Why Loud Chewing Makes You Angry

The mukbang phenomenon is comfort viewing for millions, yet for others the sound of chewing, slurping and everyday mouth noises is enough to trigger instant anger, disgust and distress. Why do the sounds soothe one person and enrage another? In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce) explore misophonia, the misunderstood sound sensitivity that can turn everyday mouth sounds into powerful emotional triggers. 1 in 5 people in a UK study have reported a hatred of mouth sounds, but where does the problem lie, and can you train your brain to stop hating a sound, or is the person chewing next to you simply beyond forgiveness? Are the sounds themselves the trigger? Or is the structure of the human ear to blame? Perhaps, instead, the answer lies in a surprising connection between our brains and our jaws. To find out, Hannah and Michael trial a surprising trick that could offer genuine relief, and discover how changing what you see can completely transform your response to what you hear. Along the way, they investigate nails on blackboards, the frequencies used in acoustic weapons, the device designed to drive teenagers out of public spaces and the curious connection between misophonia, ASMR and the mukbang world itself. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  And I'm Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  And this is an episode that some of you will hate. This is a good way to draw people in, I think, isn't it? This is a good way to be like, welcome, welcome, you'll hate this. Michael, I asked you to prepare some crisps or chips, since you're in America, in advance of this episode. Do you have some there?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did get some, which is great because I'm a little bit hungry. I didn't get chips.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  I got America's number one finger hat.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Bugles.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Because I kind of know what you're going to talk about. I needed something crunchy.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  So we're talking about misophonia today. We're talking about the abject horror and rage that appears in some people when they overhear other people eating.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  You mean like this?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Anyway, what I want you to do.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  How was that for you, Michael? How was that for you?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  It doesn't annoy me. I can tell that, like, the smacking, it's probably more gross and annoying than the crunching. I don't know if you feel that way. It's hard for me. I think it sounds fine.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  You think it sounds fine? Do you think it sounds fine? Okay, that was you doing it.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me listen to you.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so the initial crunch was kind of cool. But then, once you closed your lips and it became like a sound that was muffled by your own head, it felt really personal, like I shouldn't be hearing it. And that's when I stopped liking it as much.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's what we're saying. You were fine with it when you were doing it. I was fine with it when I was doing it. But it's when the other person is doing that it's really a problem.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  It feels like a inappropriate sound. I don't know, maybe I'm revealing something about myself, but yeah, what's going on?

• 2:00Speaker 00

  It's just, it's not nice. It's not nice. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. What is misophonia? Where does it come from? Why do you have it? And what can you possibly do to make the anger go away?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Hmm, get the popcorn ready.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 2:26Speaker 01

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• 2:37Speaker 00

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• 3:00Speaker 00

  But today, Cancer Research UK scientists are discovering incredible ways to turn our biology against cancer.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  In fact, Cancer Research UK has helped double UK cancer survival over the past 50 years. And their world-class research is driving even more discoveries to tackle over 200 types of cancer.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/RestIsScience.

• 3:32Speaker 02

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• 4:03Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses setup required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18 plus.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Okay, well, let's start off with some noises that are horrible, shall we? Some noises that make people annoyed, because there's plenty of those. There's lots of evidence on this. Charles Babbage, who we were talking about the other day, he really disliked bad noises. Do you know about this story already?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  No idea, no.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Okay, so Charles Babbage is the guy who invented the analytical engine, the difference engine, like this really amazing inventor. He kept a tally of the street music outside of his window in Marylebone, London. He calculated that he had 165 interruptions in 80 days, and he was fuming. His neighbors found out that it annoyed him to have music playing. They deliberately started playing more and more sound outside of his window just to annoy him more and more and more.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  That's terrible.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  I don't like music coming from far away. Oh, hold on, I got a bugle stuck in my throat. It's especially annoying because the lower frequency sounds travel further. So I don't get to hear the nice song. I just hear

• 5:35Speaker 01

  and it's like, stop it.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Just irritating noises that you have no control over. That's how we felt as well. This is a time, by the way, when street music was actually an extortion trade. So you would turn up and you would play outside a nice house until somebody paid you to stop and to move on.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Sort of like the weapon itself was the music in the street. Yeah, poor old Babbage. He wrote this chapter on street nuisances and kind of became well-known for absolutely despising noises outside of his window, which then led to people deliberately playing tin whistles, brass band for like hours outside of his window just to wind him up, which...

