Probably confirmation bias or maybe I'm subconsciously hearing the interference in speakers and taking the hint from there. It doesn't happen every time and I don't receive a lot of calls.
HN seems a decent place to settle it once and for all.
However, this would be pretty easy to test! Just have a friend call you at random times throughout a 2-hour interval or something, and record every time you think the phone is about to ring, and every time it actually does. If there's a close enough correlation between the two, that's fairly persuasive evidence.
Case in point, the woman who can smell Parkinson's disease, to some ridunculous p-value.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/one-woman-s-abilit...
Some effects published in medical journals have a less convincing p-value.
A decent dev machine for $2K-ish, save for a major flaw: "coil whine"[1]. Very annoying when working in silent environments. Frustratingly random as well - for me, backlight on/off, usb connect/disconnect and scrolling on browsers would change the whine frequency noticably. [2]
It is possible that you can hear something similar from your MBP - however it is very unlikely that this has anything to do with any of the radios.
I miss the good old days when you knew your PC was busy by the HD sounding like a thousand monkeys tap-dancing shakespear.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coil_noise
[2] BTW, Dell denies this issue, claiming it was fixed before 9333. Users disagree: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/47g46m/lets_investiga...
Is this true? What about heat radiation for example. We can feel that.
And we can see/sense changes in electromagnetic fields: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n6/full/ncomms1364.h...
Anecdotally: I can definitely "feel" large AC transmission lines. They do have an audible buzz, however the "feeling" sensation seems distinct to me. My experience is from hiking the Appalachian Trail, which spends days outside of cell phone range, and then crosses regional transmission lines periodically.
So if that observation is not pure illusion or auditory synesthesia (perhaps a fully deaf person can assist here?), it would seem to follow that there is a mechanism to sense EM radiation, and it is simply a matter of whether the perceptive threshold has been met, which would obviously vary from person to person and even from instant to instant.
The story: this pastor, and only this pastor, would make wireless microphones in certain frequencies act up.
Eventually the audio team found out that somehow this particular pastor worked as an antenna for a particular frequency, matching a nearby radio transmitter, that due to its enormous size would overpower the microphone transmission and corrupt the data.
I also knew somebody who had to use wind-up pocket watches, because quartz wristwatches would always skew when he wore them, but would keep time fine when removed.
Weird stuff. Who knows.
I can imagine cell frequencies would be even more likely due to smaller antennae for the higher frequency.
There's definitely doubt about their conclusion when they can't reproduce something and then declare it busted -- absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Another observation though: I worked professionally with radar systems for a while and IIRC one of the oldtimers mentioned one isolated case where a person had been able to tell when a certain radar was transmitting in his sector. (Radars often only transmit in sectors turning away from the population.)
But, to be honest, I haven't heard about it anywhere else and most people who claim to sense that kind of radiation either refuses to undergo blind studies or fail them so if you treat this as anything but an old wives tale you have to do your research :-)
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncel.2014.00...
I have no idea on what field intensities are sufficient to influence the neurons.