Research reveals why some find the sound of others eating so irritating | Hacker News Reader

Research reveals why some find the sound of others eating so irritating

theguardian.com

53 pointsdaegloe57 comments

It's the open mouth chewing sound that causes me to get angry and violent really fast.

To share my experience, I couldn't control it well when I was young.

In my 20s I figured it was better for me to look rude and leave the table, than to start yet another discussion on this topic by suddenly asking the person to chew with their mouth closed, which makes me look rude anyway.

In my thirties I learnt how to tolerate small instances of open mouth chewing, such as those that some people do when tasting new foods or drinks (it reminds me of birds drinking water), mostly because the sound is temporary. Otherwise, I am better at practicing mindfulness long enough to be able to excuse myself politely.

I know why people chew with their mouths open. It's the air and the taste. It doesn't help with the strong reaction it causes in my brain.

I go from liking you to want to stab you in 3 seconds. Since this is the Internet, I'd like to clarify that I have never gotten into a fight and am an average, non violent person.

I used to have a mild reaction to closed mouth chewing and throat sounds, but I've been able to tolerate those better and now they don't bother me much.

If I could go back in time, I would try to teach younger me how to handle these sounds in a more socially acceptable way.

If you chew with your mouth open, please don't take someone else's strong reaction too personal. It's hard to contain the sudden burst of anger.

I'm the same, and I have a friend who loudly smacks his lips when eating, it's insufferable. To make matters worse, whenever we meet it's usually over some kind of meal, so I am at a loss for what to do.

The longer you wait, the more of an ability they have to come back with some riposte about how long you've been bottling it up. Just confront them, and laugh it off nonchalantly if they try to reason their way out of the clearly foul habit.

I tried that but they took it as a joke :/ Now they'll sometimes make fun of me (in a good-natured way) about hating chewing sounds, and to complain about it "formally" would be too serious/offputting.

I figured this kind of thing would happen. You had to double down at that point. Now all you can really do is a passive aggressive attack like putting on airbuds or earplugs to bait a decent debate with them.

This will only work if they aren't an immoral person. Honestly, something as simple as unwillingness to admit flaws and change, is a fair reason to cut and run. Shooting the shit is fun, but if you actually value the friendship then these things come into play.

I am exactly the same. It always seemed to happen at the company cafeteria for me. Sit down with a group, start eating, and someone starts chewing with their mouth wide open. It takes about 5 seconds for me to go from calm to fuming, so I have to excuse myself and go eat at my desk.

Ever since the environmental push to abandon paper napkins, all members of my immediate family have switched to licking/sucking on their fingers and then wiping them off on cloth napkins. Nothing is more disgusting than sitting down to eat and having your utensils presented on a dirty cloth napkin that has someone elses saliva and food on it. I can't fucking standing it.

We were cleaning up after making gingerbread houses, my family member was sucking icing off her fingers, and she picked up m&ms and put them back in the bag with her fingers. So now her spit is on all the m&ms in the bag. Disgusting. Then they went and gave these gingerbread cookies to other people to eat. They get upset if I point this out or say that I find chewing with your mouth open is disgusting. Sure, I am latching on to previous events that I should forget, but the disgusting behavior continues.

The finger licking is not limiting to just eating a meal. It occurs frequently when cooking as well. They look like i just insulted them when I refuse to eat anything they cook.

I can't fucking stand it.

>I go from liking you to want to stab you in 3 seconds

Nothing makes me rage more than having to listen to someones obnoxiously loud mechanical keyboard. I go from likeing my coworkers to being extremely angry at them.

Yeah label me as an insane mentally ill schzoid psycho because these small things make me rage. I dont' care.

This is an interesting insight, but I don't think it's even close to telling the whole story of the pathophysiology of misophonia.

The researchers seem to focus mainly on the mouth and throat sounds that bother many people. It's probably the most relatable disgusting kind of sound that a lot of neurotypical people can sympathize with hating too. But newer research (like that from Dr. Zach Rosenthal and CMER at Duke [1]) is showing that the root of misophonia has something to do with trained aversive reactions, and that meshes a lot better with my own experience. It's very common for people with misophonia to develop more triggers over the course of their lives such as footsteps, doors closing, car engines, etc., and even for associated visual stimuli to cause similar triggers.

