Do you compulsively select blocks of text, click non-linked text just to click, or randomly wiggle the mouse? You may have Restless Mouse Syndrome (RMS).
Lots of people have RMS, but it manifests in different ways. For example, my RMS compulsion is to select about 3 lines of text from the middle of the first line to the middle of the third line. It doesn’t really have anything to do with reading; often the selected text is in a different paragraph than the one I’m reading.
RMS manifests in full when you’re using a mouse, but trackpad and laptop “nipple” variants exist. For example, you might scroll up and down slightly or just wiggle the cursor around.
Since there’s little information on RMS, I’m curious:
- Do you have any RMS compulsions?
- Have you seen RMS in others?
- If so, what behaviors have you seen?
3 Comments ↓
I can’t help but do the two-fingered scroll on my MacBook Pro constantly. I drive people nuts in demos but it looks all nice a scroll-ly on the big screen.
I definitely have RMS. It’s horrible when I go to the New York Times website and selecting and clicking around randomly on text opens this pop-up dictionary of whatever word you selected. A clever feature, maybe, I don’t know. Doesn’t work out so well for me with RMS.
Doug- I scroll up and down too in demos. Like I want to keep the pixels alive or something.
Britta- Funny, NYT.com is what prompted this post. That dictionary popup finally pushed me over the edge.