting in class, cell phone in pocket, a vibration shakes the jacket, alerting the receiver of a call. But when the recipient flips up the phone to see the missed call, nothing is there — it’s just a blank screen.
It was a phantom phone ring.
It’s not communication with the supernatural. A phantom phone ring, or ringxiety, is defined by experiencing the sensation of a ringing or vibrating phone only to discover that nothing actually happened.
Doug Gillan, a psychology professor, said ringxiety occurs for different reasons.
“One reason is that our cognitive perception system interprets ambiguous sounds as important noises rather than not interpreting,” Gillan said. “Some stimuli’s closest sound is a ring, especially when a person is expecting a call or hoping for a call.”
Gillan also said the brain is to blame because it is constantly at work.
“If you sit in a dark room and close your eyes and you see little bursts of different colored lights, this is true for all different parts of the brain,” Gillan said. “Our brain is not quiet and nerves are still firing. There is always intrinsic activity.”
Although he knows the philosophy behind ringxeity, Gillan said he is also a victim of phantom phone rings.
“I get ringxiety on my leg; even though I rarely have my phone on vibrate, so this makes almost no sense to me,” Gillan said. “My phone is not very small, so I have an awareness that it is there, so I guess anytime I get a muscle twinge on my leg, I think that my phone is vibrating.”
According to Gillan, ringxiety is basically the brain taking uncertain information, whether it is a ringing noise or a vibration, and making sense of it.
Don Mershon, a psychology professor, also equated ringxiety to perception.
“It goes back to the way we perceive,” Mershon said. “It is an active process where we search for information around us so we can behave properly. … We construct the world from those pieces that we perceive.”
Being in a noisy environment, Mershon said it is common for people to process sounds and form an important sound — a cell phone ringtone — by putting the collected pieces of information together.
Mershon related hearing phantom phone calls to hearing one’s name being called from within a crowd.
“It is like hearing your name, but no one actually said it,” Mershon said. “You can hear things that are not correct. … A person can hear random noises characteristic of speech and begin to hear these noises as speech.”
Ringxiety has happened to Mershon, like Gillan, in the form of a cell phone vibration.
“It does not matter if you feel, hear, or see the information,” he said. “It is the brain taking cues to recognize the familiar.”
Wes Hazelgrove, a freshman in English, said he has had his share of experiences with the phantom phone call. Just as Gillan confused a leg twitch with a vibrating cell phone, so has Hazelgrove.
“My phone will feel like it is vibrating when in actuality, it is just a muscle spasm in my leg,” Hazelgrove said.
And according to Hazelgrove, the reasoning behind his ringxiety is simple.
“My leg wants me to think I have a phone call, thus deceiving me,” Hazelgrove said. “Either that, or my leg muscles twitch as a result of phone vibrations. Maybe?”
