你有没有过这样的经历？
明明好像听见手机响了，或者感觉到手机在口袋里震动了，拿出来一看却什么也没有；想着可能是错觉，故意不看手机，结果过一会打开真的有未读消息。于是，为了不错过重要消息，你只得反反复复地把手机掏出来看，三番五次下来，人都要神经衰弱了。总分不清手机是不是真的在震，到底是哪里出了问题？
Source：Pixabay
今天的外刊节选自CBS News，共计603词，预计阅读时间6分钟。
通过这次的外刊，你将收获：
○描述“幻听”“幻觉”的地道表达
○长难句的拆解
希望你在阅读全文后能够回答以下问题：
○文中用苹果手表举了什么例子，说明了什么？
○作者认为“震动错觉”出现的原因有哪些？
○作者对此给出了什么解决办法？
外刊解析
Why do we feel phantom vibrations from our phones?
Several times a day we turn to our phones expecting a notification, but nothing is there.
Maybe you felt it buzz. Maybe you didn't.
Why do we feel phantom vibrations from our phones? It's not all in our heads, but our bodies.
When asked how much she feels a phantom vibration, Paige Dahlberg said "I would say like multiple times a day."
"If it happens three times a day, I'll be like 'What is going on?' and I'll take my [Apple] watch off for a minute," added her friend Lacey Sullivan.
Source：Unsplash
"Some people can feel the vibration when their phone is in their purse. They think they hear or see their phone alert going off when it's not even on their person," said Dr. Michelle Drouin, a psychology professor who has studied this phenomenon at Purdue University Fort Wayne.
"Phantom vibration syndrome is when you think that your phone is making an alert, a vibration, a sound, and you go to check it and actually there wasn't anything. So, what it technically is, is a hallucination," said Dr. Drouin.
There are a couple of reasons people think they feel a vibration, with the first being anticipation. We might be anxious about a potential incoming message, call, or email. "Maybe you're expecting something so you're like thinking it's coming, so then it vibrates," said Dahlberg.
Source：Unsplash
Then, actual physical touch can occur.
"Maybe your pant leg rubbed against you or you bumped into something," said Drouin.
Professor Paul Schrater teaches psychology and computer science at the University of Minnesota. He believes something is happening beneath the surface of our skin.
"For instance, you can have a muscle spasm. Our muscles are always active and when your muscles get active, they're sensed by these sensors within our skin and within our muscles," he said. "The sensors that pick up buzzing are a distinctive category of the sensors in our skin. They don't localize things well and they really don't pick up a lot of details of the stimulation." That means it's easy to mistake the buzz of a muscle twitch as a phone vibration.
Source：Pixabay
But rather than acknowledge the never-ending movements our muscles make, Schrater said we ignore them or associate them with our phones.
"[Phones] are incredibly important to us, addictive you know. But it's also one of the most frequent things in our environment and our brain uses importance and frequency to disambiguate ambiguous signals," he said. There's no denying the attachment people have to their phones and devices in modern society.
"My watch vibrates probably seven to eight times an hour at least. So, if it goes like 30 minutes without vibrating I think that's weird," said Dahlberg.
"It's almost the expectation of our culture that you're going to be responsive 24/7," said Dr. Drouin.
Sullivan said she does not know if the phantom vibrations would stop for people if they simply turned off vibration in their settings.
"I've had [my Apple Watch] on for so long that it would be different to go completely silent or mute," she said.
Source：Pixabay
It's a move Dr. Drouin tried ten years ago, not long after she did her study on phantom vibrations. "I think switching it off vibrate mode is the reason why I haven't had a phantom vibration," she said. "I'm not expecting them and so I'm not looking for them."
In Dr. Drouin's study, the vast majority of her participants said they've experienced phantom vibrations. However, it didn't annoy them. Medical students were found to experience phantom vibrations as well from wearing pagers, Drouin added.
Source: CBS News
Author: Jeff Wagner
Date: October 3rd, 2023
生词拓展：
1. phantom
英音/ˈfæntəm/ 美音/ˈfæntəm/
[N] A phantom is something that seems to appear to the senses but has no physical reality; a ghost or an illusion. 幻影；幽灵
例句：
She was convinced she saw a phantom in the old house.
