Misophonia: Scientists crack why eating sounds can make people angry | Hacker News Reader

Misophonia: Scientists crack why eating sounds can make people angry

bbc.com

100 pointsdaegloe83 comments

How is this an "explanation" or "cracking" the problem? They showed that an emotional response was correlated with neural behavior... what else could it have been?

More broadly, it's frustrating that neuroscientists reframe genuinely interesting questions ("Why do I get angry when people eat apples beside me?") into boring questions ("What does my brain look like when I'm angry about someone eating an apple?").

> How is this an "explanation" or "cracking" the problem? They showed that an emotional response was correlated with neural behavior... what else could it have been?

There are Facebook support groups, and a subreddit, for people suffering form this disorder, and it's not uncommon that family members, spouses and friends think they are just being obnoxious, and advise them to "just shrug it off".

If it's a measurable neurophysiological condition, this gives some support that those people just cannot shrug it off, whatever they try. It can also help the sufferers to know that they are not being just crazy, but something really is different in the way their brain is wired.

To your first point, I'm not sure how this helps the sufferers. What they have shown is that there is a different neural signature correlating with a different emotional response. There's no causal link here, meaning that I might still tell someone to just shrug it off. Maybe they can control their neural activity, just like I can control my neural activity related to thinking about elephants by not thinking about elephants.

To your second point, I would offer two responses. First, while being able to measure something is a win in itself, we need to be clear about what they're measuring. They have shown that suffering ailment X increases the probability that they find neural signature X. They do not know the reverse, meaning this isn't going to unlock early diagnostics or anything. It is unclear how discriminating this response is. Second, it's not clear that this is the product/effect of the way their "brain is wired". Perhaps changes in neural activity caused the observations of different neural connectivity. Perhaps some other factor of their experience or biology caused this sensitivity and the visible differences in connectivity, neural activity, etc. We just don't know.

(P.S. Listening to people eat drives me insane. I'm not going to self-diagnose, but I just want to be clear that I'm not criticizing the finding/report because of a lack of empathy for the sufferers.)

(P.P.S. I'm a recovering cognitive scientist who had to hear about a lot of neuropsych findings that all boiled down to, "This part of the brain lights up when we hear/see/do this! Give me another $5mm grant!").

I'm going to debunk you because as your business partner, I get to constantly annoy you with you loud eating, and this way you have an excuse for being mad.

It's not just the fact that they see a response in AIC that highlights the important aspect of this research, but rather the dissociation between sound evoked activity in controls vs misophonics. While control subjects found unpleasant sounds as annoying as the misophonics found trigger sounds, activity in AIC increased only in the misophonics, and only for the trigger sounds. Interesting to see also that for misophonics, AIC activation scales linearly with the degree of distress - I'm assuming this wasn't the case for unpleasant sounds (but I'm not positive and didn't read closely enough to tell).

You say it's not clear that it's a product of the way their brains are wired, but in the paper they highlight a potential for greater myelination in vmPFC in misophonics. They do this indirectly citing differences in magnetization transfer saturation. I don't know this technique, so I can't really comment on how legit it is, but it seems at least there's some effort to attribute this to structural rather than purely functional differences.

And yeah, of course it's always possible that it's some other factor that is underlying these effects, but I think this dissociation shows reasonably convincing evidence for pursuing more research on this condition (e.g., diffusion imaging to better understand potential structural differences)

>To your first point, I'm not sure how this helps the sufferers. What they have shown is that there is a different neural signature correlating with a different emotional response. There's no causal link here, meaning that I might still tell someone to just shrug it off. Maybe they can control their neural activity, just like I can control my neural activity related to thinking about elephants by not thinking about elephants.

>To your second point, I would offer two responses. First, while being able to measure something is a win in itself, we need to be clear about what they're measuring. They have shown that suffering ailment X increases the probability that they find neural signature X. They do not know the reverse, meaning this isn't going to unlock early diagnostics or anything. It is unclear how discriminating this response is. Second, it's not clear that this is the product/effect of the way their "brain is wired". Perhaps changes in neural activity caused the observations of different neural connectivity. Perhaps some other factor of their experience or biology caused this sensitivity and the visible differences in connectivity, neural activity, etc. We just don't know.