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Mike, I didn't know this about him. I mean, he would need to just move to the middle of nowhere.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  To the middle of nowhere, to the middle of nowhere.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you can't, you kind of... The only way I've been able to get over my sensitivity to like all these noises is to just be like, that is what it is to live in a city. And I love that I live here in London or New York City or wherever, and that's just part of it. And I just have a zen experience.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  It doesn't really bother me, actually. The noises of the outside, kind of going past the window or whatever, they don't really bother me that much. There has been some work into the physics of horrible noises. Like, what is it about certain noises that everybody distinctly dislikes? And the classic one is nails down a blackboard, okay?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the absolute epitome of this, of misophonia.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Right, so I'm going to send you a link to a website right now. This is from Boombox Post, okay? They have done some tweaking on sounds that are universally horrible, okay? So here is fingers on a chalkboard. I'm sorry, everybody, but I'm going to play it. Fingers on a chalkboard, can you hear that?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  I'm going to hit play.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Wow, that's really bad.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  It's really bad. It's really bad. There's also styrofoam squeak. Have you listened to this?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, horrible. Plate squeak.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Okay.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  I mean, there's lots of like squeaky things.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  I think fingernails on a chalkboard in real life is worse for me, but the plate squeak one that plays on this website is the worst so far.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  In the nails example, this amplitude can be like flickering 30 to 150 times a second. So it's really fast. It's not so slow that you can be like, ah, on, off, on, off. But it's like, we know that that is something that we find unpleasant.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Let me do marker squeak.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  The marker squeak one is very unpleasant. Like, I think in real life I would like it better, but something about how it's coming through the speakers on my laptop here is just... I love how terrible this is, because this is a perfect demonstration of what you're talking about.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  It is. It's just absolutely horrifying, right? So back in the 80s, there were three scientists, Half and Blake and Hillenbrand. And they were like, what is it about fingernails on a blackboard that is so horrible? Like, what physically is it about this sound, about this audio wave, right, that is causing us to just recoil in so much horror? So what they did is they stripped out the low frequencies and they found that it improved. They stripped out high frequencies and they realized that it kind of stayed kind of hideous. Volume, by the way, made no difference here. But everybody's instinct that it was the shrillness, the very top high notes that were causing people to recoil, didn't really stand up.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  That is surprising. I would have said, obviously, it's the high pitchness. But no, they took that out and it was still bad.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  What has been done since? In 2011, there was a replication of this study. And what they did is they realized that it's actually the band between 2,000 and 4,000 hertz. So also on that page that I've sent you, on the right-hand side is exactly those same sounds, but this time where they've stripped out anything in that range.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Okay, so just to put this into context, human hearing ranges from 20,000 to 20,000 hertz. And what they're removing is the 2,000 to 4,000 range?

