Perhaps you have experienced this: a long silence in a cell phone conversation leads you to believe that what you said is so profound you have put the listener into an crisis of existential doubt or contemplation of heretofore unrecognized vistas of possibility. Hey, it could happen. More likely the connection has dropped. There has to be a new word for this, the mistaken sensation of having delivered a profound remark when it was just a line drop. This can occur on any communications medium that doesn’t have a dial tone (e.g. most cell phone connections, many VoIP (Voice-over-IP or Internet telephony) and some instant message systems) when the long silence following your last statement (or lack of interruption) leads you to believe you have your audience enthralled.
And for some other ways that you can fool yourself take a look at Harvard’s Your Disease Risk (hat tip to Research Buzz) and figure out where your diet/lifestyle have put you in the various lotteries for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke. In a health context you might interpret the flatline EEG as the dialtone, but determining who answers or who you answer to after “hearing it” is an exercise I leave for the reader.
