Hate the sound of chewing? It’s in your brain
Popcorn munching. Soup slurping. Nose sniffling. Or, simply, breathing.
Ever wonder why some ordinary sounds drive you crazy? It’s called misophonia, an affliction in which seemingly harmless sounds unleash anger, anxiety and, in some cases, panic attacks in some people.
If you’re one of them, neuroscientists at Newcastle University in Britain say they may have found an explanation for what ails you.
In a report on the latest study published in the journal Current Biology, the neuroscientists say that brain scans of misophonia sufferers show that particular sounds, like eating and drinking, cause the part of their brain that processes emotions, the anterior insular cortex, to go into overdrive.
That region in sufferers was also connected differently, compared to normal brains, to the amygdala and the hippocampus, areas that are involved in recalling past experiences, said Dr. Sukhbinder Kumar, lead researcher from the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University.
“We think that misophonia may be heavily connected to recalling past memories, because people with misophonia have had very bad experi- ences,” he said.
For the study, the team used an MRI to measure the brain activities of 42 people with and without misophonia while they were listening to a range of noises. The sounds were categorized into neutral ones like rain; unpleasant sounds like a crying baby; and trigger sounds that were mostly linked to eating, chewing, drinking and breathing.
When exposed to the noises, people with misophonia showed brain activities different from those without the condition. “The most dominant reaction is anger and anxiety, not disgust,” Kumar said.
But why those sounds trigger such averse reactions remains a mystery, he said.
The affliction can be so acute in some people that they can’t stand living with their own families. Olana Tansley-Hancock, 29, of Kent, England, was 8 when family meals became a chore.
“The noise of my family eating forced me to retreat to my own bedroom for meals,” she told the team at Newcastle University. “I can only describe it as a feeling of wanting to punch people in the face when I heard the noise of them eating.”