by Grania
As Dara O’Briain once noted, of course Science doesn’t know everything. If science knew everything, it would stop and probably go and eat ice cream for the rest of its days. But sometimes we all wish that science had the answer to our particular question du jour. Then again, sometimes just because we don’t know the answer doesn’t mean that science hasn’t already figured it out for us. (Magnets, how do they work?)
This morning on Twitter, writer and journalist Tom Chivers asked this question.
https://twitter.com/TomChivers/status/618006191285927936
This response came moments later.
@TomChivers I guess we're done here http://t.co/GBxUR2LcKw
— Jacob Aron (@jjaron) July 6, 2015
https://twitter.com/TomChivers/status/618006719894024192
(He went on to apologise graciously.)
So what does science have to say on why we think we got a phone-call when we didn’t? The BBC says here:
When your phone is in your pocket, the world is in one of two possible states: the phone is either ringing or not. You also have two possible states of mind: the judgment that the phone is ringing, or the judgment that it isn’t. Obviously you’d like to match these states in the correct way. True vibrations should go with “it’s ringing”, and no vibrations should go with “it’s not ringing”. Signal detection theory calls these faithful matches a “hit” and a “correct rejection”, respectively.
But there are two other possible combinations: you could mismatch true vibrations with “it’s not ringing” (a “miss”); or mismatch the absence of vibrations with “it’s ringing” (a “false alarm”). This second kind of mismatch is what’s going on when you imagine a phantom phone vibration.
For situations where easy judgments can be made, such as deciding if someone says your name in a quiet room, you will probably make perfect matches every time. But when judgments are more difficult – if you have to decide whether someone says your name in a noisy room, or have to evaluate something you’re not skilled at – mismatches will occasionally happen. And these mistakes will be either misses or false alarms.
It’s apparently similar to the system smoke detectors use. A false alarm is much less costly and less dangerous than a missed positive.
So there you go, Science is safe for another day. And perhaps you will forgive your neighbours next time their alarm goes off for no reason at all at 3am.
What a daft original tweet. Some people really do seem to dislike science.
No, it was tongue in cheek. Chivers is very science friendly.
In fact he was one of the very best science journalists around when he was at the Telegraph. I was saddened when he moved on to Buzzfeed.
D’oh. I just assumed that he was serious, in the vein of Fay Weldon or Bernard Levin. Or even Bill ‘Canute’ O’Reilly. It’s a bit depressing that my immediate assumption was that he was being serious. Apologies to mr Chivers
We can’t help it, it is Poe’s Law in relation to what is serious and what isn’t. We assume, with no other tell tales, that a statement is serious. Invariably someone will be pissed when they meant to be funny and it wasn’t taken as such. And since they can do no wrong it is obviously the readers who are at fault.
No apologies in my opinion, his fault and he apologized. Ipso facto.
God bless science!
To me an insult even though I know the meaning you mean and the meaning they mean. 80% of humans are born to think like that. It is very easy to do—too easy to think of. It sure puts humans out for all the work they did. Reduces us to zero in it.
If it wasn’t for science, the phone wouldn’t exist. So the whole problem is obviously caused by science. 😉
cr
Ooh #3! Were you up past your bedtime? 🙂
Yep. I’m retired, as of last week. Don’t have to get up in the morning. Nice.
(Just watched the Williams sisters at Wimbledon, live, last night. I was hoping Venus would stretch it to three sets but Serena wasn’t having any.)
The strangest situation is where I feel the phone vibrating in my pocket and yet it’s in my hand and I’m staring right at it.
I have missed so many calls when outside and the ambient noise is too loud to hear it and it normally doesn’t vibrate.
I would add to the BBC’s answer that we are designed like those fire alarms that are “very sensitive to smoke and heat – and biased to avoid missing a real fire at all costs.”
The case has been made that we humans are very sensitive to identifying causes of things, and thus biased to avoid missing agents behind events in our lives so we can solve problems more effectively. If your stuff’s disappearing, it must be a thief, for example. If one of your kids goes missing in the woods, it must be a predator or kidnapper. The tendency is presumably so useful the cost of a by-product is apparently acceptable: we also find agency where there is none, in things like disease and earthquakes, resulting in the ultimate false positives we call god.
I have never heard of this false-buzzing mobile thing but I recurrently experience something similar. When going to sleep here in geologically-stable England, I often have the impression of an extended minor earthquake, lasting for about 30 seconds. It’s not a myoclonic jerk and I’m fairly convinced that I am always conscious when it happens – I sometimes have difficulty sleeping. I assumed that many people had this sensation but friends are bemused at its oddity.
