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Sixty-eight percent of medical staff at Baystate Medical Center said they had felt a phone or pager buzz that never happened, according to a 2010 survey in The BMJ. A 2012 survey of 290 undergraduates at one U.S. university put the figure at 89 percent. In Taiwan, medical interns working about 87 hours a week saw the rate climb from 78 percent before the year to nearly 96 percent after three months, then fall to 50 percent two weeks after the internship ended. The device is quiet. The body is not.
Conditioning, Not a Diagnosis
Researchers treat the sensation as a learned misfire. Repeated real alerts, especially in vibration mode, appear to prime the nervous system to read an ordinary cue as a notification. A seam at the hip, a muscle twitch, or a shift in clothing can be resolved in favor of the practiced interpretation: something arrived. The BMJ authors called it a tactile hallucination in people who were otherwise well. Ninety-three percent of those who had it said it was not at all or only slightly bothersome. It is not a formal diagnosis. It is a side effect of carrying a device that is allowed to interrupt the body all day.
The Baystate survey, led by Michael Rothberg and colleagues, could not prove cause. It found associations. Residents reported it more than attending physicians. A breast-pocket carry beat a belt. More hours on the body and more time in vibrate mode tracked with higher rates. Of 169 staff who answered, 115 had felt a phantom buzz. Thirteen percent felt one daily. Most first noticed it between one month and one year of carrying the device.
Stress Raises the Rate. It Does Not Explain It.
The Taiwan intern paper in PLOS ONE is the cleanest before-and-after window. Seventy-four interns, roughly 87-hour weeks, constant expectation of being reachable. Phantom vibration rose with the job and fell when the job ended. The authors’ reading was anticipation plus repeated real alerts, not a permanent injury.
Anxiety is messier. A 2026 cross-sectional survey of 553 students at Jilin University, published in Cureus, found phantom vibrations in 41.4 percent. After adjustment for sex and daily screen time, students with anxiety symptoms had about 1.5 times the odds of reporting them (odds ratio 1.51). Screen time itself did not remain an independent predictor. The survey used screening questions, not a clinical exam, and cannot say whether anxiety came first. The Taiwan intern data did not show anxiety scores tracking who felt the buzz. The link is open.
These studies use different questions, countries, and jobs. They do not produce one rate. They do show the same pattern in people who must answer.
What People Tried
No controlled trial has established a treatment. The Baystate respondents who experimented reported what they tried. Of 36 who took the device off vibrate, 75 percent said it helped. Of those who moved the phone, 63 percent reported improvement. Switching devices helped about half. The groups were small and self-selected. Thirty-nine percent never tried anything.
The practical levers in the observational record are the same ones the studies associated with the sensation: vibration mode, where the phone sits, how many hours it stays on the body, and whether a reply is expected in the next minute. Sleep showed up beside the Jilin numbers — 54.8 percent reported fatigue, 22.4 percent poor or very poor sleep — without proving the buzz caused the night or the night caused the buzz.
A notification that is not there is still a demand the nervous system answered. The phone did not vibrate. The habit of waiting for it did.
