You know the feeling. You’re walking through the mall and you feel your pants vibrate and clutch at your pocket for your phone like you have some kind of disorder only to find there’s no text, no call, and it’s not your turn for Words With Friends. WTF was that? It was Phantom Vibration Syndrome, my friend.

It probably makes your wife or girlfriend a little suspicious too doesn’t it? Cause you whip your phone out and then go “huh” and put it back in your pocket. In their head it was a secret message from your work wife, or one of the guys letting you know about a trip to the strip club they’re planning for later tonight.

It’s like how when you have a kid your brain does a thing where you can hear your kid’s tiny voice calling for you in a noisy store or at a playground over all the other noise.

It’s a real thing.

There are scientists and universities who have actually spent real American dollars doing research on this. They’ve come up with the names “phantom vibration syndrome” or “vibranxiety”. It’s not as much of a waste of money doing a study to figure out what kind of porn people prefer, or that original Doritos are better than Ranch, but it’s close.

When I ring a bell do you salivate?

Well you should cause you’ve been trained sucka. It’s pretty much that you’re like a trained dog. You trained yourself. Your brain did an amazing thing. Your brain re-wired itself to filter out all other distractions so you could sense that phone vibrating. It’s like how when you have a kid your brain does a thing where you can pick out your kid’s tiny voice calling for you in a noisy store or in a playground. Same thing, more or less.

Of course I think it’s more like that phone in your front, left pocket is burning some kind of cancerous electro-magnetic tumor into your thigh muscle and it’s picking up minute signals from your phone and making your synapses fire a tiny signal to make your muscle twitch.

What do you think it is?