Maybe it's happened to you. You're sitting there quietly munching away on something, and suddenly, you feel someone's eyes burning into you. When you turn toward the stare, you encounter eyes filled with rage.
"What?" is your likely response. That "what" is the sound of your chewing — you've just driven someone who has misophonia over the edge. This condition affects somewhere between 6 percent and 20 percent of us. Maybe you have it and have wondered what's been making you so mad.
Misophonia — it means "hatred of sound" — is a hypersensitivity to certain sounds made by other people. These may include noises made by chewing, drinking, or breathing. It can prompt anger, anxiety, disgust, irritation, and even violent rage coupled with a strong flight impulse.
A study from the University of Newcastle published in the Journal of Neuroscience may reveal, for the first time, what's going on in people with misophonia. It's not the sounds themselves after all, but an unwanted mirroring response they elicit in the listener.
According to lead author Sukhbinder Kumar, "Our findings indicate that for people with misophonia there is abnormal communication between the auditory and motor brain regions — you could describe it as a 'supersensitized connection.'"
The first clue
Credit: Sammy Williams / Unsplash
Increased connectivity in the brain between the auditory cortex and the motor control regions affecting the mouth, face, and throat appears to be what causes misophonia. The study is based on fMRI scans of 17 subjects with misophonia and 20 control subjects.
When all the participants were exposed to recordings of human eating and chewing, all of their auditory cortexes responded similarly. However, for those individuals with misophonia, the researchers also observed increased communication between the auditory cortex and the mouth, face, and throat motor control areas. These regions were strongly activated by the sounds.
The second clue
Credit: Caleb Woods / Unsplash
It's not just sound that can trigger misophonia, apparently.
Says Kumar, "What surprised us was that we also found a similar pattern of communication between the visual and motor regions, which reflects that misophonia can also occur when triggered by something visual."
That both sonic and visual inputs can trigger the condition prompted the researchers to consider what the two responses have in common. "This led us to believe," says Kumar, "that this communication activates something called the 'mirror system,' which helps us process movements made by other individuals by activating our own brain in a similar way — as if we were making that movement ourselves."
Invasion of the body snatchers
"We think," Kumar says, "that in people with misophonia, involuntary overactivation of the mirror system leads to some kind of sense that sounds made by other people are intruding into their bodies, outside of their control."
Put another way, this hypothesis suggests that the anger and revulsion inside a person with misophonia are an emotional response to an unconscious — and highly unwelcome — sense someone else is attempting to take over control of their mouth, face, and throat.
A trick shared with the researchers by some people with the condition seems to support this:
"Interestingly, some people with misophonia can lessen their symptoms by mimicking the action generating the trigger sound, which might indicate restoring a sense of control. Using this knowledge may help us develop new therapies for people with the condition."
Senior author of the study is Newcastle's Tim Griffiths, who says of the study's findings: "The study provides new ways to think about the treatment options for misophonia. Instead of focusing on sound centers in the brain, which many existing therapies do, effective therapies should consider motor areas of the brain as well."
Neanderthals' image has undergone quite an upgrade in recent years. Where we once we thought of them as knuckle-dragging just-slightly-more-evolved apes, we now know that they were not so very unlike us. Evolutionarily more primitive, yes, but not by that much. They buried their dead, painted cave art, developed wooden tools, and even made string. We also know that their genetic traces remain in many modern humans. A new study from researchers at the University of Binghamton in New York State and Universidad de Alcalá in Spain pretty conclusively demonstrates they had the physical apparatus required for speaking and for understanding speech.
"This is one of the most important studies I have been involved in during my career," says co-author Ralph Quam. "The results are solid and clearly show the Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech. This is one of the very few current, ongoing research lines relying on fossil evidence to study the evolution of language, a notoriously tricky subject in anthropology."
The study is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Long-standing questions
Neanderthal reconstruction (right), 2014
Credit: Cesar Manso/Getty Images
"For decades, one of the central questions in human evolutionary studies has been whether the human form of communication, spoken language, was also present in any other species of human ancestor, especially the Neanderthals," says co-author Juan Luis Arsuaga.
The key to answering these questions, say the researchers, has to do first with Neanderthals' physical ability to hear in the frequency ranges typically involved in speech. In addition, while it's known that these ancient people had the physiological capacity for producing vowel sounds, the new research adds consonants to the Neanderthal repertoire, greatly expanding the possibilities for conveying a wide variety of meaning through the production of more types of sounds.
Neanderthal hearing
The authors made high-resolution CT scans of fossilized Neanderthal skulls—and skulls from some of their ancestors—found at UNESCO's archaeological site in northern Spain's Atapuerca Mountains. These scans served as the basis for virtual 3D models of the fossils' ear structures. Similar models of modern human ear structures were also created for comparison purposes.
Auditory bioengineering software assessed the hearing capabilities of the models. The software is capable of identifying sensitivity to frequencies up to 5 kHz, the midrange and low-midrange frequencies at which homo sapien speech primarily occurs. (We can hear much higher and lower frequencies, but that's where speech lies.)
Of particular importance is the "occupied bandwidth," the frequency region of greatest sensitivity, and therefore the spectrum most capable of accommodating enough different audio signals to represent a multitude of meanings. The occupied bandwidth is considered a critical requirement for speech since being able to produce and hear many different sounds—and understand their many different meanings—is the cornerstone of efficient communication.
Compared to their ancestors, the Neanderthal models turned out to have better hearing in the 4-5 kHz range, making their hearing more comparable to our own. In addition, the Neanderthals were found to have a wider occupied bandwidth than their predecessors, again more closely resembling modern humans.