[1] - https://www.misophonia.duke.edu/content/research-overview

In my 20s I would shake internally when I was eating at the table with someone chewing with open mouth. Sometimes I would just walk away from the table to stop hearing them.

Actually now that I am reflecting on that I am hearing this sound in my head and I am getting a bit annoyed.

But through reflection on the nature of it, and focusing on anything but that sound, I learnt to cope with it. I am sure going to hear it and it will be annoying but i am not bother more then that.

I wonder if that’s why older people tend to score higher on life satisfaction scores?

When you’re young, you’re full of emotion towards the world and as you age you either abandon the desires or learn coping strategies. Eventually you’ve abandoned enough desires ranging from the “holy shit! I wish BOB WOULD STOP CHEWING LIKE THAT!” rage to the “I’ve gotta work hard to make something of myself!” that you can actually just sit back and enjoy a day.

There are plenty of older people that rage and throw fits, I's say it depends on personal growth and perspective, not age (though both comes with time as we get more experiences).

Sadly some people never look back or inward and never grow beyond their basic instincts.

I find that a lot more plausible as a primary cause. I've had a lot of that sort of misophonia, and ended up doing a kind of trauma therapy over childhood incidents including a situation where my Dad raged at me at the dinner table, parodying my mouth noises (presumably he, too, had misophonia)

Turned out, there was more going on in that situation than it seemed at face value. Revisiting the events with an adult capacity to look at context, suggested that my Mom and Dad were having a fight already and repressing it, and that I'd got in the middle. The total lack of context made it seem like the end of the world, and I'd call that a real specific trained aversive reaction if anything could be.

If this mouth-brain link exacerbates the problem, I wouldn't be terribly surprised, but I don't think that alone can cause it.

Did the therapy reduce the effect of these sounds on you?

Or, maybe, this mouth-brain link is caused by these traumatic events.

This meshes well with some advice my audiologist gave me, too. I had suggested using earplugs to muffle the sounds that bother me, because they tend to be rather quiet. She advised against, over concerns that I would lose the ability to cope without earplugs, and that this could be a bigger problem in the long run than just working on developing more coping strategies.

For me it's other people coughing, especially dry coughs. Productive coughing is fine for some reason.

I struggle to express the sheer negative reaction that happens in my brain, it's like a switch that turns on anger, depression and frustration all at the same time. Imagine someone scraping their folk on a plate, and the unpleasant sound it makes. Now multiple that by 100.

Obviously this has had a very negative effect on my marriage to my wife who suffers from asthma. None of it her fault of course.

Sound blocking ear phones work to some degree. I have wandered if meditation could help, or to take an extreme course of action: LSD.

I am one of those people. Not only can I not stand hearing people chew their food, I get irritated hearing people swallow.

Me too. I always thought it was because throughout childhood my seat at the table was next to my noisily eating stepfather. Actually, that would have desensitized me, I guess. I don't even like hearing myself eat... there must always be tv or music playing.

Restaurants are different though. For one, many of them understand how to maintain low level ambient noise; plus, in a restaurant there's usually a din of conversation, and in that setting I'm there to socialize as much as eat.

I definitely hate the sound of people eating, but I also can't stand people idley whistling or humming. And I can not stand the muffled sound of a conversation, especially if it's someone I know, somewhat similarly to how one gets annoyed if they can't hear the other side of a conversation. As such, working from home has been more challenging than I expected. And it's terrible, I hate these noises, and I'm fine with that, but not hating the people is really hard. This is a problem that only really should affect me, but it's very hard to not get upset.

Same. Also the heavy breathing that the article mentions. When I was a kid and around a noisy eater, I would also start eating noisily. I rationalized the behavior as a mechanism to cover up the sounds of their eating, but the explanation in the article makes a lot of sense. I would try to synchronize my eating somewhat with theirs to cover the sound up better.

Interestingly, "Earthling Cinema," (later rebranded "Alien's Guide") has a running gag where they show clips from movies, and sensor any frames which show someone eating food.

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu6DDGoV21YhwSb5iWbriAw

It's always been my least favorite way for a film-maker to lazily show that someone is evil. Perhaps the worst example would be King Théoden in the Two Towers. It's an extreme closeup, which holds for a while, of Théoden eating in the most gross manner possible. It's as disgusting as it is ham-fisted. A modern equivalent to mustache-twirling, perhaps.