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. So a little chunk right in the middle.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  I'll do chalkboard first.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Okay, let me compare it to the original, because it's still kind of bad. Oh, yeah. I just played the original. It's... I'm going to do the plate squeak, which I hated the most.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Oh, the plate squeak is almost so cute, it could be a notification on your operating system.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  The marker squeak is like a cute mouse. Once it's been equalized.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  So it is really good to play them back to back. So for example, the styrofoam squeak where this band has been taken out and then the original.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so here's, here's the, with the band removed.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  And here's the original.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Horrible, horrible. And it does, I mean, it's still recognizably the same thing. And it's not, it's not like it all of a sudden becomes a really nice sound, but it just becomes more tolerable. It doesn't have the, quite the same sort of blood curdling nature as previous. So the thing that's interesting about that particular band, 2000 to 4000, two things are interesting. One, it's about the same range that human screams are. Like babies crying, children screaming, people like, you know, literally a blood curdling scream is within that range. So it might be that there's some evolutionary aspect to this. I mean, that's speculation. But the other thing about this is that the, your ear canal is complicit in all this.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Because around 3000 hertz, the structure of your ear canal, those sounds will start to resonate within it.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  So they are vibrating your whole head essentially at that particular frequency, which is, I'm gonna add to it, feeling way more horrible.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  3000 hertz sounds like this.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like an alarm sound. Like again, it's like a sound that we know people cannot ignore. Whether it's a crying baby or an alarm, that's the 3000 hertz band.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  And you're making exactly the right point about the alarm here, because this is where sirens, car alarms, you know, smoke detectors, you know, industrial, all of those kinds of things, they are deliberately put in this range where it doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing. You are, you are sitting up and paying attention when you hear something that is in that exact range. But these sounds are so horrible to us, right? And, and this is, you know, essentially universal that we all really dislike something in that, that range. That people have come up with acoustic weapons that exploit this, this fact about human nature. So there's one in particular, it's called the long range acoustic device.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  It is this dish that fires off this really horrible sound. It sounds like a really horrible, horrible, horrible alarm. It's like a 30 degree beam kind of like sprays it out. And it sits between 2100 and 3100 hertz, which is exactly the bit that resonates within, within your ear canal. One of the things about this acoustic weapon though, I should add, is that it is insanely loud. I mean, loud enough to destroy eardrums. There have been examples where it has been successfully used to deter people. So what I think my favorite example that I managed to find was in 2005, off the coast of Somalia, there were, there was a pirate ship that was attacking a cruise ship. Pirates were sort of trying to climb on board this cruise ship.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  And they had machine guns, they had like rockets, all of this stuff. So instead, the crew got out this loudspeaker, this like acoustic weapon, blared it down and the pirates like, do you know what, actually I'm all right, thanks, don't want to. Don't think I will, don't want to come on board. Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  Which is really, I think.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  So you're fighting, you're fighting not with physical harm or physical objects, but with annoyance.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Discomfort.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  I love that you've got an acoustical weapon and you're like, hey, what kind of ammo do you got? You got, well, I got a 40 hertz. No, that's too pleasant. I've got the Spice Girls wannabe. Nah, it's still too good. Oh, I've got a 3000 hertz sine wave. Yeah, that'll get them.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Thank you very much, thank you very much. I mean, talking about Spice Girls wannabe, actually, I mean, there have been instances where songs like pop songs have been used as torture devices. You play it over and over and over and over again. And people just lose their minds. I mean, really, really, really distressing and incredibly quickly can be distressing incredibly quickly. The one other example, there's something called the mosquito. Have you come across this?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yes, I have.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, go on, you tell it, you say it.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so I was in Jacksonville, Florida, doing a Brain Candy live show. And outside the theater, they were playing this noise that was very annoying, but all these like union workers were hanging outside. And I'm like, what is that noise? And they were like, oh, you can hear it? That noise is here to keep young people away. To keep the juvenile delinquents from, and I could hear it. And back then I was in my 30s, so I was really proud. And I, I looked like I was 74, like just like I do now. But my, my ears could hear this sound and it kept away like teenagers, basically. I should go back and see if I can hear it today, now that I'm 40.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  But yeah, they, they were all just hanging out, no kids in sight, because it drove away and annoyed anyone who was under a certain age. Cause as you get older, you can't hear those higher pitches.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Exactly, so this is set at 17.4 kilohertz. Really loud as well, 108 decibels. It's just like, oh, really too much. I, I have, I've lost that level of my hearing. I've never been able to hear the mosquito. By the time it came around, I was already, already a bit hard of hearing, I guess.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Actually, you're not missing much.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, fair. But I mean, the idea of this was it could be sold to shopkeepers who wanted to disperse teenagers so that paying adults could come in and they'd be unaffected. But the thing is, is what actually happened? I'm really on teenagers' side on this one, I've got to be honest, because the idea of making, making a space not welcoming to young people just bothers me. That's just like a, a general rule.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  The idea that you cannot physically exist in this public space and we're gonna make it really, really bad for you.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  The idea, the idea that every young person is a delinquent also just extremely bothers me. Anyway, what, what teenagers did is within a year, they lifted the same tone and then they turned it into a text alert that teachers wouldn't be able to hear.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Oh, that's clever.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Really smart.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  They could be talking to each other in class through Morse code beeps of mosquito sounds.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Just in 17 kilohertz that no one else can hear, which I think is very fun.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Gosh, 17 kilohertz, that's really high. Let me, can I play that with that tone generator we're using?

• 16:57Speaker 00

  I mean, you can try, but you're not gonna hear it.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I can't, it goes all the way up to 20,000. So at 17,000 hertz. Oh, can I hear it? Probably not. Here we go, I'm gonna hit play.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  I've got nothing.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  I hear nothing. Now, it could be that my laptop can't play that sound, but it's probably that I'm too old. I'll have to show this to my daughter.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Just out of interest, what level can you hear at?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Okay, let me bring it down while it's playing. Oh, okay, I can hear it at 14,381. Ooh, if I go a little lower than that, it's really obvious. So I'd say the threshold is 14.3 kilohertz. What about you?

• 17:35Speaker 00

  I think it's, oh, I think it's about 14 for me. 1426, I can just hear something.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Okay, so it could, now it could be that that's the threshold for our computer speakers. We need like an actual ear doctor to tell us if we're doing this right. What, what the limit is, is it the machine or the ear? But anyway, yeah, I can't, I can't hear 17 kilohertz at all.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  I'm also two years older than you though, so you know, let's, let's assume that it's an extremely precise way that our ears have aged in that, in that 24 months.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Very special ears, yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Very special ears, exactly. Okay, so here's the thing, that there's definitely a particular sound wave or particular sound waves that we don't like. This though, actually does not correlate with misophonia. Misophonia is something separate. The sound of people chewing and eating is particular and distinct. And we know that it doesn't have to do with volume. It doesn't have to do with that frequency. It doesn't have anything to do with roughness either. So, so sort of how lower frequencies, if the sound is a bit more jagged, which is what you did in an episode.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Now, what is this roughness you're talking about?