That's a very good point, to expand, it appears the implicit conclusion at the intersection of biology and psychology that sufferers 'have a genetic predisposition to be upset' might possibly be taken as sufferers 'have an inherited right to be upset,' which is something I've been seeing more of in the world, and something that I am reading between the lines in the article--and even in the diagnoses itself, Misophonia.

We know no one is perfect, and most of us are far from it, but are we headed to a future where we are all walking baskets of 'scientifically-diagnosed' defects that we must tolerate (that we really don't fully understand if we're honest about it--the brain is still, for the most part, an unsolved mystery)? I think it's important to be respectfully tolerant of genetic defects, i.e. mistreating a deaf person would really upset me, because we know a deaf person cannot 'get over it;' but can we really know the same about the plethora of new neurological conditions such as this one? It's possible there might be something about scientific journalism that is selling itself for more than its worth here, but maybe that's not true, it just doesn't appear there is enough to know right now but I see that admission nowhere in these kind of articles.

> I think it's important to be respectfully tolerant of genetic defects, i.e. mistreating a deaf person would really upset me, because we know a deaf person cannot 'get over it

There have been attempts, though, to make deaf people "get over it" by trying to teach them lip reading, and speaking word even though they cannot hear themselves what they are saying. They have not been very successful.

"In 1980, a vocational school for deaf adolescents was opened in the area of Managua called Villa Libertad. By 1983 there were over 400 deaf students enrolled in the two schools. Initially, the language program emphasized spoken Spanish and lipreading, and the use of signs by teachers was limited to fingerspelling (using simple signs to sign the alphabet)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

Since only a small fraction of people are unable to hear at all to the point where ASL not a hearing aid would be beneficial wouldn't it be easier and more practical to teach them both ASL and lip reading and speaking to the degree that is feasible.

In theory it would be fantastic to get the 95% to all learn ASL to better communicate it doesn't seem likely to happen. ASL for example isn't on my personal to do list not because I don't care but because I have other things higher on the list.

That's interesting, however it sounds as though you're intending this as some kind of disagreement with what I said?

Certain types of eating sounds make me angry; but I found that I could grin and bear it if I rationalized it. I think it's probably more productive for people to manage it than to insist that nobody make eating sounds around them.

P.S: I think it's important to draw a distinction between feeling annoyed and feeling angry. In the case of this, the feeling is definitely anger, the same way I feel when somebody I care about is being wronged.

The way people freely judge until the experience is given a scientific name is the problem.

What says that being obnoxious and whiny isn't a measurable neurophysiological condition?

I'm only half sarcastic.

The actual journal article contains more specifics that may help direct further research.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)3...

You're right that the BBC article is titled inappropriately. One sentence of the scientific paper's conclusion indicates that the problem is far from "cracked":

> With the available data, it is not possible to decide whether misophonia is a cause or consequence of atypical interoception, and further work is needed to delineate the relation between the two.

I don't find brain activity to be boring and I'm willing to put up with researchers trying in earnest to gain any insight into misophonia; this seemingly laughable condition drastically impacts my daily experience.

As someone who was hoping the article would have some kinds of solutions or cures, I was pretty disappointed by this.

I suffer from this (or at least I think I do -- I get irrationally angry at certain noises). One thing that has surprisingly helped me has been repeated exposure.

I worked for 5 years at a Japanese high school and quite a few of the noises that drive me batty (slurping drinks/soup and .. cutting finger/toe nails, if you can believe it) happen frequently in the teacher's room. High schools in Japan are different from those in the west in that teachers don't get their own class rooms. They have to do all their prep work in a large, cramped, noisy, open-concept office (with no dividers). So I was exposed on all sides.

Some things that really helped me is that I'm a programmer by training, not a teacher. Working as a programmer requires a lot more concentration than working as a teacher. When I was doing my prep work, I could mechanically carry on most of my tasks even when I was absolutely enraged by the environment.

