This is a clip from the BBC’s ‘The Secret Genius of Modern Life’ explaining why sausages work to use touchscreens (I thought it was because they look enough like fingers to fool the screen), and how touchscreens actually work. Whatever happened to magic being an acceptable answer?

Hidden beneath your phone’s glass is an invisible mesh of indium tin oxide — a material that stores and conducts electricity. This creates an electrical field that your finger (a conductor) disrupts when it touches the screen.

“It’s the interaction between the stored charges of these two conductors, your finger and the grid inside your phone, that makes this touchscreen work.”

Or, OR — maybe our phones actually have feelings. Did you ever get high enough to think about that? Although I imagine mine must be pretty depressed living in a linty pocket all day and only seeing the light of day to play Candy Crush in a bathroom.