• 18:43Speaker 00

  One of the big things about the reason why chalkboard sounds so horrific is because what your nails are doing is they're sort of leaving and then rejoining the surface of the, of the chalkboard. They're kind of, they're jittering all the way down. And so what that means is that you're getting this, this, this peak in amplitude as, as it goes down, right?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  That's all it takes, yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  It's, you know, chewing, the sound of chewing, the sound that we started this episode with, is just like, I mean, it's about as menacing as a cardigan as in comparison to the other things that we've, we've been describing. There've been experiments where you take people who are misophonics, I think they're called, people who have misophonia, and you ask them to rate screams and crying babies. And they don't like the sounds, but they don't like it just as much as everybody else doesn't like it. But there is something that happens with, with a certain number of people where the sound of people chewing, sound of people eating food is so burdensome, so unbelievably difficult for them to hear,

• 19:49Speaker 00

  that they end up avoiding certain situations as a result. There was a, a UK study on this that estimated 18.4% of people carry misophonia symptoms that are burdensome enough to sort of, to count as, as symptoms. So that's one in five people basically. If you're sitting at a table, eating your food with, with five other people, chances are one of them is absolutely despising your chewing sound.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That's, I, I don't think I qualify for like a debilitating case of misophonia, but I do dislike chewing. Now, here's the thing though, and I might be kind of like jumping ahead a little bit, but disgust must be involved. The sound of chewing is not resonating in my ear canal or my skull. It's not really loud, but.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  So I should say, actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna focus on the hatred of listening to chewing. Misophonia is more generally the hatred of sound. So misus is hatred and phone is, is sound. And the term was coined in 2001, which I think is actually pretty late. But some people really do intensely suffer from misophonia in a way that actually affects their lives.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, and I don't, she, she might not listen to this episode, but the sound of my mother chewing is really intolerable to me.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Interesting, particularly her.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  But also, next on the list, after my mother, is my own chewing. But it's different. For me, the sound of my own chewing isn't annoying, it's embarrassing. I am just panicked that other people will hear my chewing and they'll hate me. So I, I don't eat crunchy snacks around people. And often if I'm sitting too close to people at a meal, I will just go and eat outside or something, cause I don't, I cannot chew around them. I'm too self-conscious, but it's not debilitating. And no one's ever been like, Michael, you have

• 21:51Speaker 00

  I do remember that time when we, we went for lunch together and you got up and walked out and, and all of us looked at each other and said, wow, that was loud.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Okay, that, no, that didn't happen. I think, I think it's unreasonable. I don't, I think I chew like a normal person, but I think that

• 22:08Speaker 00

  You do, you do. To be clear, I've eaten in a room with Michael many times and he's completely normal. He's a completely normal chewer.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  I think it's normal, but I can't help that I feel just like I, I myself am being embarrassingly disgusting, no matter what. So I try to, I try to just like take a bite and then soak it in spit until it's soft enough that it doesn't make a noise. And now it makes it sound like I'm really, um, losing my mind over this, but anyway.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  No, no, it doesn't. The one I'm really paranoid about is when I'm doing audio recordings and sometimes your mouth can be a bit clicky, like.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  And I really hear it in other people. Uh, if I'm watching TV and it's just like, oh gosh, that, that is a bit much for me, but I'm extremely paranoid about sounding clicky on tape.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. I know what you're talking about. I, I feel like, yeah, these are things that I notice in other people and then I hyper notice them in myself. For me, it's if there's like, if it's too wet right above, just behind my front top teeth and I'm kind of

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Ooh, yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  My S's are kind of slippery and wet, then I get really, I have to go get a paper towel and like dry the top of my mouth off.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, you poofed.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  I'll listen to the footage back and I'll just be disgusted and I'm like, I can't put this video out.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Oh man. Oh man. Ah, they're like the perils of, of recording yourself. Do you know what? I do, I do think in general, it is not healthy to have to watch yourself on screen as much as we have to with our Joe. I think it's not.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  It's a weird, it's a weird experience. Yeah. It does make you very aware of, or at least more aware of how you appear to other people, probably.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  But, but again, hyper aware. Most people don't care. They're not thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves. But yeah, when you, when you watch yourself on, on video over and over again, you're like, wow, okay. So that hair is weird. Okay. So that nostril is weird.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Yes. I have, I won't even tell you the things that I, uh, hyper focused on on my face, but, um, because then speaking them out loud will make them true. But yes, I agree is the point. Yes, I agree.

