![]() All participants were healthy and none had any mental illnesses. The participants were volunteers recruited from the seventh grade of a medical college student population. One female intern was lost to follow-up due to non-academic leave. We recruited 74 medical interns (46 males and 28 females, with a mean age of 24.8 years standard deviation, 1.2, range: 23–29) of 136 (males, 99) medical interns who were trained at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital for one year. The specific aims of the present prospective longitudinal study were: (1) to assess the prevalence of phantom vibration and phantom ringing throughout the internship (2) to identify the factors associated with the development of phantom vibration and phantom ringing and (3) to investigate the baseline personality traits, stress during internship, the accompanied depression and anxiety levels, and their correlations with phantom vibration and phantom ringing. Furthermore, in Taiwan, medical interns have a short period of free time after their internship, so the internship provides a good stress exposure model with which to study the relationship between stress and hallucinations. In addition, the age, lifestyle, and educational background of medical interns are similar. We chose this particular setting because a medical internship provides a rare instance in which the onset of a major stressor can be predicted for a defined population. Thus, we designed a prospective cohort study to investigate the factors associated with phantom vibration and phantom ringing hallucinations during the medical internship year. The first two factors can be attributed to the long work hours and stressful workload of medical students and residents. Ī previous cross-sectional study identified four factors that were independently associated with phantom vibration: being a medical student or resident, the number of hours that the phone was carried, more frequent use of the phone in vibration mode, and carrying the device in a breast pocket. Such auditory perceptual distortions may represent a state of general vulnerability in the general population. In a community sample of young adults, individuals with higher levels of psychological distress also reported higher frequencies of hallucination-like experiences. The extremely high prevalence of phantom vibration reported by medical staff members attests to the fact that normal brain mechanisms are at work. Compared with tactile and other hallucinations, auditory hallucinations are common in psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, although they are typically related to verbal voices rather than to nonverbal auditory hallucinations, such as phantom ringing of a mobile phone. Hallucinations are aberrant perceptions in the absence of a stimulus thus, phantom vibration and phantom ringing could be defined as tactile and auditory hallucinations. ![]() Furthermore, phantom ringing, an auditory hallucination, warrants further study because it is more similar to the psychopathology of a major mental illness than is phantom vibration. These two “syndromes” might share common associated factors and underlying mechanisms. Thus, its prevalence and associated factors remain unknown. A similar perception, phantom ringing syndrome, an intermittent perception that a mobile phone is ringing when it is not, has not been described in the medical literature. The only previous cross-sectional study of phantom vibration syndrome estimated that 68% of medical staff members had experienced this phenomenon. ![]() ![]() Phantom vibration syndrome, an intermittent perception that a mobile phone is vibrating when it is not, may be a prevalent hallucination in the general population.
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