I have experienced a minor earthquake in my sleep but these sensations pre- and post-date that event. I wonder if others get this sensation. x
Mine is to feel like I am falling backward when I am drifting off to sleep, and it wakes me up suddenly. This is apparently caused by not getting enough sleep, and perhaps yours is as well.
Isn’t yours a myoclonic jerk or is it a fuller experience? Yeah, my sleep patterns are terrible. x
Try 1.5 hours of vigorous exercise daily. You will soon find sleeping conditions to be different…like full stop exhaustion and out in a heartbeat.
Those sort of things are usually seen in people who don’t sleep well. Exploding head syndrome, where you are woken by a loud bang that never happened (I’ve experienced this) is another one.
We do have earthquakes, so if I feel them I assume that’s what they are. However, sometimes it’s not (as above), and sometimes it’s an overladen truck going too fast too.
Wow, Heather, ‘exploding head syndrome’: is that a thing or your name for it? Nightmare. x
It’s a thing! I always remember it because it’s a cool name and because of a comedy where someone was told he had exploding head syndrome but it wasn’t explained to him, and he thought that was what was going to happen. Which I suppose wouldn’t be very funny in real life. 🙂
It wasn’t funny for this guy:
DumbGuy
I had the same reaction, Dermot! Who knew?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome
Thanks, Diana. Blimey, exploding head syndrome sounds terrifying. My minor earthquake sensation is relatively benign: I’ve learned to sort of enjoy the experience. After all, when was the last time a Brit died from a British earthquake? It’s a sort of Rowan Williams fuzzy sermon rather than a New Zealand full-on Bill Donohue rant. x
I see a cartoon here: a man wearing a white lab coat and holding a clipboard is standing in an open door, talking to a man waiting outside. He says, “I’m afraid the answer to your question will have to wait a little while; science isn’t out of bed, yet.”
I have not experienced the false positive phone vibration. But hearing my name being said when no one is there has happened. It is extremely weird.
Fortunately you are of a rational turn of mind. For plenty of people a supernatural explanation would be ‘obvious’.
That is another one that happens to people who don’t sleep well, like above. They get woken by someone calling their name when there’s no one there.
F*ckin smoke detectors, how do they work?
They are marvelous devices, the pinnacle of AI computing. They are clever enough to wait until the wee hours, no matter the time zone, when you are in a deep sleep, sophisticated sensor suite, and then, and only then, do they sound off with their “time to replace the back-up battery” warning screech.
And don’t forget that annoying little ‘blip’ they emit when the battery is low. Lots of times I can’t tell which damn alarm it is, so you end up standing still in stupid places in the house waiting for it to ‘blip’ again. And some only do it every 5 minutes or so and that can get really aggravating.
lol, exactly correct on both comments. I also have a CO detector that gets set off by anything that upsets it – dust, breathing near it, ghosts, etc., and whose alarm will split your head clean in two. And it has a big reset button on the front that does exactly nothing. I am now keeping a 5-pound hammer next to it for the next time.
LOL!
And while we are kvetching about these devices that may one day save our lives, I really hate how they seem to ‘throw’ the sound they make when the battery is low so if you do not know where they are they are surprisingly hard to find.
I’ve replaced ours (the complete alarm) with units with batteries that last 10 years, stretch the problem out.. I have no idea what it is going to do when the 10 years is up but I can wait. It does flash a little red light to let me know I’ve got you covered though.
Now if science could also explain why I never feel the darn thing vibrate even if it’s supposed to have done so…
“… sometimes just because we don’t know the answer doesn’t mean that science hasn’t already figured it out for us.”
As a better way to illustrate that, I recommend this infamous quote from Bill O’Reilly.
Brain turns off, brain turns o –oh no it just stays off.
Cell phones have becomes such integral parts of our lives (and bodies) perhaps it can also be explained by the ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon. Just half joking.
The use of signal detection theory to explain sensory processing has a long history, and it works extremely well in controlled psychological tests. I’d recommend to any interested reader here the highly regarded “Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics” by Green and Swets. (Like David Green, my research is in the area of auditory psychophysics.) But the more interesting part of the BBC explanation is that some of our brains may be primed for detecting phone vibrations. If priming wasn’t important, imagine the huge range of false positives we could experience on a day-to-day basis: Wait, I just heard the cat ask for cheese curd; was that a massive earthquake I just felt? That we usually don’t gives an indication of the low false positive rate that our brain will expect.
With the false phone vibrations, there is probably SOME type of vibrational energy that is triggering the sensation in the first place. A stomach rumbling, maybe, or a random tingling of a cutaneous nerve.
When I do carry a cell phone, it is almost never on vibrate. It’s no surprise to me that I’m not primed to detect it and never have had a false positive error.