• 24:27Speaker 01

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  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

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• 26:28Speaker 00

  Okay. So I think disgust does come into it, but people who really, really have misophonia, um, it's, there, there've been investigations into what it is about them that makes them really, really struggle with these kinds of sounds in a way that is beyond what normal people would find, uh, difficult or disgusting or whatever it might be. There was a group in Amsterdam who took 109 people who had misophonia and they checked their hearing and it was like, no, the hearing is fine. You know, one of them had tinnitus, you know, whatever. But basically they were all completely normal. Uh, yeah. So it's not the sound itself. It's not the physics of the sound itself. It's not the ears of

• 27:09Speaker 00

  the person. And what people think it might have to do with is what's going on in your brain as you are watching somebody eat food. So, okay. If you watch somebody yawn, I mean, it doesn't, you, you don't need me to tell you how, uh, how contagious yawning can be, right? You, you watch somebody yawn, you, your, your jaw kind of mirrors what they're doing. And then before you know it, you're, you're actually yawning.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Even, even talking about yawning is making me feel this reflex.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Like you're sort of sympathetic.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I hate it. I, I read to my daughter every night and if a character in the book yawns, I wind up actually yawning, but after the character has, so I can't even use my real yawn to perform the, the character's yawn. Ugh.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  And it's because you're mirroring, you're mirroring what's going on in others, even if it's just an image of that that's, that appears in your head. So there is one theory that says misophonia is kind of like contagious yawning, but it's for chewing. So this is a paper that was in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2021. And, um, the idea, they put people in, in brain scanners, people who had misophonia. And then they, uh, played the sounds out and then looked to see what was going on in their brains as they were hearing and being disgusted and angered by these noises. And the hearing part of the brain behaved completely normally. It was sort of reacted as it would to any other sound. Uh, but the difference

• 28:38Speaker 00

  was in the ventral premotor cortex. Basically it's in the part of your brain that plans a movement before you make it.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  And specifically the part that handles your, your lips, your jaw and your throat. So it's essentially like your, your own mouth's control panel.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  So the idea here then is that in misophonics, like people who have misophonia, what they're doing is they're seeing people chewing and they're sort of, the bit of their brain that wants to mirror what's going on there is like, is, is, is kicking off and is like, doesn't like it.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  In some early form mirroring the motion, they aren't actually physically moving the muscles to mirror it, but something about the, the mirroring happening at a deep level.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  But then.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  And that's what causes the discomfort. So they, they call it hyper mirroring. This is the, the paper called it hyper mirroring. But what this means is that it's like, it's almost as if it runs as an intrusion in your brain. So you can hear the, the sound, that's fine. But it's like, it's as though something else is instructing your body to do something that it doesn't really want to do.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Right. Oh. So that, see, that's pointing again towards, in my opinion, a kind of disgust. Because fundamentally disgust is about a fear of invasion of something contagious that can spread out of your control that's external, getting into your body. Bad smells, bad odors, gross things. But if something's infected me, meaning it's controlling the mirror neurons in my brain and I'm hyper mirroring a thing that I haven't decided to do, how is that different than me feeling like, ooh, that mold is going to get on me and in me?

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, good point. I totally agree. But this, I think, gives the clue or a hint as to how you can tackle or combat misophonia.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. What do we do about it?