Because I was working on contract, I didn't have to work as much overtime as a regular teacher. This gave me plenty of time to program in the office. At first it was impossible, but over time I was able to work a bit and then just sit there for however long it took for me to calm down. Then I would work a bit more. Eventually, I could calm down quite quickly. These days I'm quite good at recognising when I'm starting to get angry and do whatever it is that calms me down (even I don't really understand what that is, unfortunately).

Not super detailed, but I hope it gives you some hints on things you can try.

I've found that having some sort of background noise going, whether it's music or news or whatever, really helps minimize the extreme "skin crawling" feeling I get listening to people eat, breathe loudly, slurp soup, or whatever it may be. So now I will rarely sit down with my family for dinner without putting on some music first!

The article mentions "targeted electricity passed through the skull" as a possible treatment by "adjusting brain function". That seems a bit extreme to me, unless of course your condition is truly debilitating or causes you to become recklessly violent with noisy eaters.

"Why does X happen?" is not a useful question. We can ask "How does X happen?". Consider the reframing "What is the correlation between me getting angry and other abstract things happening around me when someone is eating an apple?" used by psychologists and data scientists. Maybe this can provide you with a more practical answer. Maybe you are upset that they are eating and not sharing, or that they are eating and you are not, etc. Neuroscientists would be interested in what the brain is doing when something like this happens, e.g. the inter-region dynamics of getting angry in response to seeing/hearing others eat. It is not a boring question, at all. But I see your point, most people are interested in a practical answer, not in brain dynamics.

> "Why does X happen?" is not a useful question

"Why" is the cornerstone of evolutionary biology, in the sense of why was this feature adaptive (at least in our evolutionary past, if not any more). It can give you a deeper understanding of something

Evolution is a nice framework but, like Hund's rules, it warrants further investigation; it answers "what happened" but not "how it happened". Heuristics are pseudo-solutions and don't necessarily conduce a deep understanding. I guess I should have said "asking 'why?' is eventually useless".

>They showed that an emotional response was correlated with neural behavior... what else could it have been?

Well at least we have a confirmation that emotions are real. :)

Does the definition of the disorder exclude a mere conditioned response? I would have liked to see a control group that included people who were conditioned to have an aversive reaction to a particular sound.

Seeing as how "misophonia" is a named condition, I suspect that it is somehow different from conditioned responses. Can misophonia be deprogrammed?

But that does seem like the first step to answering the question.

I'm trying to understand why seeing what the brain looks like after hearing someone eat an apple is not interesting?

I never said it wasn't the first step, but it's heralded (by the media at least) as much more than that -- an explanation or a conclusion.

As a self-diagnosed misophonic, working in an open office has always been a struggle. A great pair of noise-canceling earbuds is an absolute must (the Bose QC20 are fantastic).

I wonder if misophonia is correlated with awareness. I'm maddeningly hyperaware of my surroundings, and have difficulty getting into "the zone" if there's too much auditory and visual stimuli. For example, if someone is talking in the same room, it's almost impossible for me not to follow what that person is saying; I can't tune it out unless there's something else that drowns it out. (Radios are incredibly annoying for the same reason. I can't sleep if I can hear people talking in another room; even music with vocals have the same effect.)

Being hyperaware has its benefits, of course, but it's mostly a curse.

I see this recommendation often (using noise-cancelling headphones in an open-office) but I'm confused by it.

The headphones will actively remove (a little bit of) white noise from your environment (air conditioners, server fans, etc) which in practice actually makes 'signal' type noises more audible. I've noticed, for example, that I can hear the flight attendants on the intercom much better with my noise cancelling headphones on than without because the noise from the engine is partially cancelled.

I can see how heavy over-the-ear headphones would help in that they will dampen all noise, especially if you add in some white noise on top of that.

> I can see how heavy over-the-ear headphones would help in that they will dampen all noise, especially if you add in some white noise on top of that.

This is what I use. Only way to make offices bearable. You have to have music playing in the headphones though. Doesn't block out the office otherwise.

My Beats make the office feel like I'm sitting home alone. It's amazing. Sometimes people start talking to me from 2ft away and I don't realize they're there unless I see them.

I don't know why people like white/brown noise so much. I find it very stressful. I hate being around A/C units, fans, airplanes‚ engines and other things that produce incessant white-ish noise. (Noise-canceling earbuds are amazing on airplanes and trains for that reason.)