[edit]

It turns out that I meant "Denethor II, the Steward of Gondor" and not "King Théoden."

> Perhaps the worst example would be King Théoden in the Two Towers. It's an extreme closeup, which holds for a while, of Théoden eating in the most gross manner possible.

You mean Denethor II, the Steward of Gondor.

Strap me in and scan my brain.

The sound that infuriates me is the glug glug sound of a cup being filled with liquid. You know that pouring sound that gets to a higher pitch as the container fills up? oof I hate that sound and it makes me shake and clench.

Its used so much in TV/movies to fake them pouring a drink or mixing a cocktail or some shit, pulls me right out of the media.

Chewing though? Nah, its annoying, but like... "oh wow, that's rude" type reaction, not an anger feeling like the pouring sound.

What part of my brain is supposedly too connected to the audio sensory?

Interesting! I love that sound and have two motor associations with it. One is definitely in my throat, the motions I'd make if I were mimicking the sound. The other is in my hands, pouring with the left into something held in my right. So next time you hear it, you might see if you experience similar motor associations. That would fit with this study.

For me its like a clench at the back of the throat and an emotional response (anger/discomfort)

I can't handle hearing someones drink as it goes down their throat; not just large glugging but even little sips. I actually physically clench up and sometimes have to leave the room. It's my experience that women tend to be the worst offenders.

I am infuriated by people who take little sips of a drink. The intense sucking around (primarily a hot tea or other hot liquid) but that pursed lip sucking sound destroys my will to live (and in a way that wants me to take everyone with me.)

You must hate NPR. Nearly every story has a bunch of useless ambient noise, just so you "feel like you're there." It's entirely banal and useless, and it nearly often includes someone pouring coffee or tea. I wish this fad would go away. It doesn't have the broad appeal that its proponents believe.

Any podcast that uses those sounds is an automatic nope from me. Why do they do it? Who needs those sounds? Just tell the story, we don’t need the sounds of airplanes bombing things when talking about WWII.

The other thing that annoys me in podcasts is the two hosts switching back and forth between sentences. Either have a real conversation or just have one person, this 2-person story-telling format does not work.

It's a vestige back from times when superheroes were just radio dramas. The Green Arrow was a popular one. The sounds were the only way to add fast paced action. And despite their tackiness, people only had newspaper as an alternative.

Is there a brain defect that causes some to think that slurping of any kind or eating with your mouth open near anyone else is in any way socially acceptable?

I wouldn’t say I suffer from the thing in this article but at the same time, I don’t want people to eat like a wood chipper either. Where does that put me?

It's called "not caring about others".

> Scans show some brains have a stronger link between the part that processes sound and that which controls the mouth and throat

Aight well that's a completely wrong reason...

Can we just say out loud many (not all, but many) of those university studies are done so someone can put out a paper and they're not even trying.

It's disappointing me in the entire process and method of science when our media are flooded with nonsense like this.

What makes you say it's wrong?

The article says this explores mysophobia which covers a wide variety of sounds, like fork on plate, nails on chalkboard, ASMR sounds of all kinds of nature (not related to eating sounds) and also eating sounds, but also any similar sounds produced when playing with sticky gooey substances and so on (which our saliva is an example of).

To suggest all of this is because I struggle not to move my mouth and throat and feel "intruded upon" is honestly bizarre.

Their study only attempts to satisfy their own VERY SELECTIVE definition of mysophobia without attempting to explain how this "hyper-mirroring" explains the same exact effect non-eating mysophobic sounds cause.

All in all, someone writing a quick paper is all.

Something being "honestly bizarre" to one reader is not a valid critique of a scientific paper. Many validated scientific concepts were seen as bizarre when introduced; many invalidated ones seemed broadly reasonable. (E.g., relativity and luminiferous aether respectively).

If you'd gotten as far as reading the abstract of the paper, you'd see that they focus on this because "most trigger sounds are generated by orofacial movements". Assuming they're correct, it seems reasonable to me to start with the dominant case. If you'd like claim they're wrong about what constitutes misophonia you're welcome to do it; I look forward to your evidence.

But as somebody who can't stand fork-on-plate and nails-on-chalkboard sounds, this all sounds pretty plausible to me. I experience those as a jolt that includes my dominant hand and arm. So it seems to me that they could be on to something. They may not have all the details right; early scientific papers often don't. But I don't think that's a reason to claim that you can read their minds from this remove.