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Because, um, this same paper, when they were talking to all these people who had misophonia, they, they discovered that nearly half of them, actually to try and get around it, they sort of mimic what they're watching. So, uh, and when they do, they end up getting a little bit of relief. So, uh, if you're watching somebody eating and it's really bothering you, if you start deliberately moving your jaw, it can take away some of the horror for you because then you're sort of consciously performing the action that is already being evaded.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Right. I'm going to try that next time.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Well, let's try it now. Let's try it now. Okay.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Try it now.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Get your crisp. You did not like hearing my crisp. I did not like hearing your crisp.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  I think, here's what I'm going to try to do. I'm not going to just, just chew when you chew. I'm going to try to chew in sync with you.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Cause even if I'm eating and someone else is eating, they can gross me out. But if I try to match the motions to their sounds, maybe that'll help. So let's do that.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Okay. So we'll try and match it together. By the way, if you're watching, which, watching this, which, which, you know, it's not just you and me alone here, Michael, there's quite a lot of people watching. If you want to do this with us and see if the misophonia goes away, then, then do. Grab yourselves some crisps. Super quick. Okay. Ready?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Hannah's going to lead, so I'm following her lead.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Okay. Okay. Ready?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  That was fine.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  It's kind of funny to focus on your mouth so closely while I'm eating. For a whole different reason than misophonia. But it definitely wasn't annoying because, first of all, it was harder for me to hear your sounds.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  True.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  I'm gonna turn the volume up, let's do it again.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Go on, let me drown you out. I'll try and make it really, really like lip smacking this time, okay, ready?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  It's fine.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  It's kind of, it's kind of cool. It's like, it's very corporal, like I'm very aware of bodies at this moment. Because I'm just focusing on yours so much and I've got all this stuff in my mouth. But it's, it's not, it's not annoying, it's not gross.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  No, it's not annoying, not gross. And, and I mean, I'm sure it was for everybody else listening, but I think if you replay that and do it with us, then, then you'll hear. It does really genuinely feel quite different. And, and the idea here then is that what your brain is doing all the time is sort of subtracting your own, your own actions from your kind of conscious awareness. And so, I mean, you have to, right? You're not, the world doesn't like lurch from one direction to another as your, as your eyes are darting around. Sort of like it all adds to this kind of sensible picture. You don't, you know, as you say, you don't, you can't smell the inside of your nose, you can't taste the inside of your mouth. You're, you're sort of deleting your experience.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  And so if your experience is in synchrony, synchronized with another person's, then you're sort of deleting their experience too.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly how it felt. In fact, it almost felt like I was controlling your jaw.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Uh huh, right.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  And that was not weird to me at all. I mean, it was, it was not neutral. It was, again, it wasn't, it wasn't pleasant or unpleasant, but it was, it was not gross in the same way of like listening to your chewing.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  How dare you, how dare you call my chewing gross?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  I mean, it was less gross. Your chewing was like not that gross, but still, I deleted it.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  It's pretty great.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  It basically wasn't an external thing.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  The next time we're in a room together and we're having a meal together, Mike, I'm gonna lock eyes with you. And we just sink and start chewing again.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  I would like that. Okay, one other thing about this, a different study that I think is super interesting, that really demonstrates that so much of this is about context, rather than, rather than the actual sound itself, is another experiment. Okay, so what I want you to watch here is just this lovely little video. We'll put it on the screen as well. Have a little watch of this video with the sound up if you could.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm gonna hit play.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so I watched it and I don't have a lot to report. It seems like the sound is not quite right. It's like a liquid being sucked through a straw or something. But what I'm seeing is a quickly running stream over rocks with a grassy bank.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Were you horrified by the sound? Were you horrified by any of it? But it was fine.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  I mean, it was a bit weird, but it's okay. Okay, now watch this video.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, so now I'm watching, this, this is the same sound, but I'm looking at a guy slurping through a straw out of a paper cup.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Way grosser.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Way grosser.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  It's, okay, I don't want to say it's grosser, but it's, it's suddenly so much more annoying.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  So what this group did, this is Sam Amit and David Enko's lab at Santa Cruz. They built this, this database of sound swapped videos. So they played certain sounds, so somebody sucking drink through a straw. And then they asked people what they could hear. And most people got it right, but some people would get it wrong. And they were like, oh, is that a babbling brook? And they used those wrong guesses to go and film a more positive version of the same sound and then kind of replaced one for the other. Now, here's the thing that's really interesting. If you, if I show you the positive video first, even though the sound is from something that would annoy you,