I just want quiet. While noise-canceling earbuds/headphones don't completely block voices and other loud, irregular background sounds, they do isolate the music and make my surroundings quieter. I don't use the earbuds without music. I find that with noise canceling on and music playing, I can completely zone out — or rather, zone in.

> I see this recommendation often (using noise-cancelling headphones in an open-office) but I'm confused by it.

Me too, and I hope someone will chime in and mention a variety of noise canceling headphones that block out voices. I'm in an open office space for the first time in a while, and finding it extremely stressful and distracting to hear other people talking constantly when I'm trying to focus.

> I hope someone will...mention a variety of noise canceling headphones that block out voices.

I don't think that is even possible, since noise canceling is by statistical analysis of ambient sound. What you want is a white noise generator. Rain sounds nice, but I've found the rumble of a large fan to be more effective at covering the most bothersome frequencies of noise.

Look into proper IEMs, they're generally made for wearing on stage and tend to do a great job blocking out external noises.

I've got Shure SE535s for flying, they do a better job passively cancelling noise than any active "noise cancelling" headphones I've ever tried.

Do you have any experience with/thoughts on the SE215-K? The SE535s are a bit out of my "give it a try" budget range.

Not really, but they appear pretty similar to mine (perhaps you even get the same tips?) and other people seem to be very satisfied with the isolation http://www.head-fi.org/products/shure-se215

Instead of using noise cancelling headphones, put in a set of foam ear plugs and then add a pair of headphones over your ears playing static.

Unfortunately, that ends up not being very comfortable for long stretches.

So, I actually agree with you, but I am going to guess for opposite reasons (which is why I put forward the idea anyway): you probably mean the foam plugs are uncomfortable, but I actually sleep every night with foam plugs and actually kind of enjoy wearing them, but absolutely despise having standard over-ear headphones on my head/ears.

Yep. I find the foam plugs to be uncomfortable, and having them pressed in by the over-ear phones makes them worse. Do you have a recommended brand/style of in-ear foam plugs?

I buy 3M Disposable Earplugs in 80 packs from Home Depot, but I actually also like the fairly standard Hearos that you see around. My recommendation if you find them tight is Mack's Dreamgirl Soft 30dB, as they are extra small but are still made out of material almost (but not quite) as good as the Hearos and 3M. (I swear the 3M are slightly better than the Hearos, btw, and you can buy them in tiny packs as well to try out, but I might just be crazy and they might literally be identical to Hearos.) The one thing to absolutely avoid is the "Sleep Pretty in Pink" variety of Hearos: I don't know what the hell they did to them but they just don't work correctly. (And you probably want 32dB if you go with normal size, not 33dB, which are much larger. I wear those on plane flights, dental work, and parties, but generally not for sleeping or random work.)

I didnt even know this is what my problem was until reading this article! My daughter is still angry about me going apeshit a few times when she was a child and rattling her spoon against her teeth when eating. And people eating loudly disgusts to the point of starting to go ballistic (and that happens a lot considering i live in China!). My best solution is to leave the environment. Second best is loud music thru headphones.

And yes I have the same problem of tuning in to all the conversations around me including those in other languages! Its a curse. Loud music thru headphones is again the only solution.

I'm also hyperaware (I call it hypersensitive). It's a good thing if you're a bodyguard, but otherwise it's absolutely a curse.

Noise cancelling headphones are a must. Also, music can be too distracting. I recommend white noise. YouTube has plenty 10 hour long videos with pure white noise.

Don't forget brown or pink noise for a more soothing sound (IMO). Until a few weeks ago, I never knew there were other colors of noise. Since discovering them, I have found them to be preferable for my ears over white noise.

I also recommend brown noise. It's much nicer than white noise. I use the `play` command that's part of `sox` for this.

10 hours!? Can't someone "wrap" a 10-second clip and let you play it in a loop? It's white noise, for pete's sake.

Yip, count me in this category as well. Its a blessing being in countries where I dont speak the language!! Getting into "the zone" is a real problem (shure se315's) when I spend most of my working life working surrounded by people. Its very comforting reading these comments, knowing I'm not alone, none of my friends suffer from this. So yes, thankyou to you all and there are others that know what you're going through.

