If you’re one of the millions of people connected to a cell phone all day, perhaps you’ve wondered about that mysterious ringing in your ears.

You’ll be sitting on the couch and watching TV, let’s say, when you hear your cell phone trill. But when you go to answer it, you discover that it isn’t really ringing. The same might happen while you’re walking down the street with traffic rushing by, while listening to the car radio, or even when you’re taking a shower.

You hear your phone ringing when no one is calling.

Internet blogs and forums have been blabbing about this curious phenomenon for some time now, a sort of online group-therapy session convened by a single question: “Is it just me, or do other people out there hear their cell phones ringing when they’re not?”

So when The New York Times reported on the phenomenon last week, offering a scientific explanation for those annoying “phantom phone rings,” cell-phone users everywhere were able to breathe a sigh of relief – and immediately get on their phones and keyboards to spread the good word.

“Thanks for letting me know I’m not crazy,” wrote one grateful person on a tech site I visited recently.

According to sound experts quoted in the article, this audio illusion is a kind of Pavlovian response triggered in the brains of people who live in “a constant state of phone vigilance.” The “psycho-acoustic” phenomenon, the Times reported, is related to the way the brain interprets sound. The ear gives unequal weights to certain frequencies, “making it particularly sensitive to sound in the range of 1,000 to 6,000 hertz, scientists say.”

Babies tend to cry in this range, providing a handy evolutionary alert to parents, and cell phones ring in the same acoustical zone, too – the simple, more traditional ring tones, that is, as opposed to the popular music variety. Which means, in other words, that our brains are conditioned to respond to phone rings as they are to wailing babies.

Not only can 1,000-hertz tones be generated by many things in the world around us, according to the story, the sounds are maddeningly difficult to pinpoint. Hence, the increasingly common auditory confusion that results when a tone from a TV advertising jingle – or the squeal of brakes, the sound of running water, the shriek of a hair dryer, you name it – fools a person into answering a cell phone when there’s no one on the other end. There’s even a whimsical name for it: fauxcellarm.

Simple enough, right? Well, not to many of the conspiracy theorists on the Web, who insist that clever TV marketers are intentionally triggering phantom rings in our heads to get us to pay closer attention to their ads and maybe pick up our phones to order products. While a few advertising types in the story scoffed at the subliminal advertising notion – “Manipulative? Us?” – one said it may actually have merit.

“People are using a sound trigger to control emotions,” said the chief creative officer of the Arnell Group in New York. “The most controlling device in our life right now is a cell phone.”

Technology-induced paranoia aside, the important thing to remember, dear reader, is that you’re not crazy after all, no matter how many phantom ring tones are zinging through your noggin. But if you’re actually taking your cell into the shower with you, a good therapist may be only a phone call away.