• 36:11Speaker 00

  the sound is people slurping, knives tapping, paper, like fingernails down blackboards, that kind of thing. Even though it's something that would really bother you, when you see it with a different image, actually, and they tested this on people who had misophonia, it just doesn't really bother them as much at all.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Do you want to see another one? There's loads.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's really impressive because I knew, watching the stream visual, that the sound was liquid through a straw. But it's still, it wasn't rising to the level of, ew, this is, why is he doing this? But as soon as I saw the actual correct visual of a guy slurping matched with the sound, it was, I felt like my privacy was being invaded by something very personal of his.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  So what's interesting about this? Okay, so I'm gonna show you again, I'm gonna show you a positive one first. Here's the positive version of the video.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  All right, so I'll describe, oh, this is, this looks like it's gonna be a video of puppies in a cage.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so first of all, the puppies are like barking and it's just so cute. But yet, I have a suspicion that it's actually the sound, not of a little yip from a tiny puppy, but like a marker on a dry erase board.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  You're very close, you're very close. It's someone cleaning a screen in a really annoying way.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, so here's the original video and I can see the window. Oh, yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  As soon as they rub the cloth on the glass and I hear that sound, I go, ooh, I recoil.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Horrified.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  But when it was a little puppy's bark, I was like, oh my gosh, that little dude.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Okay, so the, the really interesting thing about this study is not only did it demonstrate that the annoyance of the sound is really context dependent, but if you show the horrible video first, the effect of trying to undo it by showing the positive video afterwards is nowhere near as strong. You sort of have to show the positive video first, so let me, let me demonstrate this for you. Okay, so here is, here is another one.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  This is quite a visual thing, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, everybody who's, who's trying to listen to this, but if you just glance at your screen, you'll see the horror.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do my best to describe this. So the thumbnail of the video you sent me is already like a close up of a woman's mouth that looks unfortunate. I'm gonna hit play.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, great. Now I've got this on my phone. It's someone chewing with their mouth basically open and there's like goop everywhere. Fantastic, I can't wait to explain this to my wife.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Genuinely horrifying. Okay, so now let me show you the positive video.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Now, it looks like it might even be the same person, oh, wringing out a towel.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  She's wringing water out of a wet towel, twisting it in her hands. And the drips of water are mimicking, they're, they're synced up with the sound of the chewing effects. And it's, well, okay, now that I'm listening more closely, it is, it is, I can tell it's the wrong sound because it's too goopy and mushy for drops of water.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Do you want to, do you want to try one more? Because I think when you watch the positive ones first, you're like, okay, this doesn't match, but it's fine. But I think when you watch, I mean, and as, this is the same as they found in the study, that the effect of the positiveness is not as positive if you already know where it came from, if you know that it came from something horrible.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  So do another one, and this time I won't talk over it the first time I listen.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is a video of someone tapping a fork on a ceramic plate, creating a quite unpleasant noise. Now send me the positive visual matchup.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Okay, so now I'm watching the same sound, but it's synced up to a visual of coins being dropped into a jar of coins. So every time the fork tines tap the plate, what I'm seeing is a coin falling on top of some other coins. Honestly, I mean, I gotta say, Hannah, I still find the positive image much nicer.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, it's still nicer, it's still nicer. It's just not as big an impact as if you didn't know where the sound came from when you first saw it.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I honestly, I'm also really impressed by the creativity here. I love how they're finding ways to match the sound to something more pleasant or less pleasant, and it works.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  It really does. It really is. What an amazing study. These are all open source, by the way. You can, you can download them and play with them, play with them yourselves. But I think what they really do, though, is that they really demonstrate that what your brain is doing with all of this is that it really cares about what it is, the actual kind of physical movement that is causing the annoying sound. It's all about that context. It's all about, yeah, I guess, like, your, your brain, potentially, this is the hypothesis still, but like, your brain mirroring what's, what's going on and is watching.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And once, if you see the negative one first, you just can't reinterpret the new one without mirroring the old

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  knowledge you have of the sound. I wonder if, on audio only, it could still work if you just gave an audio description of what the sound was ahead of time. You told people, hey, this is coins being dropped into a jar. And they'd be like, yeah, I don't care. But if you told them that it was a fork tapping a plate, they'd be

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wouldn't like it.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Irritated.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  The other thing about this is that it really demonstrates how there is this list of exclusions, right? So it's, people don't get annoyed when they hear the sound of toddlers eating, or elderly people, or people with dementia, or adults with sort of intellectual disabilities. You know, it's not as annoying. It's like, it's something, you can empathize with the situation.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  And it's only when they should, they should do better, right?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  So is that yet another layer? Or is it still part of the, the hyper mirroring issue? That if I see a toddler chewing, my brain goes, that's just so different from your own chewing, that we're not going to trigger the, the neural mirroring?

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Well, potentially, I mean, the neural mirroring thing is like, is a particular, is one particular hypothesis. In truth, we don't totally know why this is so key in some people. One of the limitations of this mirroring idea is that it sort of seems to work for the chewing, but some people have misophonia for, I don't know, like a pen clicking, or like tapping, or just hearing somebody fidget, or like, you know, cutlery hitting a plate. And it does really work for that. So I think there's sort of limitations to this particular description. One of the other hypotheses is that there might have this genetic component to it. Because 23andMe, they put the question out to 80,000 customers about, you know,