I suggest we take the discussion of misphonia with a grain of salt.

It seems to be ignoring the very large cultural factor. As an American who has lived around Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, I've observed a great variation in what counts as acceptable table manners. East Asian culture in particular seems to accept a lot more chomping and smacking at the table, and this seems to be a general complaint among Westerners, not just a few individuals.

Secondly, as with anything else psychological, there will be individual variation. I feel there is too much eagerness to isolate some end of a continuum and label it as a syndrome. For example, I've always found notable the fact that some people can't comprehend why neighbors would be bothered by a loud stereo and others can't comprehend how anyone could not be bothered. Though there is a significant psychological variation there, I would not label either group as suffering from a syndrome.

As for dealing with irritating background sounds, in addition to white noise, I've found earplugs very helpful in some situations. The best ones I know of are Hearos Xtreme Protection.

https://www.amazon.com/Hearos-Plugs-Xtreme-Protection-pairs/...

The attitude you express towards Misophonia is one of the reasons why having this disorder is such a burden. It has nothing to do with table manners. There is nothing rational, or for that matter culturally relevant, about the emotional reaction I have to someone eating an apple next to me. The visceral, angry emotional response I feel to that sound has nothing to do with culture.

>The visceral, angry emotional response I feel to that sound has nothing to do with culture.

So, you can't be wrong about this?

That sound is not the only one that triggers my response, but I chose it because of this argument: I don't think anyone would argue that there is something culturally wrong (at least in western culture) with eating apples around other people. And there isn't really a way to eat a whole apple without making a sound that makes me irrationally furious.

I can't stand others eating an apple, but I can eat one without and issues. The same behavior holds true for playing with loose coins or cellophane wrappers.

How do you react to eating an apple yourself?

That's right - I don't feel anything when I am eating myself, or even when I am at a lunch table with others munching with me. It's only when I am not the one eating. I also get irritated when I am on the phone and the person at the other end is chewing or lapping.

Also, I don't think it's cultural and I suspect it might be hereditary.

I think I suffer from the same symptoms, but weirdly enough, if I'm at table and I got food, there is no problem.

Even if I finish first and the other are still eating, it's really only when I didn't eat / not eating that it infuriate me.

Interesting. What if you listen to a recording of yourself eating? While you're at if see how much you can distort it before it stops or starts to bother you. E.g. Played backwards, at double speed, half speed, etc.

Yeah, doesn't bother me. Never bothered by the sound of my own eating.

> The visceral, angry emotional response I feel to that sound has nothing to do with culture.

How do you know this?

Your comment is wildly inappropiate and non-contributing for the discussion of this article.

Not only are you passing judgement on something you have zero personal experience with, you even managed to completely miss the fact that the article did not discuss "being bothered", but "fight or flight response".

> you passing judgement on something you have zero personal experience with

How do you know that? In fact, the opposite is the case. And having given this issue considerable thought over the years, I'm pointing out where I see this discussion as a bit misguided. Most importantly, psychological differences are largely a matter of degree, not either-or.

You couldn't possibly go into extremely nerdvoice "Actually, ..." mode if you were affected by something like this to the degree described in the article. (Ok, technically you could, and just be a horrible person in other ways, but i suspect that's not it.)

sampo posted an article about misophonia in China: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1030060.shtml

> it's the fight or flight response

One time I was watching TV, a nature documentary, with my pet rabbit hopping around nearby. You should have seen her reaction when they played the sound of a rattlesnake on TV! Poor bunny was out of the room in no time and stayed quivering and stamping for quite a while.

So when I read about things like misphonia or even food aversion, my first thought is that these people may be showing the rough outline of genetic variants that may, in the right circumstances, be advantageous. (Of course most times it's maladaptive, but you need that initial variance for evolution to act on).

Lo and behold: https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/something-to-chew-...

Just because I may have "misophonia" doesn't mean that it's necessarily my problem if I'm distracted in an open office plan by colleagues who like to talk loudly to themselves, play drum solos on Tupperware containers, or move a pound of gelatinous substances via air pressure from one sinus cavity to another all effing day long.

