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Tech

How Everyday Technology Baffles My Senses

Moving sidewalk syndrome, phantom buzzing, and biometric fails are throwing my sense of space, time, and self into a death spiral.
Image: Shutterstock

A weird thing happened the other day. It was a subtle, if disorienting sensation—call it moving sidewalk syndrome—that got me thinking about how so-called "everyday" technologies play with our senses, spurring illusions, hallucinations, and other psychic and bodily dread.

Gliding over one of those moving walkways, the kind meant to keep foot traffic flowing in airport terminals (in this case, New York's La Guardia Airport), at my normal gait, I weaved around commuters who either walked slower than me or stood completely still. I continued apace once I hit solid ground at the moving sidewalk's end, and then it happened.

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My legs suddenly felt almost weightless. My stride seemed impossibly long. Something was off. It felt like I was covering far more ground, and thus making better time, than I really was, as if I were still bopping along that conveyor belt for humans. It was baffling not in the way Oculus Rift and similar virtual reality tech, which you strap to your face for the express purpose of being transported to other worlds, baffle. Rather, here was a commonplace thing, an airport's moving sidewalk, designed to otherwise not disorient my senses, but that seemingly had a way of doing just that.

Then it happened again.

At airports in Buffalo, Detroit, and Las Vegas, and then back again at La Guardia, I became acutely aware, after stepping off each stretch of moving walkway, of the feeling of still being on the conveyor belt. I was on solid ground, but it did not feel like it.

The sensation would subside after a minute or two, and that it even crept up again and again likely had something to do with me having gotten it in my head that the weird thing would happen when I step off the sidewalk. There was a certain expectation that I'd feel as if I'd never stepped off. I'd become fixated.

This is perhaps why the moving sidewalk syndrome stuck with me for the duration of each flight, during which I could've sworn my phone, tucked into the front pocket of my windbreaker, vibrated. But how could it have? It was turned off.

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FALSE ALARMS

Phantom phone syndrome, or what The New York Times, being The Times, ​dubbed "ringxiety" in 2006, is now a poster child of 21st century first world problems.

There is something so uniquely self-centered about not just thinking someone is trying to text or call you but feeling it too, even if your device is powered down.

These false alarms have become so common that ​the phenomenon has literally changed our brains. They're the result of ​mismatched signal detection: When you feel a phantom buzz, you're mismatching true stimulus (the phone is, in fact, buzzing) with no stimulus (the phone is not buzzing; it's in your pocket, still and quiet). ​According to one 2013 study, about 80 percent of us have felt a phantom buzz.

"All perception is made up of information from the world and biases we have adjusted from experience,"  ​writes Tom Stafford for the BBC. "Feeling a phantom phone vibration isn't some kind of pathological hallucination. It simply reflects our near-perfect perceptual systems trying their best in an uncertain and noisy world."

So, maybe phantom phone syndrome is not that big of a bummer after all. What is a bummer, though, is how looking down at my phone, regardless of whether there's an incoming text or call or if I'm simply fucking around on ​my nearly app-free iPhone is akin to resting a 60lb weight on my neck.

That's according to a 2014 ​study from New York Spine Surgery & Rehabilitation Medicine. Phantom buzzing, meet text neck.

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Back in the air, on final descent, I'd power up my phone, which has a simple biometric unlocking feature. It has a detailed scan of my right thumbprint, a marker I gave up on my own volition when I upgraded to the iPhone 5. My phone, i.e. Apple, knows who I am. Or does it?

I'd press to unlock. Nothing; "try again" jiggles, side to side. And so, I'd try again. Still no luck. Eventually I'm prompted to physically punch in my four-character password. The horror.

It's my stupid phone, and when it doesn't recognize me it stresses me out.

You might be saying, it's just a stupid phone. But it's my stupid phone, and when it doesn't recognize me it stresses me out. Did it kill me to have to manually unlock the thing? Of course it didn't. But it's an unnerving thing when biometrics fail, when my phone doesn't recognize my thumb. A hunk of plastic and glass is telling me that one of my most defining characteristics does not belong to me.

What is going on here? With Oculus and similar VR headsets still struggling to crack into the mainstream, are the specters of near-ubiquitous technology designed to not upend my sense of space, time, and self, but that do precisely that, side effects of being "over plugged"? Are moving sidewalk and phantom phone syndromes, text neck and biometric fails the unintended consequences of being assisted to death? Whatever it is, it's what's giving rise, at least in part, to ironic Kickstarters like the  ​NoPhone and a broader ​anti-tech tech movement.

At least for now, it seems there's a heck of better chance of your sense of space, time, and self being temporarily flung akimbo by "everyday" things—things that now clog the intersection of meatspace and the digital milieu that we barely notice them, if we notice them at all—than by something like the Oculus. We're all on the conveyor, now.