The Smartphone Dilemma
Every once in a while, while surfing cyberspace, you run into an article that makes you pause and go: “Wow!”. Well, today we had one of those moments. As it turns out, there has been a successful study that is now declaring that cell phones are in fact making people hallucinate. The interesting part, is that you’ve most likely had one of these hallucinations yourself at one point.
The study was conducted by British psychologist Richard Balding, and concluded that, despite smartphones supposedly alleviating stress for their users by allowing them to access their e-mail, messages, social media accounts, etc. while on the go, these devices are actually creating more stress than they are preventing.
This stress is generated by an overemphasis on the importance of checking messages and being “dialed in”. As a result, a lot of people in fact experience what Balding has coined as “phantom vibrations”, which is a hallucination experienced when you believe you feel your phone vibrating in your pocket, when it in fact it isn’t.
To double-check the frequency of this result, we asked around our office, and to put this into perspective, there wasn’t a single person who hasn’t experienced one of these “phantom vibrations”. So, should we really be as attached to our phones as we are? Is checking our messages every 5 minutes really as necessary as we think it is? Or should we make more of an effort to detach ourselves from these addictive devices? To read the full article, visit the following link:
http://gigaom.com/collaboration/is-your-smartphone-causing-hallucinations/
photo courtesy of http://screamingkid.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html