• 43:19Speaker 00

  does the sound of other people chewing fill you with rage? And about 20% of people said yes, which is similar to what you got in the other studies. There were some genetic components to this that would pick up, like, I mean, we're talking about tiny little correlations here and there, that maybe there's like genes that are miswiring certain neurons. I mean, we don't know, right? Ultimately, is, is, is the big part of this. It does also seem to come into play, in particular, when you know people really well. So like, you mentioned your mum. My sister, her jaw, I think dislocated when she was younger or something. And like, her jaw clicks as she eats, and it drives me insane. It drives me insane.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  That is exactly what annoys me about my own mother's chewing. Her jaw pops. And there's just something about how she doesn't do anything to mitigate it. It just, she just keeps doing it against my will. And I'm like, I can't do this.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Uh huh, uh huh. I think that's it. It's the against the will part. Because, because it's not, and that's the thing about misophonia, is that it's not just disgust. It's that it actually really quickly turns into anger. Like, so in the, in the studies on this, physical aggression is quite rare, right? It's sort of rare that it ends up going into that.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Verbal aggression actually can be quite common, but a lot of it stays inside, where people are describing internal aggressive thoughts, and then maybe followed by shame, because every one of them knows that their reaction is completely disproportionate.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  But what's interesting is no one is reporting fear as the, as the first response. It's anger and then humiliation about the anger.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  It is, it's anger, which, which, which kind of goes counter to the disgust hypothesis that I've been mulling over. Because when I see disgusting things, I don't get angry. But you know what? I can, I can escape disgusting things in a way that I can't socially, acceptably escape a meal with my own mother. So I don't have a, a, a flight response available. There's only fight. There's only, stop it!

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Right, it's true. But I think it's also that, that, you know, if this mirroring can, is, is to be believed, then it's something that's happening inside of you that you didn't choose, you know? It's like, it's the movement in your own head, the, the jaw, the chewing, whatever. It's like a boundary that's being crossed that you're not happy about. It's not, it's not a threat that's approaching, which is why it doesn't come out as fear. It's like, it's like a boundary that's being crossed. And there's someone to blame. And that's kind of the part that decides it. Because anger, unlike disgust, I think disgust doesn't necessarily have a responsible party, whereas I think anger does. And you sort of have someone sitting right there with a crisp that you can be angry at.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  It can attach to a cause.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  Attach to a cause. Absolutely, absolutely. The other thing that's worth saying about this, if the argument so far is right, then, that you're kind of mirroring what somebody else is doing and it can feel horrible, the same sound should also be able to make you feel good. And they do in the form of ASMR, because there is a big Venn diagram of people who enjoy ASMR, experience ASMR, and misophonia, right? The two, there's like a very big overlap between the two. The difference with ASMR, I think in a lot of ways, you are imagining that experience in yourself too, right? So if someone sort of does hair brushing, or like stroking down the back of your neck,

• 46:54Speaker 00

  or, you know, it's like stroking on, on screen, you are kind of imagining that sensation also happening to you. It's not just the sound, the sound helps, but it's like you're, it's really, you're physically experiencing it in your own body. But the difference is that you're consenting to it, you know? You're actively going to have to, to try and, to try and experience that.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, you know, I, I deliberately pressed play on the video of the woman chewing. And so I, I would have been more disgusted if I was forced to watch it. And it wasn't for a podcast episode. It still, it still was not pleasant.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  It wasn't pleasant. I agree. And look, it's not for me. It's not for me. But it is for some people. Have you ever come across mukbang?

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Oh my god. It's wild, that stuff. Absolutely wild.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, my sister likes to watch people review food and eat food in their cars. And again, she's deciding to watch these. And so, yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't trigger this, like, against my own will, something's happening in my brain.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. And some people say that actually, the sort of, their craving for the food can be satiated by watching other people eat it, that you're craving like really just loads and loads of food. The numbers that some of these mukbang videos get, though, oh my lord. I was in South Korea last year and was talking to somebody about these, this mukbang craze. And a lot of them were saying that eating, you know, sort of as a communal event was a really big thing in Korea. But now that people are working more, people are living in single person apartments, you know, working really late as well, you don't really get the same opportunity to share meals with people. So mukbang is like tiny bit of a loneliness thing, but it's also like a, just watching

• 48:41Speaker 00

  someone gorge themselves on huge amounts of food, and then physically sharing that experience with them by listening to it, ends up satiating a bit of your craving.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  Not for me. I think I'd just rather eat the burger.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm not personally a fan, but I think that does explain a lot of the, or some of the, the draw they have for so many people.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  But there you go. Shall we, shall we finish by, by eating some more crisps, shall we? Just, um.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Let's do it. All right. All of you listening out there, all of you watching, enjoy.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Let's, um, let's end on our own mukbang, shall we?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  I'm trying to be

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  like, super gross.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  When you're not synced with me, that did bother me.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Mmm. I love, mmm, I love that the salt is on my lips, I can lick it off.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Mmm.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  All right, see you guys next time.

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