Phantom Vibrations



Have you ever felt your phone vibrate, but the sensation wasn't real? Researchers at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne call it "phantom vibration." The Atlantic's Robinson Meyer summarized their study in eleven points:

1. Many, many people experience phantom vibrations. 89 percent of the undergrad participants in this current study had felt phantom vibrations. In the two other studies on this in the literature -- a 2007 doctoral thesis, which surveyed the general population, and a 2010 survey of staff at a Massachusetts hospital -- majorities of participants experienced phantom vibrations.

2. They happen pretty often. The survey of undergrads and medical professionals agree: about ten percent experience phantom vibrations every day. 88 percent of the doctors, specifically, felt vibrations between a weekly and monthly basis.

3. If you use your phone more, you're more likely to feel phantom vibrations. The 2007 graduate study found that people who heard phantom rings roughly used twice as many minutes and sent five times as many texts as those who didn't.


Link -via Kottke | Photo: Colin Kloecker

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I'm training to be an oncologist and it is so wonderful to see the biology so elegantly rendered. It's such a powerful tool and there needs to be more of these types animations to educate future scientists as well as the public at large. A few years ago a media lab at Harvard produced a similar video along these lines:

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/technique/tprojects/6850.html

The lab also has a version of video with narration instead of music so to explain what is going on.

http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_innerlife_hi.html
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Wow! Fascinating and stunning. I have long practiced visualization techniques to stay healthy - imagining T-cells and B-cells and macrophages devouring and attacking any cancer cells in my body. Now I now what they actually look like.
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The graphics are lovely. It's not possible to draw everything accurately and have it make sense to everyone; the animators did a good job picking and choosing how and what to illustrate.
Word of caution, though, to all those who think think the modulation of angiogenesis is 'the key to cancer'--pay attention to the phrases such as 'may be'. It really 'may be', but those are also the things that are definitely not guaranteed.
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