她坚信在那座老房子里看到了一个幽灵。
2. hallucination
英音/həˌluːsɪˈneɪʃn/ 美音/həˌlusəˈneɪʃn/
[N] A hallucination is a perception of having seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled something that wasn't actually there. 幻觉
例句：
The patient reported experiencing vivid hallucinations during the treatment.
患者报告在治疗过程中经历了生动的幻觉。
3. bump
英音/bʌmp/ 美音/bʌmp/
[V] If you bump into something or someone, you accidentally hit or knock against them. 碰撞；撞击
例句：
I bumped into the table and spilled my coffee.
我撞到了桌子，把咖啡洒了。
4. spasm
英音/ˈspæzəm/ 美音/ˈspæzəm/
[N] A spasm is a sudden, involuntary contraction of a muscle or group of muscles. 痉挛；抽搐
例句：
He felt a spasm in his leg after running for an hour.
跑了一个小时后，他感到腿部抽筋。
5. disambiguate
英音/ˌdɪsæmˈbɪɡjueɪt/ 美音/ˌdɪsæmˈbɪɡjueɪt/
[V] To disambiguate means to make something clear by removing ambiguity or confusion. 消除歧义
例句：
The context of the sentence helps to disambiguate the meaning of the word.
句子的上下文有助于消除这个词的歧义。
知识卡：
哪些人更容易成为“震动错觉”的受害者？
幻觉震动（Phantom Vibration）是“幻觉电话综合征”（Phantom Phone Syndrome, PPS）的表现之一，还有一类表现是幻觉响铃（Phantom Ringing）。
目前的研究认为，有四类因素和“幻觉电话综合征”（PPS）高度相关：
- 使用手机越频繁，时间越久的人出现PPS的概率越大
- 经常把手机调成振动模式的人出现PV的概率越大
- 习惯将手机放置在胸口的人比放在裤子口袋里的人出现PPS的概率大
- 工作学习压力越大的人，出现PPS的概率越大
此外，研究表明出现PPS的人会更依赖手机，他们大多会选择在不合适的场合使用手机，如开车、吃饭、走路、上课、开会等。
Source: 科学公园
Source：Unsplash
重难点解析：
1. There are a couple of reasons people think they feel a vibration, with the first being anticipation.
译文：
人们感觉（手机）在震动有几个原因，其一是因为有所期待。
解析：
本句话前半句是一个定语从句，在reason后面省略了表示原因的why，句意不受影响，仍然是“有几个人们感觉到震动的原因”。后半句属于with的复合结构，具体形式为“with+宾语+现在分词”，“the first”这里就是句子的宾语，表示“第一个的”、“第一条的（原因）”。
2. That means it's easy to mistake the buzz of a muscle twitch as a phone vibration.
译文：
也就是说，肌肉抽搐的震感很容易和手机震动的感觉弄混。
解析：
这句话中mistake是作为动词使用的，而不是更常见的名词用法。Mistake...as...的意思是“把……误认为……”，即“把肌肉抽动的震感误认为是手机震动”。
3. There's no denying the attachment people have to their phones and devices in modern society.
译文：
的确，现代社会的人们，对手机和电子设备存有依赖。
解析：
“There is no denying”的意思是“不可否认的”，虽然我们平时见到的更多的是用“there is no denying that...”衔接从句，但在本句话中，它的后面接的是一个带有后置定语的名词短语，也就是the attachment。所以，句子的主干其实是There's no denying the attachment，“依赖的确存在”，而后面从people have开始的部分是the attachment的后置定语，用于补充说明是“什么样的依赖”。
今天的外刊内容到这里就结束了~
看来，要想不受这种震动“幻觉”的困扰，核心是降低对收到新消息的预期。至于是做物理隔绝还是心理上的调节，就因人而异了~
喜欢"有译思"外刊精读栏目的小伙伴可以在下周同一时间继续关注我们，下周见！
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