Earlier today, I was playing around with the ringtones and other stock sounds on my cellphone. The current tones and sounds I use for calls and messages are ones I've since imported (for calls, I use "Type A" from Tetris and texts are signaled with Navi's "Hey! Listen!" from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time). When I got to my own tones after listening to the stock files, I noticed something: in the back of my mind, I could still hear the sound of the cellphone vibrating even though it physically wasn't. During a regular call or text, my phone will both chime and vibrate, but now my mind was filling in the absent sound of the vibration. It is as if you are listening to a song you know well with one working headphone and your brain fills in what the second headphone can't (eg: missing harmonies, drum progressions, et cetera). All the same, this got me thinking about human conditioning. How much combined stimuli of the phone's ringtone and vibrations were required before my mind tied the two together to a point where my mind will involuntarily create one in its absence?
If my mind was conditioned to create a sound, how difficult would it be to break that conditioning? With that, I switched the vibrate feature of my phone off to see if that would do it. If that does not, I will switch my ringtone (I did not "hear" the vibration on the other tones). Interestingly enough, I can play Teris and Ocarina of Time and listen to their music and sounds without thinking my cell phone is vibrating.
I am doing this experiment more out of curiosity to see how long it will take for my mind to disassociate the ringtone from the vibration. I am not tying this to phantom phone vibration as that phenomena is more tactile and mine is auditory, though I imagine correlations could be drawn (the ubiquity of cell phone vibrations in society, et cetera). But I digress, my phone is no longer set to vibrate (first time in years) and I am curious to see what will happen.
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