Lead author of the study Mercedes Conde-Valverde says, "This really is the key. The presence of similar hearing abilities, particularly the bandwidth, demonstrates that the Neanderthals possessed a communication system that was as complex and efficient as modern human speech."
Consonants
Credit: sakura/Adobe Stock/Big Think
The study also suggests that Neanderthal vocalization were more advanced than previously thought. Says Quam: "Most previous studies of Neanderthal speech capacities focused on their ability to produce the main vowels in English spoken language."
However, he says, "One of the other interesting results from the study was the suggestion that Neanderthal speech likely included an increased use of consonants."
This is important, since "the use of consonants is a way to include more information in the vocal signal and it also separates human speech and language from the communication patterns in nearly all other primates. The fact that our study picked up on this is a really interesting aspect of the research and is a novel suggestion regarding the linguistic capacities in our fossil ancestors."
Bottom line
The study concludes that Neanderthals had the physiological hardware to produce a complex range of vocalizations, and the ability to understand them through ear structures not very unlike our own. This fits neatly with other recent insights as to the sophistication of the Neanderthals, a people who now seem to have been developing an expansive set of advanced capabilities simultaneously.
The authors of the study have been investigating the Neanderthals for almost 20 years, and others have been at it even longer. The work continues, and the study's publication marks a significant milestone in the much longer journey.
"These results are particularly gratifying," says co-author Ignacio Martinez. "We believe, after more than a century of research into this question, that we have provided a conclusive answer to the question of Neanderthal speech capacities."
Even different definitions of the word "clairaudience" reflect the way different people respond to the experience.
Merriam-Webster defines it as "hearing something not present to the ear but regarded as having objective reality," suggesting a hallucinatory experience. The Free Dictionary refers to it as the ability to hear things "outside the range of normal perception," suggesting a sort of superpower to hear what's there, but that others can't hear.
Often, what's heard are voices. In some cases, the hearer finds the experience distressing, and a mental health diagnosis, perhaps of schizophrenia, may result. For other people—such as seance mediums—the phenomenon has spiritual significance, and such voices are interpreted as messages from the dead.
Are these two different phenomena, or are they the same thing, understood differently depending on the context in which they occur? A new study in the journal Mental Health, Religion & Culture suggests the latter, and seeks to work out why hearing voices for some is a symptom of mental illness but for others it's a religious/spiritual experience (RSE). The study assumes sincerity on the part of those reporting hearing voices.
The study
Schizophrenia
Credit: Camila Quintero Franco/Unsplash
The researchers, led by Adam Powell of Durham University's Hearing the Voice project and Department of Theology and Religion, conducted online surveys of 65 clairaudient mediums they found through contact with spiritualist communities. The survey also included 143 people from the general population who responded negatively to the question "Have you ever had an experience you would describe as 'clairaudient?'" posed through an online study recruitment tool.
All participants spoke English and were aged 18-75. Most (84.4 percent) were from the U.K., with the rest mostly from the North Americas, Europe, or Australasia.
Of the spiritualists surveyed, 79 percent said hearing voices was a normal part of their lives at church and at home, while 44.6 percent said that they heard voices every day. Most respondents reported the voices as being inside their heads, though 31.7 percent said they came from outside their bodies.
Not surprisingly, more spiritualists reported believing in the paranormal than did the general population participants. They also cared less about what others thought of them.
Both groups were prone to visual hallucinations as well.
Youth and absorption
Credit: Tanner Boriack/Unsplash
Spiritualist clairaudients reported their first experiences with other voices early in life. Of these participants, 18 percent said they had heard voices for as long as they remembered. The average age, however, for first hearing voices was 21.7 years. Schizophrenia typically presents when a person is somewhat older than this, in the late 20s.
Significantly, 71 percent said their experience with voices pre-dated their awareness of spiritualism. Rather than religion prompting the hearing of voices, it seems that it's more the other way around — voices led them to religion.
Says Powell, "Our findings say a lot about 'learning and yearning.' For our participants, the tenets of spiritualism seem to make sense of both extraordinary childhood experiences as well as the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practicing mediums."
Still, the voices came first he says, so "all of those experiences may result more from having certain tendencies or early abilities than from simply believing in the possibility of contacting the dead if one tries hard enough."
The more likely factor is spiritualist clairaudients' relationship with absorption. Responses to questions based on the 34-point Tellegen Absorption Scale revealed that these people tended toward absorptive personality characteristics. These are described by the study's authors as "being readily captured by entrancing stimuli, reporting vivid mental imagery, becoming immersed in one's own thoughts."
Some, though not all, voice-hearing individuals from the general population were found to exhibit high levels of absorption — those that did were more likely to believe in the paranormal than others.
Implications
The study's finding regarding the relative young ages at which spiritualist clairaudients begin hearing voices suggests that these individuals' more welcoming attitude toward the phenomenon may have to do with malleability of youth — a belief in the fantastical is part of being young.
"Spiritualists tend to report unusual auditory experiences which are positive, start early in life and which they are often then able to control," says co-author Peter Moseley of Northumbria University. "Understanding how these develop is important because it could help us understand more about distressing or non-controllable experiences of hearing voices too."
The authors of the study do note, however, that their findings leave two big unanswered questions: Does a tendency toward absorption reveal "a predisposition to having RSEs or a belief in the plausibility of having RSEs?"
The other obvious big question? It's beyond the scope of this survey, but are those really the voices of the dead?
