Do you suffer from 'ringxiety'?

Your cell phone rings. You go to answer it, but there's no
one there. Curiously, there's no missed call, either. You
realize after a moment that you mistook a bird chirping for
your cell p­hone's ring. What's weird is that this isn't the
first time this has happened to you. You're probably not
insane -- instead, you are suffering from what's come to be
called ringxiety.

It's not surprising that in the increasingly wireless and
connected world, humanity would begin to suffer
techno-neuroses. Electronic gadgets have become a part of the
everyday lives of people worldwide. Ringxiety is among the
first of these new neuroses to emerge, along with Internet
addiction and the "crackberry" phenomenon -- a person's
compulsive urge to use and check his BlackBerry wireless
device. While crackberry addiction is a compulsive behavior,
ringxiety may be a result of that and similar compulsions.

Ringxiety, first coined by psychologist David Laramie, is
exactly what it sounds like: confusing the sound of a cell
phone ringing with a sound similar to it. Since there's no
harm done, aside from a bit of annoyance -- especially if
a person struggles to locate his phone -- most people seem to
regard ringxiety as a curiosity or a fact of wireless life.
The exact origin of this hallucination has yet to be exactly
pinned down, however.

Some researchers think that ringxiety stems from a constant
state of readiness that could develop in cell phone users.
Before the advent of wireless phones, no one expected a call
while driving in the car, shopping at the grocery store or
dancing at a nightclub. With cell phones, though, there's
a potential for a call to come through at any moment. Because
of this, it's possible that our brains are conditioned to
expect a call constantly, and when a person hears a tone that
reminds him of his cell phone ringing, he will believe that's
the case.

Others believe that ringxiety -- or in this case, phantom
ringing -- simply stems from confusion due to the frequency
of most stock cell phone ringtones and the location of our
ears. Most standard cell ringtones play at a frequency of
around 1,000 hertz. Humans are particularly attuned to pick
up on sounds at this range, especially if they're
single-toned, like many ring tones. But because people have
ears on either side of their heads, it's difficult for them
to pinpoint the source of a sound, particularly at this
frequency -- for example, from a phone or from a bird
outside. To some, this explains the phenomenon of phantom
ringing. This doesn't hold true for multi-tonal rings,
however, such as an MP3 of a popular song.

Those who opt to set the phone to "vibrate" rather than
"ring" aren't off the hook either. Even stranger than phantom
ringing is the phantom vibration phenomenon. This is also
a part of the ringxiety that David Laramie studied, although
fewer ideas about its origins have been suggested. It's
similar to phantom ringing, but phantom vibration is
a physical rather than an auditory hallucination.

It's also similar to another, well-documented phenomenon
called phantom limb syndrome. In this medically recognized
condition, amputees -- people who've had limbs removed --
report feeling pain in limbs that are no longer attached to
their bodies. Is it possible that people have become as
attached to their cell phones as they are to their own arms
and legs?

Though ringxiety is little more than an annoyance, it may say
a lot about the minds of those who experience it. Read on to
explore the psychology behind wireless society.