> relativity and luminiferous aether

We may get a bit off-topic, but I believe the aether was an unfortunate casualty of Einstein's work. First of all Einstein didn't disprove the aether, he just made it unnecessary. But relativity makes lots of things unnecessary at this macro level, like the quantum mechanics it contradicted later on. I think relativity is extremely valuable. But there's no such thing as a wave of nothing. And we'll eventually come back to that at some point. Knowledge sometimes swings from one end to another like a pendulum, as long as we advance overall I'm good.

I'm not sure that throat mirroring is advancing our knowledge on why some sounds are terrible to us.

> you'd see that they focus on this because "most trigger sounds are generated by orofacial movements". Assuming they're correct

But that's not even close to correct by mere observation. Not to mention that your orofacial movements would bother no one if you eat with your mouth closed.

Am I being crazy here? The feeling of cringe and disgust is not just the fact someone is eating around us. We eat together socially with great pleasure.

But if you step into something gooey, and as you remove your shoe, you hear the resulting sounds, it's instantly disgusting.

Was my throat mirroring your foot? I mean, come on :)

I'm not going to rabbit-hole with you on either your novel theories about physics or your notions about the basis for misophonia. That does not look productive to me.

My point is that if you're going to make sweeping accusations like this, you should back them up with actual facts and analysis. Otherwise you are just committing the same sin you're accusing these authors of.

My overall point is your examples were not as simple as we see them today.

As for what I believe the paper commits, is it adjusts the definition of a problem to fit their research and conclusion. That's not something I've done.

I don't believe that was your initial claim.

If we're going to accuse somebody of not even trying, I think I'd go for the internet commenter saying "X is completely wrong" and descending into ad hominem and broad-brush tarring of large segments of society while not providing any actual evidence or analysis.

Sorry about "tarring of large segments of society" but I think we all know what I'm talking about. Also I've unfortunately been in academia and had a close look at how those "groundbreaking" papers happen, not just me, but other colleagues.

Unfortunately going through the moves and calling it a day is something researchers also do, when given wrong incentives (like quantity over quality).

I agree there's a broader problem. And not just with academia; I've seen plenty of code bases where misaligned incentives lead to people going through the motions and favoring quantity over quality. But if you want to make the case that's what's going on here, you still have to demonstrate it. Otherwise you're just doing the same thing you're accusing them of.

Then there are those of us who experience ASMR and find the sound quite relaxing.

I experience ASMR and enjoy some ASMR sounds, but I absolutely can't stand chewing sounds.

Is this similar to the misophonia over nails over a chalkboard?

Nails on chalkboard us supposedly a supernormal stimulus version of hearing a baby shriek.

Interesting notion, but it seems suspicious to me. I live in a place where when windy the trees make all sorts of loud squeaky noises. I glory in it. But nails on a chalkboard and forks on a plate, even when distant, give me jolts that even a baby shrieking near me doesn't.

Interesting, I heard another theory that it was due to some flying predator during our cave-people days that was our deadliest threat, and evolution baked-in that threat-sense into humans.

Can I just say that I genuinely hate the kind of people who complain about the sounds of other people going about their normal life? Chewing is absolutely normal and I don't enjoy hearing it either but I would never actually go up to someone and tell them to stop chewing so loudly. It's just a ridiculous complaint.

You do realize that some people suffer from a real psychological disorder called misophonia, right?

I’m not saying everyone does, but it’s something to be aware of before you judge people.

It’s almost as if you quite literally didn’t even bother reading the article :|

Its like you didn't read the guidelines.

I did actually read it but I noticed that a lot of the comments were complaining of the sound and I also have a sibling who is really irritating about this. ^^

I fully understand that some people have misophonia and I can't blame them for complaining.

You’re raising an interesting question about to what extent it’s okay for a person to expect other people accommodate their mental illness.

That's a really difficult question to answer, I think in this case it's ok if there is actually a mental illness or a consequence. I happen to know that my sibling who hates it when anybody chews gum in their vicinity doesn't suffer much from it and doesn't have a poorer quality of life. Them asking me to stop chewing so loudly just makes me feel bad about something I have no control over just as me chewing loudly makes them feel bad because they don't like the sound.

Yes and if you scan the brains of people who can’t stand people who have misophonia and find some pattern, then suddenly it justifies being intolerant of other people.

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