>or move a pound of gelatinous substances via air pressure from one sinus cavity to another all effing day long.

Well, they chose oxygen instead of making you happy...

Whether it is "your problem" or "their problem" depends on what you can do about it.

For myself I thought it bothered me because of how I was raised (not to chew with mouth open, smacking sounds, eat quietly, etc)

Exactly. We are forcefully taught to fight these behaviours in ourselves very early on, often before we gain consciousness and memory as children. That will lead parts of our brain to detest and fight those behaviours in others laters on, bot on a subconscious level which makes it hard to change.

Same here. I think this is evidence of genetic factors - i.e. my dad has a mild case and it manifested in him being very emphatic about training us not to make sounds while eating.

There are genetic factors!

As someone who physically lashed out on human beings making annoying sounds, regretting it and apologizing immediately after each time, I've developed only single coping mechanism for it that doesn't at the same time destroy my productivity and concentration (like most music that'd wash over such noise does) - rain sounds.

This is very interesting. I think I have a mild version of this. Since I was a young (6 or 7) kid I remember how it pissed me off when someone would make noises while I was watching TV. It used to be enough for me to storm out of the room.

Nowadays, I have more control, but it still bothers me when my office mate munches on chips or an apple at work. I usually put on my noise cancelling headphones and listen to death metal, and that takes care of the problem.

Cannibal Corpse - Hammer Smashed Face?

That kind of brutal metal usually has several small pauses and other almost quiet moments in the songs, so outside noise can be heard during those moments. More melodic subgenres of metal usually have more continuous song structures. Melodic metal fills in also in the higher frequency bands better than brutal metal.

Quite interesting approach. You might like Meshuggah then. Catch 33 fits what you describe.

The Duskfall, Mors Principium Est or Kataklysm are my faves. Melodic but not too melodic like Dark Tranquility.

I only recently discovered there was a name for what I experience. I was surprised to find it's pretty rare, but it helped me at least feel a lot more empathy towards people who make chewing noises!

Eating sounds combined with an open office plan is enough to make my head explode.

What about countries where making sounds while eating is the norm? When I lived in China the majority of people made sounds while eating and I never met someone who was annoyed by it. This fact, while anecdotal, seems to suggest that misophonia is learned or cultural.

According to this article, misophonia occurs in China, too. There is even a support group in Baidu.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1030060.shtml

I know someone who smacks their lips loudly when eating. Although noises in general don't irritate me as per the article, this person's eating noise riles me. Like another commentor, i think it's just a manners thing.

Some cultures are less sensitive to these noises than others --in some places, people chew open-mouthed normally, which can get some getting used to as someone used to chewing mouth closed.

I don't know if I have misophonia but please tell me I'm not the only one who finds it incredibly annoying when people suck their teeth in public.

there's also a genetic link to misophonia: https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/something-to-chew-...

I think there's another way to attack the problem. I assume that the anger is arising for good reason, that it is (or at least was) helpful to human creatures. So it may be really difficult or impossible to prevent the anger from arising.

But when you meditate, one thing you slowly but deeply learn is that your thoughts are not you. Thoughts that bring you happiness arise even when you didn't ask them to, and you want them to stay forever, but they don't. Thoughts that make you feel bad arise even though you obviously didn't want them to, and you try to make them go away, but they stay as long as they want. But they eventually go.

So over time, as meditation practice develops, it can be as if you build a second mind behind the first mind, and you live in that more quiet mind, watching the first mind, seeing, e.g., wow, OK, there is anger in the mind. But there's a distance because you know it's not you. It's there but it doesn't move you so much.

That is quite eloquently put. I am reminded of Minsky and his color to this. It is a useful view. To characterize emotions and feelings as subroutines that input to your higher consciousness. Having that distance to say "ok, anger is activating, what is it trying to tell "me"?"

Happy and sad are the same. These feelings arent "you". They are inputs to your "you". When you can observe these feeling you can at times become powerfully separated. But I also like to embrace the holistic integration at times. To be "human" and let it all jumble together. It is quite beautiful and tragic at times.

(Minsky, society of the mind).

My explanation was "we find the other's enjoyment intolerable", but I guess this one is better.

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